Outside the Beltway has an interesting post about American students and their knowledge of history. His comment makes sense:
“I don’t much care whether students can tell me the names of battles or identify which document contains a particular p...

Pete DuPont is shocked–shocked!–that American college students have a poor knowledge of American history.

The only reason DuPont is shocked about poor knowledge of American history is that nobody remembers his sorry-ass excuse for a Presidential campaign back in '88!

Give it up Pete!

It was the War of Northern Aggression, dang it!

Couldn't resist.

But we’re ahead of most other countries in doing this well for a broad spectrum of society.

Have you ever taken a look at the total number of college/higher education seats in Germany or France? It's appalling.

I remember in High School where the world history teacher was amazed when I didn't know the answer to a question in class (What was the significance of the battle of Tannenberg in WWI). I missed one question in all the tests for that class when I compared the internment of Japanese-Americans to Nazi concentration camps. Note that used the word concentration camp and not death camp. Note further that some of the roots of the Nazi concentration camps come from the British actions in the Boer war. So the teachers rejection of my comparison as "We don't do things like that" wasn't very convincing to me, but what the hey, I already had a solid A and there are no brownie points differential between a 99.7% and 100% average (at least not back then).

The reason I could answer so much wasn't study of the class textbooks, but rather I tended to stay awake and focused on the material in all my classes and in the case of World history, my hobby of war gaming meant that I had independently, voluntarily studied about a great swath of world history because I had studied wars, what led up to them, what occurred during them, what occurred after them, technology/political changes before, during and after a war, and how the different wars interrelate. Surprise, but if you cover those things, you have covered most of world history. Certainly to a point of being able to ace a high school world history class.

I think the biggest loss for those who don't know the "trivia" is they lack context for viewing the current world situation. To understand the similarities and dissimilarities between the meal minute men and "Moore's minutemen" you need to know some of that trivia. Similarly with the economic examples you gave, knowing the difference between GDP and GNP, the impact of policies that could impact one but not the other, etc. is good context for understanding our political choices.

But the time for a man to be able to read several hundred books and be an expert on all aspects of man's knowledge has passed us by several centuries ago. We can't all know every "trivia" in every category. There are those who have orders of magnitude more knowledge about movies, music, celebrities, sports, etc than I have. Like wise there are those who know more "trivia" about quantum mechanics, riparian law, statistics, chemistry, etc than I do. The bottom line is we all pick and choose to a certain degree what "trivia" we will seek out and retain.

The midterm took place at the end of the first week of class and accounted for 25% of the grade. The midterm was a combination multiple choice, T/F, and fill in the blanks examination of names, dates, places, and events in Japanese history.

The remainder of the class was devoted to classroom discussion. Each week was moderated by a different student and devoted to some particular issue important in the 20th century history of Japan. That accounted for 50% of the grade. A term paper accounted for the last 25%.

The structure of the class was based on the notion that critical thinking requires an understanding of and elementary mastery of facts.

What do you get when you have neither mastery of the facts nor any real training in critical thinking? Point-of-view exercises. The blogosphere.

A new generation is merging forward... Click to view :)...