Doubtful Remedy, Cont'd

The storm raised when the New York Times surveyed a group of college fresh men and found them incredibly ignorant of U.S. history (TIME, April 12) was spreading last week. Other newspapers perked up, took notice. Historians and educators praised or hooted the Times survey, offered various explanations of why U.S. students do not know much about their own country's history.

Only the Young? Apparently trying to determine whether all citizens are as ignorant of history as the Times's youngsters, the New York Daily News conducted a capsule test of its own, asked ten simple history questions of 42 people picked at random on New York's streets.

Sample questions: What is the traditional American policy toward China? Who was John D. Rockefeller? Test's results: 31 of the 42 scored 100%; nine missed one question; one missed two; the other missed three. No one scored worse than 70%, an average virtually double that of the students quizzed by the Times.

The results of this test disagreed with the theory of President William Otis Hotchkiss of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Speaking of the Times test, he said: "I would predict that the percentage of correct answers would not be appreciably higher if the examination were given to all the high-school teachers in the country, if the history teachers were eliminated. . . . The results . . . would have been much the same if ... lawyers . . . physicians . . . engineers . . . busi ness groups . . . had been given the examination. ..."

What's to Blame? Almost every educator had his theory about what is wrong with U.S. teaching methods that produce such abysmally uninformed citizens. Some explanations: dull textbooks, poor teachers, sketchy history courses. The explanation that caused the most debate was the one offered by Hugh Russell Fraser, who resigned last week as an official of the U.S. Office of Education and who was one of the two men who devised the Times survey.

Educator Fraser blamed student ignorance of history on a change in teaching methods. That change, he said, took place in Denver in 1924, when Denver schools, at the instigation of Teachers College of Columbia University, began to emphasize the study of social trends and ideas at the expense of chronological history. Said he: "It represented the first organized attempt in the American school system to teach history backward-- a procedure dear to the hearts of the educational psychologists. Thus, according to this school of thought, you start with the present and work backward; only the tendency recently has been to start in the present day and stay in the present, with only occasional glances back at the past. . . ."

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