Posted on 07/16/2008 12:22:19 PM PDT by bs9021
Pop Quiz
by: Bethany Stotts, July 15, 2008
How much do American high-schoolers know about their literary heritage? A non-profit group called Common Core surveyed 12,000 17-year-olds this year in order to answer just that question.
Barely over half (52%) of the surveyed teenagers knew that 1984 was about “a dictatorship in which every citizen was watched in order to stamp out all individuality,” reports Frederick Hess, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Hess authored the Common Core study.
Far more prevalent was knowledge of civil-rights-related literature such as To Kill a Mockingbird and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with more than three quarters of students correctly identifying themes within these novels.
About half of the students knew that the biblical character Job was “known for his patience in suffering.”
It is important to note that the questions were multiple-choice, not fill-in-the blank.
“As a whole, [seventeen-year-olds] earned three Cs, one D, and seven Fs,” concludes Hess. (In contrast, students earned one A and five Bs on the 22-question historical quiz). While students averaged 73% on history, they got an average of 57% on literature. AEI released the entire list of scores:
Book or Literary Character +
Percentage Answering Correctly
To Kill A Mockingbird
79%
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
77%
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
72%
The Odyssey (Odysseus)
60%
A Tale of Two Cities
57%
The Scarlet Letter
56%
1984
52%
The Book of Job
50%
Oedipus
45%
The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
41%
The Canterbury Tales
38%
“Certainly, skeptics might suggest that literature knowledge would be better measured by standards drawn from more recent works,” argues Hess. ..
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
In America, you can get a B.A. in literature and have never heard of Ayn Rand.
Where was the Gettysburg adressed given?
When is the 4th of July celebrated?
Bonus environmental question:
What color is an evergreen tree?
She was an important political thinker, but not a very good novelist, frankly.
Who’s buried...Oh, nevermind...
I liked her plot lines; she just needed a good editor. Her writing is certainly not inferior to some of the dreck universities are pushing on kids. I haven’t read a ton of bell hooks, but what I did see did not bowl me over.
She wasn’t that bad....
except for the rape/love scene in Atlas Shrugged. That was just disgusting.
Dagney was a slut.
Oh wait, sorry, I mean a “serial monogamist”
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