Posted on 11/02/2016 2:31:13 AM PDT by Altura Ct.
For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.
The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.
“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”
Pesta, currently an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, has taught the gamut of Western literature—from the Classics to the modern—at seven different universities, ranging from large research institutions to small liberal arts colleges to branch campuses. He said he has given the quizzes to students at Purdue University, University of Tennessee Martin, Ursinus College, Oklahoma State University, and University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.
The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.
“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix.
Before even distributing the syllabus for his courses, Pesta administered his short quizzes with basic questions about American history, economics and Western culture. For instance, the questions asked students to circle which of three historical figures was a president of the United States, or to name three slave-holding countries over the last 2,000 years, or define “capitalism” and “socialism” in one sentence each.
Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.
Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.
What’s more, he began to observe a shift in his students’ quiz responses in the early 2000s. Before that time, Pesta described his students as “often historically ignorant, but not politicized.” Since the early 2000s, Pesta has found that “many students come to college preprogrammed in certain ways.”
“They cannot tell you many historical facts or relate anything meaningful about historical biographies, but they are, however, stridently vocal about the corrupt nature of the Republic, about the wickedness of the founding fathers, and about the evils of free markets,” Pesta said. “Most alarmingly, they know nothing about the fraught history of Marxist ideology and communist governments over the last century, but often reductively define socialism as ‘fairness.’”
Pesta also noted that, early on, his students’ “blissful ignorance was accompanied by a basic humility about what they did not know.” But over time he said he increasingly saw “a sense of moral superiority in not knowing anything about our ‘racist and sexist’ history and our ‘biased’ institutions.”
“As we now see on campus,” Pesta said, “social justice warriors are arguing that even reading the great books of Western culture is at best a micro-aggression, and at worst an insidious form of cultural imperialism and indoctrination.”
Pesta, an outspoken critic of Common Core, said he believes that these attitudes will become more pronounced moving forward, due to Common Core architect David Coleman’s rewrite of Advanced Placement American and European history standards.
Pesta argues that Coleman, now president of the College Board, “has further politicized the teaching of history, reducing the story of Western culture to little more than a litany of crimes, exploitations, and genocides, while simultaneously whitewashing the history of ideologies like socialism and communism.”
Despite no longer giving the quizzes, Pesta told The Fix that he continues “to seek effective ways to teach students the literature of Western culture, which it is not only alien and complex, but often condemned by students before it is truly encountered.”
“We must absolutely teach those areas where Western culture has fallen short, but always with the recognition that such criticism is possible because of the freedoms and advantages offered by Western culture,” he said.
In 1998, I had the same conversation with a black WO3 who would not believe that the Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights bill. I had to go on the “fledgling” internet and pull up the Congressional list from that vote. He did not talk to me for three weeks and was never very friendly after that.
Reality bites when you are dumb.
I wonder how they would react if they were told other blacks in Africa sold other black into Slavery...Tribal warfare provided supply of slaves.
Ignorance is Strength
By now, they have been so indoctrinated that they would not believe it.
They love calling us fascist pigs when in reality a fascist is far right on the LEFT of the political spectrum. These idiots also wrongly equate Nazi to the right wing. These minds of mush just repeat what they hear and or taught not having any understanding of what they say. In regards to pigs, she should pick up Animal Farm and learn something.
Also Slavery was a Colonial issue not U.S.
Thanks, shared to facebook as some of my relatives are of college age and at least a couple of them are newthink types
Thirty two students’ answers aren’t enough to make a conclusion.
Thank the Marxist Bozos of the NEA.
First: No I did not read the whole article. A FR tradition. ;o)
Second: Students haven’t spent much time reading the Old Testament.
Third: At least they knew there had been a Civil War.
scholars - Howard Zinn. Two words that should not be used in the same sentence as they contradict each other.
Today I attended a “Town Hall” meeting at the woman’s college where I work & which is part of the Orthodox Jewish university system.
To my surprise, a number of students complained about separate-sex education, gender inequality, and censorship. They wanted to study left-wing ideology. One girl with weird hair & a hippie voice spoke about the possibility of dorming near — or with — the boys. The university president tried to explain that a religious institution had to adhere to certain traditional/conservative values.
I couldn’t help marveling at how lost & confused this generation was, let alone academically ignorant. Why were these girls even there? Probably they resented being in a sheltered, controlled environment. Liberalism always represents freedom, even if it isn’t truth, so they’ll embrace anything taught by these advocates.
Guess the snowflakes aren’t aware that the Bible speaks about servants and slaves. Pretty sure that came out before the 1700s.
For 80 years it was an American issue; Europeans governments maintained it prior to our formation as a country.
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