What's Washington, DC? Who's Thomas Jefferson? Tough Questions.

Evidence that Americans lack basic knowledge of the world is all around us, but most of us don’t talk about it—and some dismiss it as unimportant.

Another day, another anecdote revealing that many people in this country, through no fault of their own, don’t actually know some things we assume they know.

Today’s was a passing mention in a magazine article I was reading. The author was on vacation in Hawaii with her parents, staying on a military base in connection with her father’s work. Returning from an outing, the family was in a hurry to catch the sunset.

“We made it all the way to the military base’s entrance gate, where checking identification cards should have been a quick formality. The young guard squinted at my driver’s license. ‘District of … Columbia,’ he said, clearly unfamiliar. ‘Is that in the United States?’

“We assured him that D.C. was, in fact, the capital of these United States. He asked us what state it was located in. Then he called his supervisor, who was all the way at the other end of the base.”

You might think this was a weird one-off incident, but as someone who lives in D.C., I can assure you it was not. Once when I was in Texas, I told a 20-something Lyft driver that I lived in Washington, D.C. His response was, “That’s in West Virginia, right?”

Even young people who live in D.C. can be confused. I’ve spoken to D.C. teachers at all grade levels, including high school, who have told me that when they’ve asked their students to point to Washington, D.C., on a map, they point instead to Washington State.

This is just the tip of an iceberg of stuff people don’t know, and we don’t have to rely on anecdotes about D.C. to uncover it. There have been numerous surveys over the years finding things like this:

• Over 70% of American adults fail a basic civics literacy quiz, with half unable to name the branch of government where bills become laws and a third not knowing there are three branches of government.

• Only about a third of Americans can pass a multiple choice test consisting of items taken from the U.S. Citizenship test, with only 13 percent knowing when the U.S. Constitution was ratified and 60 percent not knowing which countries the U.S. fought in World War II. Just 24 percent could name one thing Benjamin Franklin was famous for, with 37 percent believing that he invented the light bulb.

• On another multiple-choice text, sixty percent or more of college students didn’t know things like the term lengths of members of Congress or the name of the Chief Justice or Speaker of the House. Most thought the Constitution was written in 1776, not 1787.

And scores on national tests of U.S. history and civics are abysmal, with only 22 percent of eighth-graders scoring at or above proficient in civics and only 13 percent doing so in U.S. history.

These statistics probably understate the problem, as the anecdotes suggest. They don’t ask extremely basic questions—like “What is Washington, D.C.?”—so we don’t really know how many people can’t answer them.

An Old Problem That’s Getting Worse

To some extent, this isn’t a new issue. Ten years ago, a video revealed that some American college students couldn’t answer questions like “Who won the Civil War?” Way back in 1988, a book appeared titled What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? Based on findings from a national test, it reported, for example, that only 32 percent could place the Civil War within the correct fifty-year period and 28 percent thought Columbus’s voyage to the New World occurred between 1750 and 1850.

Another anecdote from way back: I heard a story from a woman who moved to the U.S. from Uruguay as a child, in the 1950s or early 1960s. On her first day of school, her fourth-grade teacher wanted to show the class where the new girl had come from on a map of the world—and pointed to Uganda.

Still there are indications that the situation has worsened in recent decades. The citizenship test survey broke down the responses by age range and found a striking difference. Respondents who were 65 and older scored the best, with 74 percent getting six out of ten questions correct—a passing score. Among those under 45, only 19% were able to pass.

Stories coming out of classrooms today indicate that things aren’t getting any better. I could recount many I’ve heard from teachers or witnessed myself (you can find some in my book The Knowledge Gap). But I’ll limit myself to one that appeared in a comment on one of my recent posts, from a veteran educator who had been observing a novice teacher’s 11th-grade ethnic studies class.

The students had been assigned to give presentations on whether a local elementary school should retain the name “Thomas Jefferson.” The presentations “came off smoothly,” the commenter wrote, but they seemed superficial and reflective of the teacher’s perspective rather than the students’ own. A few days later, the commenter found out why. He had a conversation with one of the students in the class, “an apparently normal 11^th-grader,” and discovered that he “didn’t actually know who Jefferson was.”

We Need to Identify the Problem—And Its Causes

You rarely see anything about this issue in the media or hear about it in discussions of what we need to do to improve education.

I suspect one reason is that it if we talk about what people don’t know—especially if they’re students—it sounds like we’re blaming or making fun of them. But it’s not their fault they don’t know these things. They’re perfectly capable of retaining information. The college students who couldn’t remember who won the Civil War had no trouble recalling facts about popular culture. In the college survey finding that fewer than 40% could identify the Chief Justice, almost 90% knew that Amazon is owned by Jeff Bezos.

The fault lies in our education system. And if we don’t talk about the problem, many students will continue to be denied the opportunity to acquire information about the world. So we’re not doing them any favors by remaining silent.

When the education system is blamed, fingers are generally pointed at colleges or high schools. No doubt they could do a better job teaching subjects like history and geography, but the problem begins much earlier. Pressuring high schools and colleges to improve outcomes without understanding the root causes is likely to result in an overall lowering of standards—as it already appears to have done.

The College Board recently announced that it was recalibrating some of its AP exams (in other words, making it easier to pass), partly because its grading scale was more rigorous than that used in the college courses the exams were supposed to correspond to. At the same time, college professors are reporting that they need to adjust their expectations downward because students are leaving high school unequipped to do college-level work. It’s a two-way street that leads to a dead end, if you can imagine that.

So what are the root causes of this widespread problem? Without going into too much detail: At the elementary level, schools spend little time on topics like history and science, leaving many students—and especially those from less highly educated and affluent families—without the knowledge and vocabulary assumed by the curriculum at higher levels. When schools do teach substantive content, they often do it in a way that is unlikely to make the information stick—and if you’re lacking relevant background knowledge, it’s a lot harder to get information to do that.

Why Retaining Information Matters

Some readers may be thinking: So what? Does it really matter whether kids retain factual information? In fact, many educators have learned during their training that it doesn’t matter.

A hundred years ago the argument was “They can just look that stuff up in the encyclopedia.” Five or ten years ago it was “They can just Google it.” Now it may be “They can just use AI.” What students really need to learn, it’s said, are skills like critical thinking.

One response to that argument is that it’s far more efficient to be able to draw on information stored in your head than to look it up. When you have to break off reading to look up terms and concepts, you’re likely to lose the thread of what you’re reading, making comprehension harder. And if you don’t have enough relevant background knowledge, you might not understand the definitions you find—or the text provided by AI. If AI simplifies a text for you, you’re likely to lose a lot of nuance.

Another response is that the argument misconceives the relationship between skills like critical thinking and knowledge. Cognitive science has found that, to a large extent, what enables critical thinking is knowledge. It’s not a transferable skill like riding a bike. The more you know about a topic, the better able you are to think critically about it. To take an extreme example, you can’t think critically about naming a school after Thomas Jefferson if you don’t know who Jefferson was.

Even more fundamentally, I’d say the process of transforming information into knowledge is what makes us “smart.” Subcontracting out that process to a bot is likely to lead to a decline in cognitive function, not an enhancement of it. AI has its uses, but it’s not a substitute for ensuring that kids acquire knowledge.

Of course, all people do have knowledge—of their communities, their culture, and their immediate environment. That knowledge is valuable. It’s just not enough, because other knowledge—knowledge of the wider culture and the wider world—is assumed by the texts and experiences students encounter in middle school, high school, and beyond. If they’ve been denied access to that kind of knowledge, they’ll struggle to understand what they’re expected to read or learn, become frustrated, and be denied the opportunity to achieve their full potential.

Plus, a democratic society doesn’t function well unless the electorate has enough knowledge to understand the issues. If you’re not sure what Europe or the Middle East is, it’s hard to evaluate a candidate’s positions on foreign policy.

Knowledge Isn’t Just a Bunch of Random Facts

I’m not talking about having kids memorize disconnected facts without thinking about them. Frankly, I don’t think anyone these days is talking about that (it may have been a popular idea in the 19^th century, but we don’t live there anymore). Of course information needs a meaningful context in order to make sense and stick in long-term memory. And of course, memorizing facts and concepts (which is another way of saying “retaining information in long-term memory”) isn’t the be-all and end-all of education. But to a large extent, it is its foundation.

Often people get hung up on the question of what knowledge students should acquire. To some extent, the choice of topics is inevitably arbitrary. What’s important is that a curriculum be internally coherent, so that at lower grade levels it provides the topical knowledge it assumes kids have at higher grade levels. The curriculum also needs to build—in a cumulative process that extends across years—the critical mass of general knowledge that enables students to understand texts on topics they don’t already know about, bringing in comprehension skills and strategies as appropriate to the content.

At the same time, there are specific things I think most Americans would agree kids should learn in school. That would probably include who Thomas Jefferson was and what Washington, D.C., is. I bet most people assume kids are learning those things. How can we ensure that actually happens?

Teachers Need Better Training and Materials

It would help a lot if teachers learned about cognitive science—the science of learning—during or after their training, and had access to instructional materials grounded in that science. Most don’t.

In a better system, teachers would be informed, for example, that the human mind is hard-wired to take in information when it’s presented in the form of a narrative—which explains why the most effective way to teach civics is through stories from history.

One of the surveys cited above found that two-thirds of respondents had taken civics in high school, but only 25 percent said they were “very confident” they could explain how our system of government works. If you don’t know the story of why the founders chose to distribute power among three branches of government, it can be hard to remember what those branches are and how they’re supposed to function.

With better training and instructional materials, teachers would also encounter the well-established finding that having students repeatedly recall information they’ve learned but have slightly forgotten—through quizzes or writing assignments—can enable them to retrieve that information when they need it in the future.

But first, teachers need to understand that it is important for kids to remember stuff—including names and dates as well as vocabulary words. To put scientific findings in layman’s terms, the more stuff you know, the easier it is to learn more stuff.

I don’t think there are any villains in this piece. I have yet to meet an educator or education guru who doesn’t sincerely want kids to succeed, at least as far as I can tell. The road to this particular hell, like many, has been paved with good intentions.

And if we want to get out of it, we need to start, as they say, by “naming the problem”—the fact that too many students aren’t acquiring knowledge of the world in school. Then we need to understand what to do about it.