Apologies for this site being relatively silent recently. Dear ol’ Eduflack has been hard at work on a major effort focused on the teaching and learning of American history. The full announcement from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation can be found here.

The headline is that, why many of us say history and social studies were our favorite subjects while in school, we don’t seem to be retaining what we’ve learned. In a national survey of 1,000 Americans, conducted by Lincoln Park Strategies, the WW Foundation discovered that only about a third of Americans could pass an American history test based on questions found on the actual U.S. Citizenship Test. A whopping 64 percent of those surveyed could not get a 60 percent on the test, failing to answer at least 12 of the 20 questions correctly.

What is more sad is that we don’t seem to know who the United States fought during World War II, when the U.S. Constitution was written, or even why we broke from Great Britain during the Revolutionary War. Despite our addiction to the musical Hamilton, we believe that Thomas Jefferson was an author of the Federalist Papers. Far too many thought Ike was a U.S. general during the Civil War.

And while it was a Woodrow Wilson Foundation study, most didn’t know what dear ol’ Woodrow was president during World War I.

The story on our collective lack of historical perspective has taken off like wildfire.

The Oregonian has an interesting take here.

The Washington Examiner got the party started here.

The Miami Herald began the drumbeat for McClatchy newspapers here.

The Wall Street Journal took to its editorial pages on the topic. It was joined today by the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Washington Times this morning.

All of this points to one important fact. We need to do a far better job when it comes to the learning of American history. We need to make history more interesting, more relevant, and more engaging for the learner. Hopefully, we will see such efforts coming in 2019. These survey results show it is clearly needed.