If you’re curious about what we’re getting for our education dollars, look no further than recently interviewed university students who thought President Trump was worse than Adolf Hitler, didn’t recognize Joseph Stalin, and ranked Mark Zuckerberg as better than Jesus.
The distressing occurrence’s scene was California State University Northridge. PragerU interviewer Will Witt showed students some combination of pictures of Barack Obama, Jesus, Donald Trump, Adolf Hitler, Hillary Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Mark Zuckerberg (the figures’ names weren’t provided), and asked the undergrads to rank them from “worst” to “best.”
Unsurprisingly, the pattern was to rank Obama highly and Trump low, but most of the other answers were quite surprising. For example:
• A number of students presented didn’t recognize Joseph Stalin, the major 20th-century figure and Soviet leader who murdered approximately 20 million people.
• A young woman was shown a typical portrayal of Jesus and said, “Yeah, um, don’t know who that is.”
• One young black undergraduate freely admitted that he ranked Obama highly because he was a “black president” and then said, “black power.” In fact, when asked “What was your favorite thing about Obama?” the student reflexively replied, “Being black.”
• He and the female student by his side both agreed that Trump was worse than Hitler; when asked why, the young man said that Trump was “childish” while the young lady stated that the president wanted to eliminate food stamps. When questioned about whether that was worse than killing six million Jews, the young lady was shocked, apparently unaware of the Holocaust. Witt remarked, incredulously, that these were the very first people who talked to him, too.
• One young man ranked Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as the best, and Jesus as number three, behind Trump. His reasoning? Zuckerberg is “powerful.”
• Oddly, another female undergraduate ranked Trump as the best, but Ronald Reagan as the worst, behind Hitler, saying that the late president was “manipulative.”
• Only the last young man shown assembled a rational ranking, with Reagan in the best position, followed by Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Hitler (video below).
Of course, PragerU’s results aren’t scientific, nor do they involve a scientific subject sample. But first consider that countless “Man on the Street” interviews paint the same sad picture.
Notable, for example, are shock jock Howard Stern’s 2008 interviews in Harlem, New York City. In them, the interviewer attributed GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s positions to Barack Obama and then asked Obama supporters if they agreed with them (e.g., “Do you like Obama’s pro-life stance?”). You guessed it, the respondents enthusiastically supported “Obama’s” positions (video below. Relevant portion begins at 0.40).
Moreover, scientific studies reveal the same picture. For instance, as I reported in 2011:
Test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress demonstrate, writes the Wall Street Journal, that only “20% of U.S. fourth-graders and 17% of eighth-graders who took the 2010 history exam were ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’…” and only 12 percent of 12th-graders were so. In fact, their knowledge is so lacking that fewer than “a quarter of American 12th-graders knew China was North Korea’s ally during the Korean War, and only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence,” the paper continued.
Other studies have shown similarly stunning results. In 2008, the New York Times wrote about how fewer than “half of American teenagers … knew when the Civil War was fought, and one-quarter thought that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World sometime after 1750, not in 1492.” The Times also reported that “about a quarter of the teenagers surveyed were unable to correctly identify Adolf Hitler as Germany’s chancellor during World War II, instead identifying him variously as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German Kaiser.”
Note that I encountered this myself, when learning years ago that a 14-year-old boy I was tutoring had no idea who Hitler was.
For more bad news, just consider ABC 20/20 correspondent John Stossel’s 2006 report, “Stupid in America: How we cheat our kids” (video below). It’s an eye-opener.
Unfortunately, things have only gotten worse in the last 13 years. Now we hear that the Seattle schools are even trying to push social-justice math, claiming that the discipline is a “racist” tool whites use to oppress “people of color” and that the right answer to a math question may be “relative.”
So now you know why students don’t know history. If math can be relative, what can’t be?
Oh, yeah, the $22,127 annual in-state cost to attend Cal State Northridge and teachers’ salaries. They are absolute and non-negotiable.
Image: screenshot from PragerU YouTube video
