School’s out. And how’d we do? Not great. Last week, the Department of Education released the results of its latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—the so-called Nation’s Report Card. This round was an evaluation of students’ knowledge and understanding of American history, in the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. The findings, like history itself, were open to interpretation, but basically the kids of today got a grade of Kids Today. They apparently don’t know what they’re supposed to know. For example, most high-school seniors have no idea that North Korea’s ally in the Korean War was China. That many otherwise competent adults don’t seem to know this, either, to go by an informal around-and-about poll, doesn’t mitigate the feeling that forgetting the particulars of the Forgotten War is a symptom of national decline. This is what happens when the kids aren’t watching “M*A*S*H.”

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann Illustration by TOM BACHTELL

Can ignorance trickle up? That same day, Michele Bachmann, the Republican congresswoman and Presidential candidate, misplaced the battles of Concord and Lexington, granting them to the state of New Hampshire, where she was making a campaign appearance. What points she got for proximity—mixing up her Concords beat giving Iowa Inchon—she squandered by holding aloft a tea bag, to show her support for the Tea Party movement, in the process abetting the theft of another Bay State historical heirloom. (So far, no historian has protested that tea did not come in tea bags in 1773.)

Bachmann’s gaffe served as a bookend to one made by Sarah Palin, the week before, when she, too, addressed the events of April, 1775. Palin scrambled up some clauses and facts in such a way that made it sound as though she had no idea what the heck she was talking about when confronted by the words “Paul Revere.” She had Revere warning the British—“ringing those bells and making sure as he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells.” In time, it emerged that she may actually have been making a very subtle point—that the colonists, technically, were British, that Revere probably never said, “The British are coming,” and that, once captured by the redcoats, Revere did warn them that the colonists were planning to give them what for—but that she perhaps hadn’t realized she was doing so. Her supporters took to Wikipedia, to tweak the Paul Revere entry to suit her syntax, touching off a Bunker Hill of Wiki revision and counter-revision.

America’s fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders don’t have that privilege. They can’t invent history; they can only furrow their brows at it. The federal government has spent nearly a billion dollars in the past ten years to teach history to history teachers, but the money is no match for countervailing initiatives and trends—No Child Left Behind, and its emphasis on reading and math; the rise of social studies; the tyranny of the unobjectionable textbook; widespread faintheartedness in the face of cultural and political discord; and stronger pot.

And yet it may be that, while kids aren’t getting better, they’re not getting worse. The history of history-education evaluation is littered with voguish pedagogy, statistical funny business, ideological arm wrestling, a disproportionate emphasis on trivia, and a protocol that insures that each generation of kids looks dim to its elders. “We haven’t ever known our past,” Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, said last week. “Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.” He pointed out that the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. (And it’s not just Americans: an infamous 2004 survey revealed that a small percentage of Britons aged sixteen to twenty-four believed that the Spanish Armada was vanquished by Gandalf.)

The NAEP results through more than four decades have been consistently mediocre, which may prove nothing except, as Wineburg wrote in 2004, “our amnesia of past ignorance.” (He also maintains that mediocrity is guaranteed: the testing regimen requires that results be distributed along a bell-shaped curve, and that therefore the questions that everyone got right be removed.) Our perennial dismay over the perpetual evaporation of the past is in some respects just another instance of our raging against the dying of the light. If the kids can’t remember the Morrill land-grant acts, they’re not likely to remember you, either. As for those stepdaughters of the Revolution, Palin and Bachmann, only history will tell. ♦