Is history really bunk?

Byline: Norman Markowitz

A recent survey of college students' knowledge of U.S. history yielded the sad fact that the students know little about the facts of U.S. history, failing even to place the Civil War within the right 50-year period. Sens. Joseph Lieberman and Slade Gorton easily guided a resolution denouncing these results through the U.S. Senate.

These findings are hardly new. But what do they mean and what, beyond the usual hand-wringing, can be done about them?

First of all, such surveys are not ground-breaking. They have long furnished grist for the mills of both critics of U.S. education and advertising agency executives. In the 1920s, ad agency researchers noted with some satisfaction that many Americans shared Henry Ford's opinion that history "is more or less bunk" and were ignorant of both current events and the historical past.

In one past survey, a large number of high school students identified "Mussolini" as a foreign country. Other tests have shown that large numbers of American students could not identify U.S. allies and enemies in World War II.

For advertising agencies, the less people knew, the easier it was to sell them goods by packaging that appealed to their subjective preferences and trust in authority figures.

Some background information may help explain why so much of the public seems to know so little. First, the subject of history in the United States has traditionally been taught as facts, events and dates from grade school to college _ narratives that rise from the level of simple stories in the lower grades to densely detailed and documented accounts at the graduate level.