I read an alarming story in Slate magazine, What High Schoolers Don't Know, about how today's students are morons who know nothing about literature and history. Then I looked at the questions and realized the people who created the survey are also idiots.
The question that riled me was this:
The question that riled me was this:
The first permanent English Colony in North America was
- Salem, Massachusetts
- Jamestown, Virgina
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Providence, Rhode Island
The answer given is Jamestown. The real answer is St John's Newfoundland. The comments for the article are bitter and pedantic in the good sense obsessing over small points of error, (like I am doing now). However the point is that school history is not meant to teach anything but the prevailing civic ideology. Later the same survey shows that students who had more educated parents were more likely answer the questions correctly.
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