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Ignoring history is major mistake Beginning in the 1960s, American colleges and universities abandoned the idea of in loco parentis - of imposing rules upon their allegedly "adult" charges in the absence of parental control. Social controls - single-sex dorms and rules of conduct - went first, but academic standards also have been abandoned. Only a hardy few, such as the University of Chicago and St. John's, still maintain rigorous core curriculum requirements. Among the great travesties amid the abandonment of core curriculums is the loss of a common sense of American history. For, as a new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni reveals, few schools require students to take courses in ordinary American history. The council examined curriculum requirements at 55 representative colleges and universities, including elite schools such as Princeton and Stanford, and found none of them requires a course in American history in order to graduate. Only 22 percent require any kind of history whatsoever. The council probed further, surveying 556 college seniors to check their knowledge. Only 34 percent knew George Washington led American forces at Yorktown, and 37 percent thought it was Ulysses S. Grant. Only 23 percent could identify James Madison as principal author of the Constitution. Only one in four could identify Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist leader. What's behind this historical illiteracy? History has been pushed aside by fashionable, inch-deep socio-ethnic "Studies" courses. The primary quest is the airing of political grievance rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Sadly, the council's study should not surprise. The radicals of the 1960s who pursued Ph.D.s to avoid the draft are now tenured radicals in positions of power on college and university campuses. Driving the study of history, and its lessons and traditions, off of campuses helps them to advance their agenda of radical relativism, in which anything and everything - save traditional virtues - is held to be of equivalent legitimacy. This nonsense will end only when parents vote and alumni vote with their checkbooks and redirect their tuition and donations to schools that still require rigor of their students.
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