Study shows colleges are failing to teach American history

There's a song performed by the one-off trio of Paul Simon, Art Garfunkel and James Taylor that acknowledges, "Don't know much about history." It could be the theme song for many of today's college students, according to civic literacy surveys and tests sponsored by the non-profit, non-partisan Intercollegiate Studies Institute at a sample of American institutions of higher learning. Based on the studies, ISI has concluded that colleges are, by and large, failing to teach basic knowledge of American history and institutions and that many students may be forgetting what they did know about America's past when they entered college as freshmen. ISI studies in 2006 and 2007 tested 14,000 freshmen and senior students from 50 colleges and universities across the country, including 25 top-ranked universities--Harvard, Yale and... [read full story]