According to a newly released poll, 10 percent of college graduates—COLLEGE graduates—think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court. A study done by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) confirmed the trend that “recent college graduates are alarmingly ignorant of America’s history and heritage.”
Many parents accept the difficult truth of modern education—they have to make sure their kids are actually learning something, at least in elementary school, and maybe even high school. Now, they just might want to do their due diligence for college.
In addition to the surprising fact that 10 percent of college grads think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court, the ACTA study found that 40 percent didn’t know Congress has the power to declare war. Fifty-nice percent believe Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, was the father of the Constitution (the real Constitution Daddy is James Madison, a fact only 20 percent knew). Less than half of college graduates knew that a trial of impeachment occurs before the U.S. Senate—after President Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in 1999.
Opponents of the Common Core educational standards point to a decreasing standard of educational excellence as the culprit of this ignorance. Kenneth Calvert, associate professor of history at Hillsdale College and headmaster of Hillsdale Academy in Michigan, argued that Common Core has dumbed down the goal of education to “the lowest common denominator.”
In our school and from the Hillsdale perspective it’s our belief that if you hold the bar high, very few kids are going to get there, but most of these kids are going to get beyond anywhere they ever thought that they would get…[but] by keeping the bar low, by keeping it at [the Common Core] kind of average, you have doomed [students] to a low level of education. They never know how far they can go.
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