What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn, Jr., presents the results of the widely publicized first national assessment of high school students' knowledge in history and literature. The students got very poor scores:
·Only 68 percent could place Columbus' discovery of the New World before 1750
·Only 20 percent could identify Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Ellison, Ibsen, or Chaucer
·One of out of three could not find France on the map.
Ravitch and Finn discuss the history and literature tests, report students' answers to questionnaires on their educational experiences and home backgrounds, and then make recommendations for improving American education.
On the theory that the nation's educational problems are widely recognized, but that solutions to them are widely debated, this month's Book World excerpts a portion of Ravitch and Finn's recommendations.
Three commentators then discuss What Do Our 17-Year Olds Know? accentuating aspects of the educational picture that Ravitch and Finn do not stress. Stephan Ellenwood in "Reforming the Curriculum" explains the myriad complications involved in actually reforming a curriculum. Edward A. Wynne in "Learning and Youth alienation" focuses on the behavior problems that infest today's classrooms. And Henry Johnson in "American Culture and the Public School" shows how Ravitch and Finn's parameters for American culture slight moral and religious aspects that may be fundamental to understanding
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