CORRECTION

In Rob Christensen's column on Page 1B Sunday, the scores on a civics test given to students at Duke University, UNC-Chapel Hill and Pfeiffer University were incorrectly presented as the percentage of students passing the test. The figures represented the mean score for each school.

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When Ronald Reagan said "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," was the late president referring to: a) Kremlin Wall b) Wailing Wall c) Hadrian's Wall d) Great Wall of China or e) Berlin Wall?

Pretty simple, huh? Well, apparently not for many of America's college students.

College students might be techno wizards who know twice as much as you do about iPods and laptops. But to quote R&Ber Sam Cooke, they don't know much about his-to-ry -- or civics or economics.

A recent study of 14,000 students at 50 American colleges shows students really struggle when asked questions about how this country works.

The students were asked 60 questions about such topics as Jamestown, Puritans, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, representative democracy, the Federalist Papers, inflation and business profits. The average grade was 53.2 percent -- an F.

Less than half the students knew that the bombardment at Fort Sumter came before Gettysburg or that NATO was formed to resist Soviet expansion, or could identify key lines from the Declaration of Independence.

This is deeply troubling to Richard Brake, an executive with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Delaware, the group that sponsored the study. ISI is a conservative-leaning organization founded in 1953.

"There is an information explosion," said Brake, who spoke last week to the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh. "Kids are awash in information. They are not awash in knowledge."

The top-ranked school was Harvard, where the students scored 69.5 percent on the civics test. Only a D-plus.

North Carolina college students didn't dazzle.

Duke University students ranked ninth, with 63.4 percent passing; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill students were 18th, with 57.6 percent passing, and Pfeiffer University students were 40th, with 44.3 percent passing.

Not only are the students failing the civics test, Brake said, but at some schools, such as Duke, they performed worse on the test as seniors than they did as freshmen -- as if the knowledge was leaking out of them like helium out of a balloon.

"They're not dumb," Brake said.

Brake blames the poor grades on the decline of civic education in secondary and elementary schools and the lack of core curriculum in colleges.

There are any number of reasons why civic literacy is important, Brake says. Republics are fragile institutions that rely on an educated and engaged citizenry. If the schools don't produce such enlightened citizenry, it could harm the nation's future.

To be fair, it was a tough test. I got seven of the 60 questions wrong (88 percent grade), and I write about such affairs.

I misidentified the date of the founding of the Jamestown settlement, could not identify the just-war theory, mischaracterized the "balance of power," and had a problem with Keynesian economics, among other things.

You can test yourself by going to ISI's Web site at www.AmericanCivicLiteracy.org and decide for yourself whether we are creating a generation of techno wizards and civics dummies.

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