How Well Do Today’s Students Know History?

In Drew University’s Mead Hall, a once-private mansion built when Andrew Jackson was president, History Professor C. Wyatt Evans stood at a lectern, facing a rapt group of alumni from Drew’s Caspersen School of Graduate Studies and friends eager to learn about the future of history at the 2016 Arts & Letters dinner.

Amid the gentle clinking of teaspoons stirring coffee, Evans fielded a question from Judy Campbell G’10: Do today’s students have a good grasp of history?

He shared that he’d recently asked his undergraduates if they knew that the Red Sox lost the World Series in 1986. No one did.

“Yeah, but it’s baseball,” said Campbell. “Who cares?”

The decibel level spiked. Mock outrage spread across faces, people shrieked, cacophony reigned. To much laughter, Caspersen Dean Robert Ready banged on a table four times, quipping, “We need to maintain the dignity of the Caspersen School.”

“For basic historical associations, students have a new vocabulary,” Evans continued. “And I don’t know what that new vocabulary is. Even 10 years ago, students were historically uninformed, but there were basic associations in our popular culture that have to do with history and they knew them.”

“I will speculate that history is failing as a worldview due to the massive changes we are living through,” said Evans, describing the present as “a period of profound cultural disruption” due to digital technology, war, terrorism and climate change. In such a time, “records are lost, languages are forgotten or suppressed, and long-standing cultural references lose currency.”

Then came the curve ball.

“At the risk of sounding like an apostate,” said Evans, “There is something to be said for jettisoning history if and when a particular history becomes stultifying to the culture it serves.”

Evans directs Caspersen’s History & Culture program and teaches U.S. history in the College of Liberal Arts. He is the author of The Legend of John Wilkes Booth: Myth, Memory, and a Mummy and is currently working on a study of Civil War domestic security for Oxford University Press.