It’s important to know... stuff
Or: Did you know that the more things change, the more they stay the same?
“[Russia] fought with us in WWII, and everybody hates [them]. And Germany and Japan, they're fine [now], you know? Someday, somebody will explain that. But I like Germany and Japan, too. But Putin is a little confused by that, he said, ‘We lost 51 million people and we were your ally, and now everybody hates Russia and they love Germany and Japan.’ I said, let’s explain that sometime, ok. But it's a strange world.” – President Donald Trump, June 12, 2025
The results were front-page news for The New York Times: “Ignorance of U.S. History Shown by College Freshmen.”
The paper’s recent survey of some 7,000 freshmen at 36 institutions across the country found “striking ignorance of even the most elementary aspects of United States history.” Twenty-five percent did not know that Abraham Lincoln was president during the Civil War, 30 percent did not know Woodrow Wilson was president during World War I, and only 45 percent could name four specific freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, the article, published April 4, 1943, reported.
“All must agree the results are bad,” Dr. Harry N. Wright, president of City College, said in the next day’s paper. “But why are they bad? And is this lack of knowledge confined solely to history…”
The survey created a great deal of buzz among educators, who largely didn’t find fault with the survey but scattered the blame for the poor results: A debate emerged over the need for more classes teaching strict history and the teaching of “social studies” to make students “more thoroughly ware of the large currents – economic, social, labor and others – rather than relying on old-fashioned drill.”
Some did offer pushback on the survey: “One of the members of the Board of Higher Education in New York City felt the questionnaire dealt ‘too much in names and dates and too little in the great eras and fundamental movements in American history,’” The Times noted. “He nevertheless agreed the results were appalling.”
I remember the questions were always asked in some form or another, and the answer was, more often than not, met with sighs of relief and even cheers: “Do we need to memorize names and dates? And will we have to know the dates for the test?”
During the time and place I went to school, teachers seemed to have decided that grading students on their knowledge of dates and names, learned through rote memorization or other means, was to be done away with.1
That notion that learning the names and dates was an optional part of learning history always miffed me. But I liked learning and committing to memory those details. Calling up pieces of information like they were stats on the back of a baseball card.2 While this anecdotal evidence and a quarter gets you a gumball, there is a chicken or the egg factor here to consider: Did I remember names and dates better because I first knew the significance of the events, or did I learn the events and then commit to memory the dates?
“But if students do not know the great personalities of our past, the rough chronology of our history, or its main elements of cause and effect, what do they know?” Allan Nevins, professor of American History at Columbia, wrote for The Times on April 18, 1943.
Without the understanding of the order of events over the march of time,3 how can there be any deeper understanding of how events are connected? Or the context that comes from seeing how events that are happening simultaneously, but seemingly are unrelated, are, in fact, not occurring in a vacuum.
“ALABAMA ADMITS NEGRO STUDENTS; WALLACE BOWS TO FEDERAL FORCE; KENNEDY SEES 'MORAL CRISIS’ IN U.S.” The front-page headline of the late city edition of The Times read on June 12, 1963: “Gov. George C. Wallace stepped aside today when confronted by federalized National Guard troops and permitted two Negros to enroll in the University of Alabama. There was no violence.”
“I don’t think it is half as important to remember some of the things people did not know in The Times test as to know where to go look them up and how to look them.” – First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was quoted in response to the survey.
Wikipedia exploded into prominence at the same time I became a regular internet user on my family’s desktop computer. The warning was that since it could be edited by anybody, it was not a reliable source. It was, at best, to be used as a jumping-off point for further reading and inquiry. That mantra lasted throughout high school and college.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s quote comes from the paper’s May 9, 1943, editorial, which continues with a passage laying out an alternative to looking things up in an “encyclopedia or year book” for oneself: “Ask somebody.”
“Sometimes it is only an alternative and no harm is done if our informant is really informed and his intentions are of the best. But under different conditions the alternative becomes a penalty. The seeker after truth is at the mercy of his informant.”
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.4
“To be sure, he might ask more than one person and check information against information. But that is physically a laborious process. It demands from the student an amount of leg work or telephone work which only the professional newspaper man can afford.”
Ok, that one is just the plus ça change part.5
“For the layman we are very much afraid that he will take the word of the first authority he turns to. It is what good newspaper men call a handout and heartily detest. They want to ask questions. They don’t want to be told anything ‘off the record’ if it involves giving up the right to inquire elsewhere.”
Plus ça change, plus ça change. Say that twice.
“The handout is one of the paradoxes of our time. It is a democratic age, but we are more and more inclined to sidestep the task of finding out things for ourselves; we want other people to tell us.”
And we’re now just plus c'est la même chose.
“Mr. Wallace refused four requests this morning from a Justice Department official... Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, Deputy Attorney General, did not press the issue... However, the outcome was foreshadowed even then. Mr. Katzenbach told Mr. Wallace during their confrontation: ‘From the outset, Governor, all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students.’”
If the reader turned her attention to the article to the left on the June 12, 1963 front page, they may have read this passage: “Mr. Harriman has long enjoyed special respect among the Russians, who regard him as a symbol of the better East-West relations that prevailed in World War II when he was Ambassador to Moscow." ("Harriman to Lead Test-Ban Mission to Soviet in July”)
Seven months after The Times published its survey, they took a victory lap: “Reports from colleges and universities throughout the country indicate that there is a greater student interest in the study of American history.”
“… An immediate result of the study has been the increased demand for books... The New York Public Library has had an unprecedented run on history books and historical novels; many of the persons who come to the library bring the newspaper clipping with them; declaring that they had not realized how little they knew about the background of their own country.”
But as things change, they also don’t: “More than ignorance of the past, however, [Naomi Miller, chairman of the history department at Hunter College] finds an indifference to dates and chronology or causation. ‘They think that everything is subjective. They have plenty of attitudes and opinions, but they lack the knowledge to analyze a problem.’ Professor Miller believes that “we are in danger of bringing up a generation without historical memory. This is a dangerous situation.” (The Times, Nov. 17, 1985)
We all want to know stuff. We’re curious people looking to find things out. Encyclopedias have faded, but Wikipedia is still chugging along. Now, the large language models, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, have entered the fray as more of a one-stop shop to be the source to look things up, the friend to ask, the provider of a handout, and all with the ability to re-tell everything in your own words, too.
“We ask them to read, reflect upon, write about, and discuss ideas. That's all in service of our goal to help train them to be critical citizens,” Robert W. Gehl, associate professor at York University, told 404 Media. “GenAI can simulate all of the steps: it can summarize readings, pull out key concepts, draft text, and even generate ideas for discussion. But that would be like going to the gym and asking a robot to lift weights for you.”
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
“As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind.
“... General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” – President Ronald Reagan, June 12, 1987
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives and works in New York.
Here is where I will note that any discussion or debate of the efficacy of such a method of schooling is beyond my knowledge and this piece’s scope.
I was looking at Juan Soto’s slugging percentage the other day, and that led me to look at Babe Ruth’s slugging percentage in 1921 (.846) when he had 119 extra-base hits out of 204 total hits (58.3 percent). Isn't that insane?
This is a terribly reductive way to describe the study of history, but at its most basic level, for many people, this is what history will be for them: names and dates from the past
Which, of course, in Italian means… “affection.”
Ok, either you knew it meant “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” looked it up, or just took my word for it. (Start video at 2:39 mark.)