How much
do American high-schoolers know about their literary
heritage? A non-profit group called Common Core surveyed 12,000
17-year-olds this year in order to answer just that question.

Barely
over half (52%) of the surveyed teenagers knew that 1984 was about “a
dictatorship in which every citizen was watched in order to stamp out all
individuality,” reports Frederick Hess,
a Senior Fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI). Hess authored the Common Core study.

Far more
prevalent was knowledge of civil-rights-related literature such as To Kill a
Mockingbird and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with more than three quarters of
students correctly identifying themes within these novels.

About half
of the students knew that the biblical character Job was “known for his
patience in suffering.”

It is
important to note that the questions were multiple-choice, not fill-in-the
blank.

“As a
whole, [seventeen-year-olds] earned three Cs, one D, and seven Fs,” concludes
Hess. (In contrast, students earned one A and five Bs
on the 22-question historical quiz). While students averaged 73% on history,
they got an average of 57% on literature. AEI released the entire href="http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.27846/pub_detail.asp">list

of scores:

“Certainly,
skeptics might suggest that literature knowledge would be better measured by
standards drawn from more recent works,” argues Hess. “But the purpose of this
survey was to measure seventeen-year-olds’ knowledge of their literary
heritage, not their exposure to popular culture.”

Bethany
Stotts is a Staff Writer at Accuracy in Academia.