The ForumCore Curriculum
New Data: Students Ready to Learn, but Colleges Fail to Require Essential Classes
What do college students know? Not much. So suggests polling just released by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) and College Pulse. The Forgotten Fundamentals, second in a series of surveys on college students’ basic knowledge, adds questions about general arts and sciences to its predecessor’s focus on civics and government. Among the more depressing results: More students identified Charles Dickens as the author of Moby Dick (42%) than Herman Melville (35%). Such errors should not come as a surprise, given that 79% said they had not taken a college literature course. Students do not know much about literature because they are not taking literature classes.