Columbus sailed when?

Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2008 | 2:07 a.m.

When asked in what part of which century the Civil War occurred, 43 percent of 17-year-olds in the United States knew it was between 1850 and 1900.

The other 57 percent didn’t know the answer, a new report says.

Really.

“Still at Risk: What Students Don’t Know, Even Now,” was released Tuesday by a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. The study is a follow-up to the 1983 federal report “A Nation at Risk,” which documented teens’ lack of cultural and historical knowledge.

The new survey suggests that such knowledge has not improved:

• Nearly 25 percent of the teens could not identify Adolf Hitler.

• Twenty-six percent didn’t know that Columbus sailed for the New World before 1750.

• Although 97 percent knew that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the “I Have a Dream” speech, 25 percent did not know that the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” aided the anti-slavery movement.

Chester Finn of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education think tank, told USA Today that although students seem well aware of King’s contributions, “what a better thing it would be if people also had the Civil War part, and the civil rights part, and the Harriet Tubman (Underground Railroad) part and the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ part.”

Indeed. Literature, history and other humanities topics provide the foundation for a “complete education,” the study’s authors say. But such subjects often are forsaken to focus on passing standardized tests that, ostensibly, measure basic skills.

Certainly it is important that our children be proficient in reading and math. But these subjects should not be taught to the exclusion of topics that provide the context for creativity, problem-solving and social and civic responsibility.