> colleges have to ... get students up to a level where they can actually start to understand enough to move forward.

About a dozen years ago I was teaching a group of third- and fourth-year college students (and perhaps even a grad student or two) a literature course that required come knowledge o history.

I was floored when they told me that *none* of their mandated high-school American history courses went *beyond 1945*!!!

And none of the students had taken an elective history course in college - at least yet.

The reason high-school history stops in 1945, of course, is partly because of an overemphasis on some earlier periods, but largely because after 1945 it becomes "controversial."

So they had "heard of" the Cuban Missile Crisis, but had no idea what it was. Martin Luther King, Jr., led the Civil Rights Movement, but what exactly did he stand for? They didn't know. Vietnam? Pretty confusing, but either protesters wouldn't let us win, or else we were trying take over Vietnam for the oil.

Watergate? Something about Nixon. "Reagan Revolution"? Oh, he was the President who won the Cold War. Everybody knows that. What *was* the Cold War? Um, America and Russia yelling at each other about politics and who was better?

That takes you to 1988. Some stuff may have happened since then.