Greater knowledge of the past would help improve America’s public discourse.
Once again, President’s Day has come and gone and Americans spent little time reflecting on their past leaders—in part, because Americans know so little history at all, even about the country’s most well-known Founding Fathers. For example, in a 2012 survey commissioned by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), fewer than half (48%) of college graduates knew that George Washington was the American general at Yorktown; only 20% knew that James Madison was the “Father of the Constitution” (half thought it was Thomas Jefferson); only 17% knew what Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation actually said; and only 17% knew that the phrase “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” came from the Gettysburg Address (76% thought it came from either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution).