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 list of scores:
| Book or Literary Character | Percentage Answering Correctly |
| To Kill A Mockingbird | 79% |
| Uncle Tom’s Cabin | 77% |
| Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass | 72% |
| The Odyssey (Odysseus) | 60% |
| A Tale of Two Cities | 57% |
| The Scarlet Letter | 56% |
| 1984 | 52% |
| The Book of Job | 50% |
| Oedipus | 45% |
| The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison | 41% |
| The Canterbury Tales | 38% |
“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.
