I don't know if the students I work with are representative of American students or not. They tend to be very good in math and science with high grade point averages and good test scores. Many of them have been identified as "gifted" during all of their school years. So why, oh why are they so weak in the humanities? I can understand focusing on a subject or area in college as a major, but only after truly investigating other subjects. I do not understand how a rising junior in high school can not know vocabulary, topics, people that even when I was a teenager I took for granted. I don't necessarily expect this rising junior to have read Paradise Lost , but I expect him to have heard of John Milton, have at least a vague idea of his time period, know his nationality, etc. I guess that the College Board expects, or expected, that as well since a prompt assigned within the last ten years included Milton in a poem by William Wordsworth.
I can't imagine a less inviting future than one that is dominated by technocrats who have no background at all--not even at the high school level--in the great ideas that the humanities encompass.
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