Nerd News: High School Students Don't Know History

This is a common jeremiad on this blog. Usually I'm moaning about how students don't know what they ought. But I'm usually moaning about students in the US or the UK.

This story reports that high school students in Israel don't know history either. Great -- now there's a pandemic of high school history-ignorance.

Sigh:

Sixty percent of the country's high school pupils don't know the difference between the man who declared Israel's independence and the mortar used to fight for it.

Those results, along with other embarrassing indicators as to the poor state of high school pupils' grasp of national history, were included in a recent survey conducted by Prof. David Chen, dean of the Or Yehuda Academic College's School of Education and an adviser to the Education Ministry.

The survey, which tested the national history knowledge of 527 students, revealed that only 39% of them knew that David Ben-Gurion was the first prime minister of Israel, and 49% thought Davidka, the name for the homemade mortar used during the War of Independence, was Ben-Gurion's nickname. He was, of course, known colloquially as "The Old Man."

Other findings showed that 39% of those surveyed thought Ben-Gurion was the country's first president, and only 34% answered correctly that it was Chaim Weizmann.

Again, only 39% of the pupils knew that November 29 was the day in 1947 that the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution recommending the partition of British Mandated Palestine into two states - one to become an Arab state and the other the Jewish national homeland.

It's pretty depressing when you think about how recent some of this history IS. The modern state of Israel celebrated its 61st year earlier this week.