In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Would you like fries with your order?

Honestly, I'm all for having depth and breadth of knowledge, and I think that history provides a context for current issues, and I personally enjoy learning long after my formal schooling has ended, etc. etc, but really. Why is it important that today's highschool students know when Columbus discovered America, the Federalist papers maybe, but Columbus? The dates of the Civil war? What possible good does knowing almost any date do? Proximate cause: good to know. Results: good to know. But the very fact that they whine about dates makes the writers of the study way off the mark in my book.

The only problem with your complaint is that the test didn't actually ask for the exact dates. Most questions that asked for dates gave chunks divided into 50 year periods. For example, to answer the Civil War question correctly, you only had to know that it took place sometime between "1850 - 1900." And as for the Columbus question, I don't think it's too much to ask to expect most people to know that Columbus sailed for the New World "before 1750."

You're all for having "the depth and breadth of knowledge" but don't see why young people should know the basic origins of the Americas?

To be honest, without a sense of history - why even bother at all? Why be proud to be an American, then, if you have no idea what that truly means? I know Columbus didn't discover America, but his explorations were an important part of European exploration in the Western Hemisphere. How is that not worth knowing?