More proof that you can’t go wrong underestimating what students know:
In a recent survey of college students on U.S. civic literacy, more than 81 percent knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was expressing hope for “racial justice and brotherhood” in his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.
That’s the good news.
Most of the rest surveyed thought King was advocating the abolition of slavery. …
The recent survey of college students, conducted by the University of Connecticut’s Department of Public Policy for the nonprofit Intercollegiate Studies Institute, suggests that schools are not doing as much as they could to go beyond a cursory history lesson. More than 14,000 college freshmen and seniors at 50 colleges and universities earned an average score of 53.2 percent in the survey.