The History Matters Campaign is a project of the Knowledge Matters Campaign. Ask almost anyone these days and you’ll hear the same worry: college students are in trouble, even those at elite institutions. They can’t do math. They don’t read books. And they don’t know the basics about the U.S. government.
Why are students graduating high school with such shaky foundations? We recently listened to a wide-ranging conversation with Dartmouth President Sian Beilock and University of California, Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons hosted by the All-In Summit. The university leaders shared their earnest concerns that students arrive underprepared for campus engagement and academic success, have shorter attention spans and lack a shared cultural foundation. Even at Dartmouth, Beilock said, “our students are landing … without [having studied] civics,” necessitating a remedial class.
They pondered ways to restore curiosity and rigor to college life. One of the hosts asked whether more tutors, higher-quality teachers, or a longer school day should be the focus of a hypothetical $25 billion federal education plan. Other hosts asked what was missing from students’ high-school educations.
Those questions didn’t go far enough, because the challenge colleges are facing has much deeper roots. It takes shape a decade before students even apply, in elementary classrooms and schools, where we’ve stopped teaching history, geography, and civics in favor of abstract “skills” divorced from content. The real crisis in higher education is an absence of knowledge. And more tutors or a longer school day won’t fix it.
Knowledge, not Trivia
Beilock spoke movingly about Dartmouth students who can’t engage in difficult conversations, which she described as a “muscle” that atrophied during the COVID-19 pandemic because kids’ social lives happened on the Internet instead of face-to-face. A host pointed out the challenge is even more basic: students, even at selective colleges, struggle to read complex texts or understand algebra. Beilock put this down to economic inequality, and suggested that teachers need better preparation.
What was missing from this discussion was an understanding of how students gain knowledge.
Cognitive psychology offers an informed answer. As researchers from E.D. Hirsch to Dylan Wiliam to Dan Willingham have shown, comprehension depends on background knowledge. You can’t think critically or argue civilly about something that you don’t understand. To analyze a political argument, a student needs to know who the actors are, what ideas they’re invoking, and the historical context that gives those ideas meaning. Without that scaffolding, they fall into solipsistic impressions and fashionable opinions.
When we complain that students cannot “think,” we’re confronting the shadow of an education system that, for far too long, has treated knowledge as trivia. For decades, elementary literacy instruction has revolved around isolated skills like “find the main idea,” “make a prediction,” and “identify the author’s purpose,” all of which are typically taught through short texts about unconnected topics. The science of reading movement has strengthened lately, powered by results in states like Louisiana. But a coherent ELA curriculum that builds shared background knowledge remains the exception rather than the rule. Worse, very few students receive sequential history instruction that lays a foundation for a balanced appreciation of American history and civics.
The consequences are now visible on college campuses. Professors lament students who can read words but cannot parse arguments, who can write sentences but struggle to synthesize ideas. Many students have never studied a historical period in sequence or read an entire nonfiction text. Their gaps are not due to deficiencies in intelligence or motivation. They are structural, the downstream effects of an education that favors skills over knowledge. When the curriculum abandons knowledge building, comprehension becomes accidental or, worse yet, dependent on family income and social status.
This is why the college “crisis” is better understood as a pipeline problem. Today’s undergraduates were 2013’s fourth graders. They practiced “reading skills” without learning the content that makes comprehension possible. Because knowledge is cumulative, this lack of a factual foundation handicapped their learning in middle and high school—even among students who mastered skills so effectively, they earned top grades. But that doesn’t carry over into college; when students arrive in a freshman seminar, they face a cognitive mountain. They are expected to analyze what they have never systematically been taught to know.
Rebuilding the Foundation
To be sure, social media, digital distractions, and political polarization also are part of the challenge. We often imagine a time when students came to campus having read Moby Dick and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and a daily newspaper. We think they watched respected and responsible reporters like Walter Cronkite or Christiane Amanpour on television and participated in informed conversations around the dinner table.
But they also were the products of a school system that still aspired to teach history and literature in depth. They had studied the rise and fall of empires, the principles of the Enlightenment, the geography of the world, and the foundations of democracy. They may have read a biography of Ben Franklin or Fredrick Douglass. That knowledge allowed them to connect new ideas to old ones. It allowed them to think.
This content-heavy instruction has been hollowed out, especially as schools focused on improving reading scores on state tests. Inadvertently, we dismantled the intellectual infrastructure on which higher education depends. The result is not just weaker readers, but less confident citizens, incurious thinkers repeating catch phrases, and a public prone to confusion and outrage.
This trend can be reversed. We’ve seen states and districts adopting knowledge-rich curricula that re-establish coherence and depth in the early grades. In Louisiana, the Bayou Bridges curriculum integrates history and geography lessons with daily literacy practice. In Massachusetts, Investigating History helps students learn to reason with evidence by studying content chronologically. The Core Knowledge Foundation has long championed this approach, and results from schools using such materials show measurable gains in reading comprehension and engagement.
These efforts embody a simple truth: thinking and reading are not separate domains. When students learn about ancient Egypt, the Renaissance, or the American Revolution, they are not only acquiring facts—they are building the background knowledge that enables sophisticated reading and writing later on.
If university leaders truly want to strengthen students’ intellectual capacities, they should look downstream. We cannot cultivate thinkers by stripping away the knowledge that thinking requires. Our elementary schools have an affirmative obligation to deliver knowledge, particularly to our least-advantaged children.
Those who know Franklin appreciate his warning that our republic depends on citizens who can read deeply and argue both civilly and persuasively. If America is to flourish, to remain a “shining city on a hill,” we must give children deep and meaningful instruction. The college crisis is real – but to solve it we must address what is taught in the elementary classroom. Imagine if every college president who decried the decline of campus civility and reasoned argumentation became an advocate for restoring history instruction to the elementary day.
That would be reform with a lasting impact—one that begins not in the freshman seminar, but in kindergarten.
C. Bradley Miller is chair of the Board of Directors of StandardsWork. Matthew Levey founded a charter school and helps lead the History Matters Campaign.