Not from the Usual Suspects

The historical ignorance among college students cannot come from the Usual Suspects:

For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.

The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.

“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”

This is not due to college professors; the students had that miseducation when they entered college. It was also not due to “Fundamentalists”; Any Fundamentalist would know about Egyptian slavery.

A possible effect: Someone who believes that slavery was something distinctively American and who is also determined to be patriotic might be proud of being a bigot. Maybe that's where the “deplorables” came from…