What is so troubling about this process of culling book collections is that we are losing these precious resources at a time when the average American's knowledge of history falls well short of that of his or her parents, and or grandparents. Surveys and polls reveal an embarrassing lack of historical knowledge even among those attending the best schools.

In her 1995 book Telling the Truth, Lynne Cheney, wife of the Vice President and former head of the National Endowment for Humanities, cited numerous examples of this decline in knowledge of history, citing a survey of college seniors at 55 elite American universities that found only a third of them able to identify George Washington as the American General at Yorktown. None of these 55 universities requires a course in American history.

Confirming Cheney and Will's gloomy assessment are the May 2002 reports from the federal government's National Center for Education Statistics on the results of the history component of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NEAP). According to reports:

• Only eleven percent of high school seniors were rated as "proficient" on the NEAP history exam.
• Fully 57 percent of seniors fell below "basic", the poorest performance recorded on any of the subjects covered by the NEAP exams. Science was the next worse, where 47 percent performed below basic.
• On the same exam, only 39 percent of eighth graders knew that the biggest factor leading the American colonists to form the First Continental Congress was their frustration with laws passed by the British Parliament.
• Only 57 percent of fourth graders knew that a major cause of the Civil War was a split between North and South over the issue of slavery
• And only 39 percent of seniors could identify the South's major military advantages in the war.