That's a fair point - no matter what you're teaching, you probably should expect a majority of your students to have forgotten most of the less essential stuff within a disappointingly short time, if they are not refreshed or used somehow. Forgetting half of the presidents if you started out knowing them all may not be so bad - but if you only knew fifteen in the first place, and then you forget half, that becomes a bigger problem.

So if you're reducing the sheer amount of facts and details students need to know, you do need to ensure that the "retention" percentages increase. And absolutely, that people are drilled in the process of looking up information, and critically evaluating information sources - around here you do see a lot of that, I assume in the US too, but perhaps even more is needed.

Learning Latin is definitely very useful, though it becomes a lot more debatable if, like in some American HSes, it's an either/or choice between Latin and actual living languages - if you don't use your Latin-honed grammar skills to study other languages afterwards, maybe you'd have been better off taking Spanish or German from the start.

For sure, every generation is inclined to overestimate its own uniqueness and its ability to see things better or just differently from the one before - over and over again. But the generations now in school, and the ones coming after, do grow up in a world that is radically different in technological terms - there are objective reasons why schools and the content of lessons do need to change this time, and fast. As they are doing - certainly they don't always get it right, but standing still is not an option.

Well, the idea is based on a kind of zero-sum approach, I guess - time spent learning one thing (exact order of presidents) is time not spent learning something else (details about the presidents). Of course education is more complex than that, and I too sometimes feel that modern education is reducing knowledge of some things without the corresponding improvement in other areas.

I do think that modern history education is imparting insights in terms of socio-economic backgrounds, minority history, foreign cultures, etc. which earlier generations did not get, and if that involves a trade-off with facts like the names of less important presidents, so be it. Partially to correct an old imbalance in the teaching, partially because those things are simply becoming more relevant and more important in today's world.

I'm less certain about the evolution of language education - it's not a bad thing to focus more on direct communication and speaking skills than before, but at the end of the day learning any other language will always involve vocabulary and grammar drills, there's no real way around that.

True, he's not a very religious person clearly. And sure, given his name and background, he might easily be Muslim - except that, as I think you'll agree, Obama would never have been elected as a publicly avowed Muslim in the current climate, so viewing him as a Muslim also implies, much more problematically, that he's involved in a gigantic conspiracy to conceal his true religion.