Yesterday, an old friend of mine sent me a link to an article by David Horsey called “A Fourth of Americans Are Clueless About Our National Roots.” Horsey cited a recent Marist poll — hey, Marist is my old alma mater — showing that “twenty percent of U.S. residents could not identify the USA’s mother country and six percent named the wrong country, with guesses ranging from France to China.” And the pollsters were not talking about recent immigrants to our nation. Most of them apparently knew the right answer. The question was, “From which country did the United States win independence?” Horsey points out, “Forty percent of people aged 18 to 29 hadn’t a clue.”

Think for a minute about what this means. The 18-29 age group is the demographic of the community college, where I teach. Many of these American-born people don’t know that the country whose ass we kicked in the Revolutionary War — you know, the one we celebrate on the fourth of July — was England’s! I’ve encountered many weird things in my life, but this has to take the cake of Everest proportions. The language we speak is English, for heaven’s sake — doesn’t that give people a clue even if nothing else in our information-saturated culture does?

I’ve heard amazing things in my classes over the years. One semester, we were reading Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night in a literature class. In that play, for reasons we need not get into here, a woman disguises herself as a man. I mentioned to my students that old Will might have been playing around a little with subtle references to homosexuality, but that he had to be careful and not be too blatant about it. One young lady near the front of the class — she was around 20, I guess — raised her hand and said, “I didn’t know they had homosexuals back then.”

Another time, in a developmental reading class, we were playing a mock-up version of the old TV game show College Bowl, where teams of four competed against each other and the members were allowed to collaborate on the answers. I asked questions pertinent to the reading I had assigned, and then followed those with extra-credit general knowledge questions that I thought were challenging but not impossible for the students to answer correctly. One such query was “Who was the President of the United States during World War I”? Although I didn’t really expect them to know it was Woodrow Wilson, I was quite surprised by the possible answers the team bandied about in their whispered collaboration: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson. Well, you get the point.

But — America won its independence from China? Just how wrong can an answer be? I am beginning to think that in the years to come, I will hear things more astonishing than I can possibly imagine as I finish typing this article.