Last week marked the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, so on my weekly news quiz I asked my students which country the United States had invaded in the months immediately following the attacks, and why.

Many didn't know. Some said the answer was Iraq. Some had the correct answer – Afghanistan – but didn't know why we had invaded.

When I asked my students why they knew so little about such recent history, one told me, "I was like 5 years old when the attacks happened, so it's really just a hazy memory for me.


But it's so recent that we haven't learned it in our history classes."

I was shocked, but I shouldn't have been. I've asked similar questions before on my news quizzes, and with each passing year my students - who are otherwise terrific, by the way - seem to know less and less about this event that so profoundly changed our world.

To my mind, this lack of knowledge has less to do with history courses and more to do with reading the news. Because if my students or the millions of other students across the country had been reading newspapers or news websites on a regular basis, chances are they'd know plenty about the attacks that killed some 3,000 Americans.

Indeed, with the recent ISIS beheadings of two American journalists and a British aid worker, we've seen a resurgence of the kind of medieval terrorism that brought us 9/11. Stories about those grisly executions would likely have included references to the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which of course would follow a timeline back to Sept. 11.

News, in other words, fills the void between what's taught in history books and what's happening now. The first draft of history, they call it.

But many college students don't follow current events. I don't know why this is the case. A few years ago I interviewed Mark Mark Bauerlein, an Emory University English professor who wrote a book on the topic. He thinks students are too distracted by the digital world, by social media, texting and the like. That seems as good an explanation as any, I guess.

The digital zealots, meanwhile, seem to think that sleeker, hipper methods of news delivery will attract the young. I've seen little evidence of that.

In my journalism courses I explain that in the news business, not surprisingly, it's the news that we're selling. So it stands to reason that if you want to be a journalist, you need to follow the news.

Then I try to make a broader argument. Noting that most of my students probably won't become reporters, I tell them that as citizens of what is arguably still the world's only superpower, they have a responsibility to be informed about what their country does and what role we play in the rest of the world.

I don't know how much of an impression my little speech makes on them. So that's why I give them the weekly news quiz. If nothing else, I'm hoping the threat of a bad grade will get them to scan a few headlines.

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