An article in the Washington Post stated:

American schools are producing students with "startling gaps in knowledge" of history and literature, teaching them how to think without giving them anything to think about, the National Endowment for the Humanities charged Sunday.

The endowment said 68% of high school students questioned in a new survey could not place the Civil War within the correct half-century.

The survey of nearly 8,000 seventeen-year-olds found that 43% could not place World War I in the correct half-century, 30% could not do the same for the writing of the U.S. Constitution and nearly a third placed the date of Columbus' discovery of the New World after 1750.

Eighty percent of these students were enrolled in an American history course in the spring of 1986 when they took the multiple-choice test.

The National Endowment for Humanities chairman, Lynne V. Cheny, blamed the poor state of humanities education on several factors including a curriculum that emphasizes skills over knowledge, a system of teacher training that stresses teaching methods over subject matter and textbooks that have become "an overcrowded flea market of disconnected facts." Cheny went on to say, "Usually the culprit is 'process' -- the belief that we can teach our children how to think without troubling them to learn anything worth thinking about."

These young people and perhaps some of us are U.S. citizens who live bereft of a conscious, factual data base about our heritage. Some of us are reasonably educated people who have either forgotten or have never known the basic facts about history and literature.

The same can be said about the religious and spiritual facts of life.

The most important event of all human history is the resurrection of Jesus Christ, for this event is the earthly culmination of God's atoning work on the cross.

The Apostle Paul throughout the first fourteen chapters of 1 Corinthians has dealt with many issues. Some are of only peripheral significance to the Christian faith. Others of them are more central issues of Christian conduct and faith. Now as he nears the conclusion of this letter, he reminds the Corinthians and us today of our heritage, writing, "Now I would remind you brethren, in what terms I preached to you the gospel, which you received, in which you stand, by which you are saved, if you hold it fast -- unless you believed in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:1-2).

This is strong language. You can't find much stronger. Paul recapitulates the Good News which several years before he had brought to the Corinthians. He was not the inventor of it. It had been delivered to him. It was the Gospel, the news of the risen Lord.

He reminds them that they had received it. He reminds them it was something in which they stood. It was foundational to all they were. It was something by which they were saved. Now we are down to the basics, aren't we? This is the essence of the Christian faith. It is something to which they must hold fast.