(FORTUNE Magazine) – -- We were sitting there reading an absorbing new book called What Do Our 17- Year-Olds Know?, by Diane Ravitch and Chester E. Finn Jr., and concluding that the general answer is Not a Whole Lot, when a detail leaped off the page and begged for analysis. The book is essentially a report on some elaborate tests of 17-year-olds. They were administered in 1986 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress and centered on knowledge of history and literature. It appears that in American secondary schools, the Seventies now qualify as ''history.'' It also appears that the U.S. educational establishment, overriding numerous hints from the Keeping Up social issues desk, now routinely incorporates feminist themes in this discipline. The teacher who tells about Washington at Valley Forge will eventually get around to Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem battling for the Equal Rights Amendment in the Seventies. So far, you will agree, no surprises. The National Assessment test findings were uniformly horrifying. The tests were all of the multiple-choice variety, and for each question there were four choices. An interesting implication of this arrangement is that you can go into the test knowing absolutely nothing and reasonably expect to get about 25% right just by guessing. The basic bad news is that even with this powerful head start, the kids on average were right on only 54% of the history questions and 52% of the literature questions. The arresting detail concerned their knowledge of modern feminism. Asked to name feminist leaders of the Seventies and given four choices, only 22.8% gave the correct answer: Friedan and Steinem. In other words, the sample of 1,953 kids who fielded this particular question did worse than you would expect if they were totally ignorant. How could this be? The science of statistics tells us that the result is probably not attributable to chance. Assuming total ignorance and guessing, there is only about one chance in 70 of such a dismal result. If the result had been closer to 25%, we could explain it by positing that the kids were merely bored out of their skulls by the subject. A finding that much below 25% requires us to look beyond boredom -- to wonder if maybe the kids are positively resisting the news about feminism. Meanwhile, the social issues desk has a modest curriculum reform to propose.