As the kids making up the Class of 2011, the largest in history, left high school and entered college this semester, here are some of the courses they took to fulfill general requirements:

•At Brown, English 110 turned students into “sensitive and agile readers” by having them do “critical readings of television shows (Big Brother, Seinfeld, and Sex in the City), films (The Godfather, The Hours, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and even architectural spaces (Starbucks and the shopping mall).” A Comp Lit course on “Che Guevara: The Man and the Myths” “compare[s] the development of Guevara’s theories to posthumous uses of his work and image.”

•A section of English 111 at Wake Forest, “My Friend Flicka: Companion Species in American Culture,” examined the “intimate connection” between Americans and their pets. Darwin serves as a starting point, but gives way to “adored animals such as Bambi, Lassie, Flicka and Barbaro.”

•The University of Washington offers a freshman seminar, “Queer 101: Exploring Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Issues,” which addresses them “from a broad, affirming and inclusive GLBT perspective.”

•At Ohio State, a freshman seminar, “Reading Superheroes,” surveys comic books from the 1930s to the present. Another asks, “Why Should I Care?: Rewards and Challenges of Community Service.” Two notions prevail there, Marxist educator Paolo Freire’s vision of community service for oppressed peoples and radical leftist bell hooks’s idea of “Service as a form of political resistance.”

Nothing surprising here. Cutting-edge critique of cultural fluff and tendentious counters to mainstream Americanisms have been standard practice for decades now. But instead of regarding them in the customary (and accurate) light of political bias, consider them in relation to something else: the intellectual condition of the students.

Last year’s results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress exams in history and civics estimate well where high school seniors stand. In history, an abysmal 53 percent scored “Below basic.” Most of them, for instance, could not explain an old photo of a theater sign that announced, “COLORED ENTRANCE.” On the civics exam they did better, 66 percent reaching “Basic” or higher. But only 54 percent of them were able to read a sample ballot correctly, and only 16 percent provided “complete” or “acceptable” explanations of how the legislature and judiciary check a president’s power.

And yet, despite these and other reports documenting vast knowledge deficits among college students, departments continue to throw them into trivial and biased classes that won’t remedy the problem one bit. They cheapen the classroom tone and narrow the range of acceptable opinion, and they leave the kids just as ignorant as they were before, and more incurious.