There ain't half been some clever bastards

In 1952, a Gallup Poll asked people if they could identify some famous people (the questions were introduced as things that "might be on a radio quiz program").  Answers that said what a person did were counted as correct, and those that just gave his nationality were counted as "approximately correct."  In 1975, a Gallup poll asked respondents to identify the same people.  This time, the answers were just counted as correct or incorrect, and they didn't explain what it took to be correct.  So I give two figures for 1952--the first just counts correct and the second includes approximately correct.  The results:
 

              1952    1975

Beethoven    62 63    84

Raphael      30 30    35

Tolstoy      17 23    29

Freud        16 21    47

Aristotle    25 33    44

Rubens       15 15    24

Shakespeare  78 80    89

Gutenberg    17 24    24

Karl Marx    26 32    41

Napoleon     57 66    58

Columbus     88 89    92

Regardless of how you count the "approximate" answers, there were gains from 1952 to 1975, and in some cases big gains (e. g., Freud).  In a way, that's not surprising, since levels of formal education increased over that time.  But levels of political knowledge (things like ability to name public officials or knowing which party controlled Congress) haven't changed much since about 1950.  So the good news is that people were learning something during the 1960s and 1970s.  

As is often the case, the question hasn't been asked recently.  There are a lot more surveys than there used to be, but they tend to focus more heavily on politics.  I'd gladly sacrifice a few more questions on whether you approve of the job Congress is doing for a repeat of this one.