Over a quarter of the students polled couldn’t even identify Mao Zedong, while 75 percent had never heard of "The Great Leap Forward".
The survey, carried out under the auspices of Norwegian "think tank" Civita (www.civita.no), made front page news in Norway, and unleashed a storm of reaction and commentary.
This comes hot on the heels of news that Norwegian students came out poorly on the international PISA test of 15-year-olds’ scholastic performance. Norway has undergone major education reforms in recent years.
Meanwhile, almost all of the Norwegian students knew what Auschwitz was, as well as the Berlin Wall.
The poll also revealed that more than a third of the students believe communism has improved the lives of people in some parts of the world.
Major Norwegian daily newspaper Aftenposten carried the story on the front page of its morning edition on Wednesday (January 30).
The survey received immediate criticism from all sides.
Aftenposten’s own political editor pointed out in a commentary accompanying the article that the Norwegian results are not especially different from those of similar surveys carried out in other lands.
A 2007 poll in Sweden showed that 90 percent of the students had no idea what the Gulag was and practically none had heard of "The Great Leap Forward" or "Bolshevik".
In a new poll of 10th and 11th-graders in Brandenburg, Germany, only half knew when the Berlin Wall was built and just as many believed that East Germany was not a dictatorship, wrote Stanghelle.
Others criticized the survey for its poor methodology and lack of any comparative data. The statistics, assembled by TNS Gallup for Civita, are based on interviews with 998 students from all over Norway, aged 15 to 20 years old.
Debate also raged about the kind of historical knowledge the survey tested, with some politicians saying that broad understanding is more important than a grasp of the facts.
Meanwhile, a live internet chat was scheduled Wednesday afternoon with World War II war hero Gunnar Sønsteby, who has worked tirelessly, even into his eighties (and now nineties), to educate Norwegian pupils about the history surrounding World War II.
