(AgapePress) - A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author is warning that widespread ignorance of American history among students and teachers at high schools and colleges is a major threat to the nation's security.

David McCullough sounded that alarm on Thursday in an appearance before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. He said "we are raising a generation of people who are historically illiterate" and ignorant of the basic philosophical foundations of America's constitutional free society.

According to McCullough, who is a past president of the Society of American Historians, American citizens cannot function in a society if they do not know who they are and from where they came. He said only three colleges in the United States require a course on the Constitution in order to graduate -- and those are the three major military academies (the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy at Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs).

The historian stated that when asked to identify the commanding general of American revolutionary troops at Yorktown when British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered, more than half of a group of high school students guessed Civil War figure Ulysses S. Grant. Six percent, he said, conjectured it was Douglas MacArthur, who served as Supreme Allied Commander of the Southwest Pacific theater during World War II.

And McCullough added that when there are students at Ivy League colleges saying they thought Germany and Japan were American allies in World War II, the nation has a very serious problem.

The Washington Times notes other speakers who appeared before the panel voiced similar concerns.

Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who chairs the Senate committee, has proposed legislation that would create summertime "presidential academies" for American history and civics teachers, and "congressional academies" for students of American history and civics.

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