Let's start with a short exercise.

Besides the President and the First Lady, who is the most famous American in history?

Go ahead and make your top ten list.

I can wait.

(Go ahead, use the comments section below.) A colleague and I recently posed this question to 2,000 11th- and 12th-grade students from all 50 states, wondering whether they would (as many educators predict

That) name Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Tupac Shakur, 50 Cent, Barry Bonds, Kanye West or any other hip-hop artist, celebrity or sports icon.

To our surprise, these young people's responses revealed that whatever they were reading in their history classrooms, it wasn't People magazine.

Their top ten are all genuine historical figures.

What surprised us even more was that their answers matched closely with answers we collected from 2,000 adults aged 45 and older. From this humbling exercise, we extrapolated our conventional wisdom about young people today,

A lot of it may be conventional, but it's not wisdom.

Maybe we spend so much time looking for what kids don’t know that we forget to ask them what they know.

Chauncey Monte Sano of the University of Maryland and I designed our survey as an open-ended exercise.

Instead of giving students a list of names, we gave them a table with ten blank lines in the middle.

The first section reads: "From Columbus to the present day, write down the names of the most famous Americans in history." There is only one basic rule, no presidents and first ladies.

Part B presents "Famous Women in American History" (again, no first ladies).

Therefore, the questionnaire was directed to women, although many children had women's names removed from the first part and then added to the second part.

But when we count the all-time top 10, we count the total number of times a name appears, no matter which part.

Sure there were a few kids messing around, but most everyone was serious.

Roughly equal numbers of kids and adults list mothers; from teenage boys, we learn that Jenna Jameson is the biggest star in the X-rated film industry.

But neither Mom nor Jenna are at the top.

Only three people appeared on 40% of the questionnaires.

All three men are African-American.

To today's teenagers, the most famous American in history is... a priest.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., appears on 67% of the lists.

Rosa Parks followed closely with 60%, and Harriet Tubman came in third with 44%.

Rounding out the top ten are Susan B. Anthony (34%), Benjamin Franklin (29%), Amelia Earhart (23%), Oprah Winfrey (22%), Marilyn Dream

Dew (19%), Thomas Edison (18%) and Albert Einstein (16%).

For the record, our sample matches the 2000 U.S. Census demographics by less than a few percentage points: approximately 70% of respondents were white, 13% African American, 9% Hispanic, and 7%

Is Asian American, 1% Native American.

What about the gap between our supposedly unruly young people and their historically entrenched elders?

Not one more.

Eight of the top ten are the same.

(Instead of Munroe and Einstein, adults listed Betsy Ross and Henry Ford.) Among children and adults, there wasn't much difference either by region or gender.

In fact, the only consistent differences are between races, and even just between African Americans and whites.

There are four African Americans and six whites on the white list; there are nine African Americans and one white person on the African American list.

(African-American students put down Susan B. Anthony, the adult Benjamin Franklin.) Trying to take the pulse of the nation through numbers is fraught with problems.

First, we know little about the respondents except for a few characteristics (gender, race/ethnicity, and region, and year and place of birth for adults).

When we surveyed children, we found that substituting "famous" for "important" made no difference, but our substituting "famous" for adults' appearance of female names significantly inflated their total number of names for the sake of consistency, although we

Don't know how many there are.

, but it remains true: This qualification cannot obscure the clarity of political awareness we find among Americans of all ages, regions, and races.

Eighty-two years after Carter G. Woodson founded Black History Week, Martin Luther King Jr. has become the most famous American in history.

This is perhaps not surprising, after all, King was the only American whose birthday was named after a Fourth of July holiday.

But who could have predicted that Rosa Parks would become the second biggest celebrity?

Or would Harriet Tubman be the third among students and the ninth among adults?

Or that 45 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in an all-white classroom in Columbia Falls, Montana, the three most common names that appear on surveys will belong to African Americans?

For many of the students' grandparents, this moment is unimaginable.

Susan B. Anthony is one of the ten most famous Americans in teenage history today.