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Townhall...
Flunking the
Citizenship Test
By Brent Bozell
Anyone who’s ever seen Jay Leno do one of his “Jaywalking” segments on
NBC, locating average Americans and asking them factual questions on
street corners, knows there are far too many Americans who know next to
nothing about just about everything. They can’t name our first
president or don’t even know what the phrase “Founding Fathers” means.
Ask them to name our current vice president and watch the brain waves
flat line.
Newsweek magazine recently announced its disgust after it offered the
government’s official citizenship test (the one we require immigrants
to pass before being naturalized) to 1,000 Americans. Thirty-eight
percent of the sample failed. Newsweek worried in its headline: “The
country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance.”
The magazine was careful enough to report that civic ignorance isn’t
new. One study found the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World
War II have averaged out to “slightly under 1 percent.” But it worried
that today’s interconnected world is “becoming more and more
inhospitable to incurious know-nothings -- like us.”
It’s easy to get discouraged with the results. Sixty-five percent
couldn’t figure out that the Constitution was penned and adopted at the
Constitutional Convention; 63 couldn’t identify how many justices were
on the Supreme Court (nine); and 73 percent couldn’t identify that
communism was what we opposed in the Cold War.
Current national leaders aren’t so well known: 29 percent could not
identify the current vice president (Joe Biden) and twice that
percentage didn’t identify the Speaker of the House (John Boehner).
Let’s start with the positive angle here. It’s a terrific idea to
examine whether native-born citizens can pass the citizenship test and
an astonishing embarrassment to learn how many can’t. Some public
schools have used the citizenship test as a social-studies project in
civic knowledge. A daring principal could make passage of the
citizenship test a high-school graduation requirement. Promoting better
civic and historical knowledge is an important cause.
But this leads to a follow-up question for Newsweek and its media
colleagues: Do journalists see building civic knowledge as an important
part of their job?
A few years ago, when pollsters asked Americans to name two of Snow
White’s Seven Dwarfs and two of the nine U.S. Supreme Court justices,
77 percent of Americans polled were able to identify two dwarfs, while
only 24 percent could name two Supreme Court justices.
But how often are the justices discussed on news programs, where
ostensibly, Americans receive their civic education? A quick Nexis
search for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to take one example, finds her
mentioned less than once a month each on ABC, CBS and NBC morning and
evening newscasts in 2010: 10 on ABC, eight on NBC, six on CBS. That’s
just mentions, not stories.
Or take “communism.” The word was mentioned just 19 times on the Big
Three morning and evening newscasts in 2010 (eight on ABC, seven on
CBS, four on NBC). That’s despite Communist parties still ruling China,
North Korea and Cuba, among others.
Perhaps the news media think they don’t have time or space to waste on
high-school basics about civics. Newsweek turns to liberal experts to
find agreeable culprits for civic ignorance, such as “our reliance on
market-driven programming rather than public broadcasting,” which would
“foster greater knowledge” than commercial news.
But guess what? Playing our Nexis game, Ginsburg was only mentioned six
times and the word communism was only mentioned seven times on “PBS
NewsHour” in all of 2010. Someone wouldn’t necessarily get a better
test score from Jim Lehrer than from Katie Couric.
The liberals at Newsweek also blamed America’s decentralized or
federalist system of government. We have civic ignorance, they report,
since unlike Europeans and their majority-rule parliamentary systems,
Americans have to contend with voting for “subnational” officials.
Likewise, American schools are “decentralized” and managed by states,
without a central national curriculum.
How ironic that Newsweek would find Americans ignorant for not knowing
the authors of the Federalist Papers even as they blame federalism for
our civic stupidity.
Naturally, the magazine also blamed America for having “one of the
highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the
top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent
combined.” Those darn successful people. So if we more aggressively
redistributed wealth, Newsweek suggests, more people would know who the
vice president is.
There are more direct culprits that could correct this ignorance:
teachers, parents and, yes, journalists, for not emphasizing this “rote
knowledge” of the facts around which we organize our government and
remember our history.
By the way, Newsweek only mentioned Ginsburg three times in 2010.
Read it at Townhall
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