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Yes, I meant the title the way I phrased it. Not “Citizens Without Brains” but “Citizens wWithout A Brain (Among the Lot of ‘Em)” *sigh*.
The United States of America is a putative representative democracy which depends upon the collective wisdom of its citizens to elect representatives to look out for the common good. That being the case, it stands to reason that a people well-versed in the nation’s history, its founding documents and the forms, purposes, responsibilities and limits of its governmental bodies would be a very good thing and that the opposite would be a very bad thing.
In late September, just as the present academic year was getting underway, The American Civic Literacy Program at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute released its report The Coming Crisis in Citizenship: Higher Education’s Failure to Teach America’s History and Institutions. Its findings are based on extensive survey research, conducted on fifty American campuses, from large state schools to elite private universities to liberal arts colleges. Over 14,000 freshmen and seniors across the country completed a questionnaire comprised of sixty questions covering a wide range of topics in America’s history, founding ideas, political institutions, economic system, and place in the world.
What did the survey determine? Well, beside the fact that incoming freshmen, high school graduates, knew damn all about the subjects, outgoing seniors knew little—if any—more. In some schools, the phenomenon of “negative learning”—outgoing seniors leaving knowing less than incoming freshmen—was observed (and not because incoming freshmen were well-versed).
*Seniors scored just 1.5 percent higher on average than freshmen.
*If the survey were administered as an exam in a college course, seniors would fail with an overall average score of 53.2 percent, or F on a traditional grading scale.
*Though a university education can cost upwards of $200,000, and college students on average leave campus $19,300 in debt, they are no better off than when they arrived in terms of acquiring the knowledge necessary for informed engagement in a democratic republic and global economy.
Read the linked article. Read the full report linked there. Then find out if your local public schools are turning out cultural illiterates who aren’t fit to be voters, and if they are, find out why and raise holy hell about it.
Then find out what the situation is at the colleges or universities your children are attending or intend to attend. follow the above provedure, etc.
Otherwise, the dead and illegal alien vote captured by pols on the left will not be necessary to lead the U.S. into the ash heap of history, because enstupiated, incompetent citizens will have long since done the deed themselves.
Oh, and go ahead and take the quiz formed from a very small (five questions) representative sample of the survey questions. I had to pause and think about one question (to0 resolve a time differential between American history and British history), but nevertheless had this result:
You answered 5 out of 5 correctly — 100.00 %
Average score for this quiz during December: 90.7%
But then, I always “test” well. Not necessarily indicative of my breadth and depth of knowledge–especially with a simple 5-question sample quiz.
5/5! Heather didn’t do so well, but she didn’t try, and I was asking her the questions while she made cards.