The dumbing down of America continues. In observance of Constitution Day (September 17), the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, an Oklahoma City conservative think tank, commissioned a polling firm to do a telephone survey of 1,000 Sooner State public school students to get a sense of how knowledgeable they are about civics.

The students were asked ten basic questions ranging from “What is the supreme law of the land?” to “What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?” These questions, about history and government, were selected from the national citizenship test, which is administered to immigrants through the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

The results of the survey are shocking:

• A staggering 77 percent didn’t know the name of the first President of the United States.
• An astounding 86 percent couldn’t name the author of the Declaration of Independence.
• A whopping 90 percent didn’t know how many justices there are on the U.S. Supreme Court.
• A paltry 2.8 percent of those polled actually “passed” this mock citizenship test.

True, the students didn’t get to prepare for this pop quiz, like the candidates for the citizenship exam get to do. But American teenagers, by the hundreds, who spend years in social studies classrooms, who don’t even know who George Washington is – please!

I guarantee you, though, that the majority of these adolescents do know who Kanye West is.

Typically, what happens next, when yet another gross example of academic malpractice is exposed by some intrepid outfit or individual, is that an education bureaucrat uses the opportunity to call for more money and longer school days. They also blather on about “assessments,” as did U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan when asked about the results of this survey.

Or, they just hide and blame the messenger.

An Oklahoma news station got no takers when a reporter invited school officials for an on-camera interview to comment about why three in four students can’t identify the Father of the Country. But Eyewitness News 5 did manage to extract a statement from the Oklahoma Department of Education — a defensive one at that: "We would question the credibility of any findings of student intelligence that were arrived at solely by a supposed phone survey of purported high school students by a special-interest group."

Personally, I would question the credibility of any state department of education which allows the intelligence of their purported high school students to be arrived at solely on the basis of the instruction by a lack-of-interest group (the social studies teachers).

By the way, this isn’t a crisis peculiar to Oklahoma. The Goldwater Institute of Phoenix commissioned the same survey, and they reported similar terrible results. Only 3.5 percent of Arizona public school students passed the mini-citizenship test. The Goldwater Institute now urges that applicants to Arizona public universities be required to pass a similar civics exam as “a condition of admission.” Conversely, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs is floating an idea sure to trigger a rebellion of mall rats: Teenagers have to pass a civics knowledge exam as a precondition to obtaining a driver’s license.

I have a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of my own. An impressive 92 percent of immigrants who recently took the citizenship test passed it on the first try. Why not deport all incompetent civics teachers and replace them with these newcomers?

Someone’s got to do the work Americans are unwilling to do.

Isabel Lyman holds a doctorate in social science and is the author of The Homeschooling Revolution (2000).
 

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Bonnie said:

	The dumbing down of America continues The really disturbing thing is that this dumbing down is not the result of incompetence, but is intentional. Public schools are a threat to this nation, as are their masters,the NEA.
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September 22, 2009
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Larry Miller said:

Priorities We, as a society, have found all kinds of ways to communicate. However, as your article tells us, the teachers are certainly not communicating this information to the students. It's hard to believe they are that incompetent. So it must be that they are communicating the wrong things... like the teacher in NJ who had her students singing praises about the Obamessiah. What should they have been learning in that time frame?

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September 24, 2009 | url
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