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At least the Tea Party has a bright future.

Jill

Fewer than half of American eighth graders knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights on the most recent national civics examination, and only one in 10 demonstrated acceptable knowledge of the checks and balances among the legislative, executive and judicial branches, according to test results released on Wednesday.

At the same time, three-quarters of high school seniors who took the test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, were unable to demonstrate civic skills like identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations or naming a power granted to Congress by the Constitution.

Wait, the Constitution grants powers to Congress other than outlawing abortion and solidifying the rights of white people to wear stupid costumes at rallies?

8 thoughts on At least the Tea Party has a bright future.

  1. Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me. And will get worse, thanks to things like the Texas Board of Education deciding that history needs to be rewritten because textbooks are too ‘liberal’ when they mention things like Hispanics being at the Battle of the Alamo or the Trail of Tears.

  2. identifying the effect of United States foreign policy on other nations

    I wonder how they assess that. It’s a pretty complicated question for a multiple choice test. But honestly, how do we expect high school students to be able to answer that question when the message we hear every day, from all across government and the mainstream media, is that foreign invasions, propping up dictators and civilian-killing drone attacks are all in support of freedom and democracy, and if people hate us for that, well, they hate us because we’re free?

    But then, that’s probably not the answer they’re looking for with that question.

  3. What a shock, our school system which fails to teach reading and basic math fails to teach civics also.

  4. This does not surprise me at all. One of the high school seniors I tutor couldn’t even give me a rough estimate of when the American revolution took place and didn’t know what communism was – she was recently accepted early into very good university with a prestigious scholarship and currently attends a fancy dandy private school with a 25k price tag. I wish there was a way for me to tell her mother that she’d wasted 100 grand on tuition the past four years because it obviously didn’t pay off.

  5. I have long believed that public school teachers who happen to moonlight as coaches do a terrible job of government/history literacy. If I hadn’t had a natural interest in both, I might likely be ignorant as well.

  6. Civics courses have been being pulled out of school classrooms for the last thirty years. I frankly think the tea party couldn’t exist without the ignorance that has built among people who were never taught how their government functions.

    When you add to that population the population of children who are being indoctrinated at home (some home schoolers teach, but most are not educating their children, they’re indoctrinating them) to believe in such concepts as a Christian nation, sovereign citizenship, and other gross distortions of political ideas, you have a large enough mass of ignorance to kill a democracy or a democratic republic.

  7. I don’t remember learning anything conceptual about civics/government until high school. Earlier than that we did learn about things like when the Declaration was signed, number of congresspersons, etc. It may be that kids are learning it later in school than 8th grade. And likely, grade schools don’t have time to fit it in since it’s not on the NCLB state tests.

    On the other hand, a lot of grown up adults (based on casual conversation) don’t even remember the mindless memorization stuff (3 branches of govt. etc.) Bring back Schoolhouse Rock!

    (Salon published some sample questions from the test yesterday – more abstract than I would expect given the nature of standardized testing, but not really difficult questions.)

  8. I was a political science/American government major and I couldn’t explain checks and balances.

    (I’m willing — even eager — to embrace the hypothesis that thanks to my college coursework, I know what I don’t know, and I’m perfectly capable of explaining it at a high school level.)

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