Alaska News

Our country's ignorance is disturbing

Our elected public officials did even worse than the average American on a civics quiz designed to test basic knowledge of American government and history.

Asked what "inalienable rights" were referred to in the Declaration of Independence, under 70 percent of public officials chose the answer, "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Almost 85 percent of ordinary citizens got the question right.

Public officials were a lot less likely than the average American to know that Sputnik was the name of the first man-made satellite, not the name of the first animal to travel to space or the name of the hydrogen bomb.

These amazing findings come from a 2008 telephone survey of more than 2,500 American adults, a nationally representative survey conducted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

If you are reading this column, you would probably find most of the questions easy. I bet you know that the electoral college was not founded to oversee presidential debates!

But most Americans failed the test, getting a score of 49 percent on these basic questions. Elected officials did even worse with an average score of 44 percent.

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"There is an epidemic of economic, political and historical ignorance in our country," says the chairman of the ISI National Civic Literacy Board.

"It is disturbing enough that the general public failed the civic literacy test, but when you consider the even more dismal scores of elected officials, you have to be concerned."

About 80 percent of elected officials, for example, did not know that the Bill of Rights explicitly forbids establishing an official religion for the United States.

Civic ignorance is rampant. About 75 percent of ordinary citizens did not know the answer either.

People who read about public affairs in the newspapers did better than people who watched the news on television.

I'm not surprised. When I turn on TV for national news, I find endlessly recycled stories about Sarah Palin's clothes, interspersed by commercials for cell phones, vacations in Jamaica and medications to improve your sex life.

We are in the midst of an economic crisis. We are debating a bailout of the three big automobile manufacturers. Yet most Americans and about 60 percent of our elected officials don't even know what a business profit is.

We are in the midst of deciding whether or not to withdraw from Iraq or send more troops to Afghanistan. Yet almost half of Americans and more than half of elected officials don't know that Congress, not, say, the Supreme Court, has the power to declare war.

We are arguing about taxes. Yet just about half of Americans and public officials don't know what a progressive tax is.

College-educated people did only somewhat better than those with only a high school education.

If children don't learn the basics in elementary and high school, our government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" will perish from the Earth.

Less than a quarter of our public officials and only about 20 percent of American citizens knew this famous phrase comes from the Gettysburg Address.

Judith Kleinfeld is director of the Boys Project, co-director of Northern Studies and a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Judith Kleinfeld

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