I haven't written a diary in quite some time, mostly lazy but I also hate working on a laptop. However, tonight I came across
this article in Newsweek titled
"Study: Top Students Fail at Civics" and no this isn't just some student in some inner city schools this is the whole fucking country!
I know I'm pissed at Newsweek too for the stunt they pulled this week with the
US Frontpage but this is important
When I read the story it became quite clear how much trouble our country is in and from the looks of things it will only get worse.
Not only did many respondents at the 50 participating colleges fail to answer half of the basic civics questions correctly, but at such elite schools as Cornell, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, the college freshmen scored higher than the college seniors. Josiah Bunting, III, chairman of the National Civic Literacy Board of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the nonprofit that funded the study, decried "the students' dismal scores" as providing "high-quality evidence of... nothing less than a coming crisis in American citizenship."
emphasis mine
14,000 students 50 colleges
The average participating freshman got 51.7 percent of the questions correct. But after four to five years in college, we found that seniors, as a group, scored only 1.5 percent better than the entering freshmen.
So when we wring our hands about the loss of civil liberties, due process, and the Constitution are we screaming into the wilderness? It seems the answer is yes and if things continue along this course fewer and fewer will even know what we are talking about.
Why does this matter?
It matters because we want to leave an America to our children and grandchildren that will continue to offer the freedom and opportunities we enjoyed ourselves. If you don't understand how a democracy operates or what the Bill of Rights guarantees, you may not be able to do your part to preserve these institutions into the future.
Clearly we cannot depend on the (underfunded) educational system to prepare the next generations to guide our fragile democracy. Or to even teach them what democracy is. So I pose a question to the community. How should we as progressives help prepare the next generation to uphold our Constitution and defend our democracy? Am I overreacting or should we all be really really worried?
Here's a sample test see how you do.