A Confederacy Of Dunces

Every year some poll or news organization gives out the official US Citizenship Test to a bunch of Americans, and every year we collectively look like idiots as this time around some 38% of Americans botched basic civics.

They’re the sort of scores that drive high-school history teachers to drink. When NEWSWEEK recently asked 1,000 U.S. citizens to take America’s official citizenship test, 29 percent couldn’t name the vice president. Seventy-three percent couldn’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War. Forty-four percent were unable to define the Bill of Rights. And 6 percent couldn’t even circle Independence Day on a calendar.

Don’t get us wrong: civic ignorance is nothing new. For as long as they’ve existed, Americans have been misunderstanding checks and balances and misidentifying their senators. And they’ve been lamenting the philistinism of their peers ever since pollsters started publishing these dispiriting surveys back in Harry Truman’s day. (He was a president, by the way.) According to a study by Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, the yearly shifts in civic knowledge since World War II have averaged out to “slightly under 1 percent.”

But the world has changed. And unfortunately, it’s becoming more and more inhospitable to incurious know-nothings—like us.

As Kitty Smith alluded to earlier today, that makes us more pliable and easier to rule.  An informed populace capable of critical thinking, able to respond with reasoned logic to counter the media monsoon that deluges us daily is not what politicians and especially Republican politicians want.

And of course the Republican answer to "Why are we so stupid?" is because "The elitist educators are making you dumb, let's cut education money!"  Check the rest of Newsweek's article carefully.

It doesn’t help that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality in the developed world, with the top 400 households raking in more money than the bottom 60 percent combined. As Dalton Conley, an NYU sociologist, explains, “it’s like comparing apples and oranges. Unlike Denmark, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English.” When surveys focus on well-off, native-born respondents, the U.S. actually holds its own against Europe.

The first sentence of the paragraph is the important one.  It's the last one that undoes it all, however.  "It's the poor and the immigrants who don't speak English who are making us dumb!"  And of course, the poor and foreign-born are "responsible" for the first sentence of the paragraph, too.  "Well that bottom 60% must be those damn brown people."

Never mind that that 60% mark is "everyone who makes less than $40,000 a year" or so.