Article #1 >>>>> The Knowledge-Poor United States of America

In his book, Just How Stupid Are We? (New York: Basic Books, 2008), George Mason University Professor Rick Shenkman summarizes scientific survey and polling data in revealing the extraordinary level of American ignorance.


Included in his account are the following examples, given for citizens 18 years of age or older, except where noted for particular age groups: Just 25% of American adults can name more than one of the fundamental First Amendment freedoms (speech, religion, press, assembly, and petition for redress of grievances). Only 30% of adult citizens know that Roe v. Wade (1973) was the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal. Just 25% know that the length of term for Senators is six years, and only 20% know that each state has two senators for a total of 100 members of the upper chamber of the United States Congress. Fewer than half (40%) can name the three branches of the federal government (executive, judicial, and legislative). And, remarkably, a mere 49% of American adults know that the United States was the nation whose pilots dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.


In an assessment of basic knowledge of civics administered to 14,000 college students by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 2007, over half of these test-takers scored fewer than 55 correctly out of a total 100 questions. Fewer than half knew that the Battle of Yorktown (1781) ended the fighting between the American colonists and the British in the American Revolution.


Other instruments reveal that just 34% of American adults know that Congress is the federal governmental body with the constitutional right to declare war; 35% know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Sixty percent of adult citizens think that the President can appoint federal judges without Senatorial approve--- which must have created confusion in such folk when President Obama appointed Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia amid the controversial refusal of Mitch McConnell and the Republican congressional leadership to bring the nomination before the Senate.


Forty-five percent of American adults think that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution. Only 5% of respondents to one survey could answer 75% of fundamental economics questions correctly; comparable figures for percentage of respondents making 75% correct responses on matters pertinent to domestic issues was 11%; foreign affairs, 14%; and geography, 10%.


A Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad declared in 2003 that American ignorance of the outside world constitutes a threat to national security.


The susceptibility of so many uninformed people to the demagoguery of Donald Trump should make that admonition very tangible.


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Most likely against the common perception, young people 18 to 24 years of age are the least informed of all, despite their constant punching of smart phones and other technological devices. Young people as a group rate only above those confined to nursing homes in level of general knowledge. Only 23% of young people use the internet to access information pertinent to issues of national or international importance.


Young people do very little reading. As revealed in a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts as cited by Shenkman in his book, only 43% of those in the 18 to 24 age group read literature (down from 60% in 1982). Over 50% do not read newspapers (either physical or online), fiction, poetry, or drama. But few older adults in the United States do much serious reading, either; and in the United States Congress, members regularly cast votes on bills that they have not read.


Rick Shenkman warns his own readers not to mistake access to factual knowledge with consumption thereof:


This, of course, goes to the core of the erroneous approach to K-12 education espoused by education professors and other members of the education establishment. I have detailed in other articles the responses that I have gotten from members of the Minneapolis Public Schools Board of Education and officials in the central offices of that school district that reveal their lack of focus on knowledge acquisition as central to K-12 education. They are much under the influence of that falsely labeled “progressive” approach to education that purports to teach students how to think critically and prepare for lifelong learning without having any knowledge base upon which critical analysis must proceed--- and without having learned very much in the first place.


Thus it is that the condition of intellectual laziness and the terrible knowledge base that teachers and other members of the education establishment have as a result of their experience in wretched departments, colleges, and schools of education motivates them to conceal their own ignorance by devaluing knowledge with the claim that facts can always be looked up as necessary. This is all the more true, they claim, now that the internet and myriad electronic devices provide so much access to ready information.


But the danger is that the typical American shows little interest in knowledge, and never gets around to looking up facts of any relevance to serious national or international issues. Given so little knowledge acquired during the thirteen years spent in the terrible K-12 public schools of the United States, Americans never learn to respect knowledge and never become the lifelong learners and critical thinkers that the education establishment deceitfully claims they are producing.


The entity known as the Minneapolis Public Schools is a salient example of the locally centralized school district of the United States that sends graduates across the stage to claim a piece of paper that is a diploma in name only.


Citizens in Minnesota and the United States are ignoramuses.


And, given their knowledge-poor approach to K-12 education, officials in the Minneapolis Public Schools implicitly intend to keep them that way.