House of Eratosthenes

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.

Yikes! That’s pretty bad. Better keep reading…even though some of these words are a tad bit big, and stuff.

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.”

Thus ends paragraph two. Paragraphs three and four follow…

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

To appreciate the risks involved, it’s important to understand where American ignorance comes from. In March 2009, the European Journal of Communication asked citizens of Britain, Denmark, Finland, and the U.S. to answer questions on international affairs. The Europeans clobbered us. Sixty-eight percent of Danes, 75 percent of Brits, and 76 percent of Finns could, for example, identify the Taliban, but only 58 percent of Americans managed to do the same—even though we’ve led the charge in Afghanistan. It was only the latest in a series of polls that have shown us lagging behind our First World peers.

Paragraph five has some of them underline things in them called “links.” You know how they works. You clicks on ’em and they take you places, which makes it tougher to concentrate on the big words.

Most experts agree that the relative complexity of the U.S. political system makes it hard for Americans to keep up. In many European countries, parliaments have proportional representation, and the majority party rules without having to “share power with a lot of subnational governments,” notes Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, coauthor of Winner-Take-All Politics. In contrast, we’re saddled with a nonproportional Senate; a tangle of state, local, and federal bureaucracies; and near-constant elections for every imaginable office (judge, sheriff, school-board member, and so on). “Nobody is competent to understand it all, which you realize every time you vote,” says Michael Schudson, author of The Good Citizen. “You know you’re going to come up short, and that discourages you from learning more.”

Hmmm…yes, here at the end of paragraph five, I think we’ve got a good point. I live in California, which does something a little bit strange that might come as news to you. Anytime our state legislators sit down to decide an issue that seems to be slightly contentious — and that’s an expansive reading there, you’d be surprised how many things fall into this category — it ends up on the ballot as a referendum. They’re usually called “propositions” and in a typical election year we’ll see between ten and twenty of the goddamn things, sometimes more than that, about such things as issuing water bonds or imposing new requirements that a given revenue stream can only be spent on certain things. From the home and office note-comparing sessions during the first couple of days of November in even numbered years, it has become clear to me that even our best-informed voters have entirely given up on trying to follow this. It has dissolved into a puddle of crapshoot lunacy, a very long time long ago.

I see California as a rather extreme example of what this Schudson guy is talking about. Staying involved and fleshing out the details is a rather simple order if there aren’t too many details, especially when everybody’s talking about them all the time. Once you have to do some research, into things nobody’s talking about anywhere, the interest tapers off. Doesn’t matter if it’s going to be on the ballot or not.

Now paragraph six. This is the mind-blower…or the eyeball-roller.

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. [emphasis mine]

Maybe, since you’re probably an American with your limited attention span and so forth, you should go back and read that bolded sentence one more time.

Beginning to get an idea why I don’t subscribe to Newsweek? We just finished half a dozen paragraphs. And only now do we find out, the entire point of the article, the entire premise that has sent it ricocheting around cyberspace like a jitterbug in a jar…there’s nothing to it. America is made up of capable people who are more-or-less the same as their European counterparts — on top of which, they are remaining equivalently knowledgeable about a vastly more complex system — augmented by this influx of immigrants, of which there are a great many who are not learning the native language and not trying to assimilate. But they get to participate in this survey anyway, bringing down the net score of the country so the smug Europeans can chuckle at us.

There are some countries in the European community which also have issues with immigrants who refuse to assimilate. But I wonder if those immigrants managed to participate in the survey. Or if they cared to.

Well, I’m glad someone is going through the trouble of making sure Europe can feel good about itself.

Did you ever notice that whenever there’s a broad, intense effort to make a certain person or entity feel good about itself, most of the time that person or entity is someone/something that already feels mighty good about itself? I wonder what drives this. Did someone, somewhere, decide there was a shortage of smug Europeans that had to be immediately addressed? Not enough people running around making snide, self-satisfied comments about stupid Americans yet?

Why do we work so hard to create greater abundances of things that are already abundant? This is where the angels and demons look at us, and have trouble comprehending what it is they are seeing.

Update: Neal Boortz has some interesting observations to make about how the numbers break down.

I think one of the reasons we were ignorant is because most of us, from Generals all the way down to the shipping dock thought that our leaders were looking out for us so we focused on our interests, whether they were family or a hobby or a career and we focused on that.

Too late, many of us are realizing that our leaders were only focused on their own interests which is why I wrote this article earlier today that is titled “Why a coup in America?”

http://keepamericaatwork.com/?page_id=62043

I urge you to listen to the video on it, and ask yourself, what are we doing as a country?

Virgil Bierschwale
Keep America At Work
- vbierschwale | 03/23/2011 @ 08:48
Good points about the insanity of California politics, particularly the Proposition X nonsense. “It has dissolved into a puddle of crapshoot lunacy, a very long time long ago” characterizes it perfectly, although is maybe too kind an assessment.

I have to admit I didn’t read the NewSpeak piece long enough to get to the part about non-English speakers, which makes the whole article equivalent to a National Enquirer scare story – “Scientists Discover Aliens In Alabama!!!” turns out to be a story about non-native plants found in a garden outside Mobile, etc.

In my ignorance, of course, the first thing that popped into my mind was an email from a friend with a smart 17-year-old daughter in whose education he has been deeply involved. She recently discovered that her half sister, who’s in a well-regarded Marin County grade school, has no clue about the following at 9 years of age (4th or 5th grade, if my calculations are correct):

The country to the North of us
The country to the South of us
The state(s) to the East of us
The name of the mountain range that separates us from Nevada
Why the mountains are called Sierra Nevada
The state(s) to the North of us
Where Alabama is on the map, where her Dad was born.
Why our capital is called Washington
Where NY is on the map, where her Grand-parents live
Why we’re called the United States
What a State is

His question was “What are they teaching them in school?,” to which my response was:

Women is victims.

Heather has two mommies, and that’s the best way.

“Maps” are a system of imaginary lines conceived of by dead White men. We are all the same.

If 15 is greater than 10, 10 has less because 15 has more.

“History” is a collection of lies promulgated by dead White men.

Anything you learn from your parents, or from the evidence of your own experience, is to be viewed with suspicion until your teacher tells you it’s OK.

Public school-time is a zero sum game. There are only so many hours in the day, you know.
- rob | 03/23/2011 @ 10:01
I dunno, guys. That must mean there are some dumb Europeans out there, because lemme tell ya — I work at a “college,” and God help me, the name of the vice president and the three branches of government would be a mystery to 80% of the “students” of my acquaintance.

As an example of media bias, this article is superb. As a demonstration of anything obtaining in the real world…. I have my doubts.

We are, as a nation, totally boned when it comes to the next generation.
- Severian | 03/23/2011 @ 14:46
From the home and office note-comparing sessions during the first couple of days of November in even numbered years, it has become clear to me that even our best-informed voters have entirely given up on trying to follow this.

Yep, as one of your fellow California residents, I can attest to all of this.

I’ve also noticed that it seems like in a given year, at best half of these will pass. I was really surprised when the cannabis one didn’t make it.

Most (maybe all) of the ones the last governor proposed were shot down – all those reform measures he came up with that were aimed at trying to fix our fiscal mess.

By the way, I was in Folsom yesterday. Nice little historic downtown district you have there. Had some lunch. Took a walk down along the river near that bridge that brings you into town from Madison. Watched a couple of canoers actually try to paddle upriver against the raging torrent. Waved in your general direction.
- cylarz | 03/24/2011 @ 01:04

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The Newsweek Survey About Dumb Ignorant Americans
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011