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David Stanley Ford

Americans score poorly on civics knowledge test
EDUCATION FEWER THAN HALF GET PASSING SCORE ON 33 QUESTIONS

BY CHRIS CASTEEL    Comments Comment on this article12
Published: November 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — People know their "American Idol” judges.

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DID YOU KNOW?

Sample questions from civics test

1. What are the three branches of government?

2. The Bill of Rights explicitly prohibits:

a. prayer in public school

b. discrimination based on race, sex or religion

c. the ownership of guns by private individuals

d. establishing an official religion for the United States

e. the president from vetoing a line item in a spending bill

3. What was the source of the following phrase: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people?"

a. the speech "I Have a Dream"

b. Declaration of Independence

c. U.S. Constitution

d. Gettysburg Address

4. In the area of United States foreign policy, Congress shares power with:

a. president

b. Supreme Court

c. state governments

d. United Nations

Online: You can take the entire test at www.americancivicliteracy.org.

Answers: 1-Legislative, executive, judicial; 2-d; 3-d; 4-a


another survey

A poll conducted by Zogby International in 2006 found that 77 percent could name two of the seven dwarves, but only 24 percent could name two Supreme Court justices.

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American history? Not so much.

That’s the conclusion of a survey done by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute to measure Americans’ knowledge of their history and their systems of government and economics.

Though 56 percent can name Paula Abdul as a judge on the popular television show, less than half can name all three branches of government.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute gave a 33-question test to 2,508 Americans, and 1,791 of those got less than 60 percent — a failing grade.

"It can truly be said we are suffering from an epidemic of civic ignorance,” said Josiah Bunting III, chairman of the group’s National Civic Literacy Board.

College degree holders also fail

The institute has done two previous studies that focused only on college students. The most recent one also includes people who never attended college, allowing for a comparison with college graduates who are presumably more educated.

Turns out, according to the results, that the average score for a college graduate was still below 60 percent, though it was about 13 percentage points higher than the score for those who only finished high school.

T. Kenneth Cribb, the president of the institute, said that students — even at the nation’s elite colleges and universities — graduate "without basic knowledge of their own country’s history.”

About half of the questions on the test were taken from other tests, including the one given to people seeking U.S. citizenship and the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Other questions were developed by the institute.

Not all of the questions were as easy as naming the three political branches. Others dealt with the philosophy of a free-market economy and the tax system, the division of federal governmental power and the Bill of Rights.

Elected officials fare worse than public

Of the people who took the test, 164 identified themselves as elected public officials. They did even worse than the general public, scoring an average of 44 percent.

The average score for all who took the test was 49 percent.

Nearly a third of the elected officials didn’t know that "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are the unalienable rights described in the Declaration of Independence.

Another finding of the survey was that people who watch a lot of television — including cable news programs — scored lower.

"The more you are a couch potato, the less you know about your country,” Bunting said.

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David Stanley Ford





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My 1 didn't print. That was supposed to be # 139 in Strong's.
Floyd, Oklahoma City - Nov 25, 2008 at 3:36 pm
Concerned, I was using the definition of the Strong's Concordance. word number 39 in the Greek says a sect is heresy. As you know, cult was not in the King James Version. My Webster Collegiate dictionary says a cult is#1, Formal religious veneration-worship. #2 a system of religious beliefs and rituals, also it's adherents. #3 a religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious. It seems to come from the same root words as cultivate and culture. Now, people seem to add a new meaning to it that is quite derogatory. Even though a couple of billion of us believe the followers of Christ are the one and only true church, the southern tribes of Levi, Ben, and Judah, generally referred to as one- the Jews, considered the Christians a sect, but they,(pharisees and sadducees) also called each other sects. About 88 A.D. the term for universal was coined-catholic- for the closest followers of Christianity. They were terribly persecuted and murdered. Then Emperor Constantine, joined with his worship of his Sun god and declared anethma on any one found keeping the 7th day Sabbath and demanded worship on his most venerable day of the Sun, which is the first day of the week. The Church was forced to do as the heathen demanded and Martin Luther started what now would be considered a cult, but he was simply going back to the original Christianity as best he could. Each break away from the Lutheran by today's wording, could be considered a cult, and each break away from the next church down the line. Now there seem to be thousands of churches that think only they have the truth. This has also happened with the descendants of Ishmael and many other religions. Wow! This is getting long. But I don't want any TAUGHT in public schools. Discussed as in some college classes or like I watch on one of the secular TV stations. I was allowed to study all known religions and picked the Bible after trying without success to disprove it.
Floyd, Oklahoma City - Nov 25, 2008 at 3:34 pm
Floyd, I don't know of any children being taught Muslim religious laws in a public school these days. Maybe my experience is different because of where I live & the particular friends & family I have. There is an elementary school a couple of blocks from my house & both a Mosque and Catholic Parish about 4 blocks away. It's a multicultural neighborhood & I've known the parents of children attending that school for almost 20 years.

It's quite different from the small rural school I attended in the 60's & 70's. In high school, the local Baptist preacher was invited to our school for a week to teach us about the Bible as part of our American Literature class. He brought a workbook for each student very much like those we used in Sunday School. There was no other religious text discussed, but it was 1977 & my peers and probably their parents would have been hard pressed to even recognize a yarmulke as a religious garment. I would say we were taught religion that week and only one religion was recognized, but it was a different time & a different culture.

On the sect vs. cult distinction, sect means “A religious body, especially one that has separated from a larger group”, whereas cult means “a religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader.” (American Heritage Dict. 4th Ed)

It’s always been my understanding that the difference in a cult and a religion is that religion has a significant number of adherents in the population & wide mainstream acceptance of almost all it’s tenets & practices. For cults this is the opposite. Society only has a small number of adherents & there is no mainstream acceptance of a cult’s tenets & practices. In fact many Baptists still consider the LDS Church a cult.

I feel that the religious leaders of Christ’s time would most likely view his movement more as a cult than a sect, even though they had no word for cult (origin in the 1600’s.) They did have a word for sect & in my opinion Christianity’s early days could have been called either & it would still be correct.

Hope you have a great Thanksgiving & thanks for the discussion.
Concerned, Central Oklahoma - Nov 25, 2008 at 1:32 pm
Concerned, In the King James Version, in Acts, Christianity was called a "sect". That is as derogatory as one can get. I think the college course was called Humanities. That has been almost 50 years ago so I'm not for certain. But now I read schools are teaching fundamentals of Islam and other religions. But the Bible is off-limits. Really, I never had a school teacher that knew more about the Bible than I did from the time I was 12.You may find this amusing; I was baptized when I was 6. The preacher was asking me a bunch of questions a few weeks before I was baptized. I remember thinking he sure is dumb. I didn't realize he was just testing me.
Floyd, Oklahoma City - Nov 25, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Yes, Floyd, and Christianity could be classifed a cult at some point in our past. I find the difficulty with religious teachings in public schools is that they have not been taught as part of history, but rather as a theology. No one is teaching public school kids about these former religious idols as a theology, only as part of European history.

And I would have been dumber than that 5th grader, even though I took a mythology class in college. I'm always amazed at how little I know & how much I don't.
Concerned, Central Oklahoma - Nov 25, 2008 at 11:57 am
On "Are you smarter than a fifth grader" last week the question was,"What is the name of the three headed dog that guards Hades?" That is a question about what we now call mythology but was once considered a religion. I find it strange it could be taught in public schools. By the way, the answer is Cerberus.I guessed Pluto.LOL
Floyd, Oklahoma City - Nov 24, 2008 at 5:59 pm
JT, good point about literacy. I consider myself a history light-weight. I only took required courses because I didn't like history much. Math & science were far more interesting to me. Like Randy, I had one semester of civics in 9th grade. I also had 1 year of American history in high school & 2 semesters of American history in college.

I scored a 91% on the test & was annoyed that one of those I missed was for not reading one of the easy questions fully. (that Life, Liberty, and etc. question.) I was surprised at the number of history & economy questions that were on this civics test, but maybe my definition of civics has not evolved to modern times.

Is our country really this pathetic(esp. those running for public office), or are we all just that apathetic?

Do they even require civics & American history to graduate from high school anymore?
Concerned, Central Oklahoma - Nov 24, 2008 at 5:10 pm
J.T. I missed 2 for about a 94%. I missed the one about FDR getting approval and the one about Plato since 2 sounded reasonable and I picked to wrong one. It is hard to believe the average score is under 50% for our Congress.
Floyd, Oklahoma City - Nov 23, 2008 at 10:22 pm
Actually, I went to the site and took the test and got 84%. There was few hard ones in there, but really a basic test. If I had some study material, probably would've scored higher. Doesn't surprise me though because if people can't read and write, how are they going to learn other subjects.
J.T.(I), Norman - Nov 23, 2008 at 8:40 pm
Back in stone ages when I went through school, we only received one semester of civics in thye 9th grade. Thank God my older sister was a history teacher and one of my other history teachers assigned writing the Constitution as punishment in leui of paddling.

I know what is in the Constitution. Do you? If you did, you would be amazed at today's court system.

Separation of church and state? a myth, this country was founded as a Christian nation, but with tolerance of all religious ideas. Don't believe it? Read Washington's statement on the founding of the Thanksgiving holiday. Even the less religious Ben Franklin spoke often of God's providence in the success this nation.
randy, shawnee - Nov 23, 2008 at 8:50 am
No surprises here. When the Constitution can be described by a two time President of the United States as "just a damn piece of paper," Congress can garner only a 17% approval rating, the President Elect ventures a guess that there are 57 states, and a Presidential candidate, Senator and war hero claims to be an "agent for change" while voting with one party 90+% of the time, how can we ever expect the rest of America to grade well? Now if they'd just grade on the curve, we'd all be geniuses. Even political office holders. We wouldn't know any more, but we'd all be geniuses.
Percy F., Ardmore - Nov 23, 2008 at 7:12 am

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