Civics 101

Here’s a news flash: Americans are undereducated and perhaps not politically literate enough to support an informed and enlightened democracy. And guess what, we can’t blame this one on the mainstream media, President Bush, or global warming. Nope, this one is on us as a people, and while many of us are educated and literate, many simply don’t have a clue, or even worse, know just enough to be dangerous, like how to register to vote and show up at the polls but little else. Why do you think the McCain campaign is resorting to scare tactics that appeal to people’s base instincts while the Obama camp is long on feel good messages of hope and change but short on actual details, which of course are where the devil always resides.

Perhaps it’s because, as Jack Nicholson would say, we can’t handle the truth. Of course by we I’m not referring to any of us, those who do take the time to read and listen and watch and discuss what is going on around us. But just how many of us are out there, as opposed to them, or as McCain might say, those ones, who don’t do the aforementioned activities. Yet their votes count exactly the same as ours, and if you figure that they outnumber us, then their votes actually outweigh ours, which is a bit depressing if you dwell on it long enough.

The way I see it there are two potential solutions to the problem, one of which is considered undemocratic and the other would require a Herculean effort on the part of our society. The first option is simply to require potential voters to take and pass a literacy test in order to become eligible to vote. Now I know what many of the more educated readers out there may be thinking, that this smacks of the tactics used in the South prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, where Whites used literacy tests and poll taxes to keep Blacks from voting. But this would be a test given to all people, and would also be something that a person could study for, and retake if they failed the first time around. I realize that this seems undemocratic by today’s standards, but do we really want uneducated and illiterate people casting ballots that determine our elected officials and policies?

We require teenagers to answer basic questions about driving safety and rules of the road in order to get a driver’s license, most teenagers also have to pass some basic skills test in order to receive a high school diploma, and certainly have to take entrance exams to get into college. So is it really a stretch to require potential voters to demonstrate basic knowledge of how our system functions before they take part in it?

Lest you think this is some sneaky way for a progressive such as myself to suppress the vote of Joe Conservative, consider these results from the recent Pew Survey that found only 18% of adults could correctly answer three basic questions regarding current political issues and people. When broken down by news sources that people utilize, there was basically no difference between those who listened to NPR, watched Hardball, or watched Hannity and Colmes. Of the sources measured, only four had a majority that correctly answered all three questions, which in addition to NPR and Hannity and Colmes, included readers of the New Yorker and viewers of the Colbert Report. So what does this all mean? Simply that neither liberals nor conservatives have the market cornered on political intelligence, and for that matter, neither do college graduates. Those who get their information from NPR and The New Yorker were more educated on the whole than viewers of Hannity and Colmes and The Colbert Report, yet the survey results found little difference in terms of who knew their stuff.

The second option is to go about the task of actually educating our young people before we throw them out into the world, which would require three things. First, making civics courses a requirement in all high schools as a year long course given to students as sophomores or juniors, not simply giving them a one semester course as seniors when many have already mentally checked out of high school, or giving them a current events course as freshman when many haven’t yet gotten serious about their education. Secondly, it would require agreement on a true national curriculum on what needs to be taught, and a way to hold schools accountable for doing so. And third, it would require hiring and keeping teachers who actually know what the heck they are talking about and have the ability to pass that knowledge onto students, not giving the government course to the longest tenured and often most burned out faculty, or to the football coach whose idea of a curriculum is to read the local paper every day and shoot the bull with his students about whatever the local media determines is important.

You may be wondering what the questions were, and how you would measure up, so here they are: Which party controls the House of Representatives? Who is the Secretary of State? Who is the prime minister of Britain? So how did you do? And is it important that we know this information? It can be argued that these questions aren’t representative of what’s most important, but the point is that most Americans probably couldn’t answer basic knowledge questions no matter how they were framed, and this needs to change if our society is truly going to thrive in the 21st century, an era where we will increasingly find ourselves no longer the dominant force in the world, but one of the major and important players among many others.

The answers in case you wanted to score yourselves: The Democrats control the House, and for that matter The Senate, and are expected to increase those majorities in the upcoming election. Condoleezza Rice is our Secretary of State, and of course will be finishing up her term of service in the next few months as the Bush administration wraps up their reign, unless McCain pulls off a Boston Red Sox like comeback to win the election and keeps Rice in her current position, which would seem as likely as his having a change of heart and nominating Tom Brokaw for Treasury Secretary after all. And the British Prime Minister, which is probably the one that stumped you? Not Margaret Thatcher, nor John Majors or Tony Blair, but none other than Gordon Brown.

Hope you did well, and this gives me an idea to come up with my own ten question political quiz that could serve as the basis for the voting literacy test, which I will reveal in a future column. Until then, enjoy the news you get, and know that if you are educating yourself on a regular basis, you are living up to the expectations that our Founders had for us when this whole crazy experiment in democracy got started a couple centuries ago.