How to find what you’re looking for
The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (which helped support the magazine I edited as an undergraduate) has once again released its Civics Quiz, which you can take here. First off, it’s pretty easy, but though I’m sympathetic to the thinking behind it — Americans aren’t learning enough history — it’s a rhetorical exercise, a meaningless measurement. I’m skeptical of it for the same sorts of reasons I’m skeptical of this column by the otherwise solid Gene Weingarten.
Sure, it makes for a good cri du coeur about the Decline and Fall of Western Civilization. Cal Thomas writes almost gleefully that
For the third straight year, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute has found that a large number of Americans cannot pass a basic 33-question civic literacy test on their country’s history and institutions. The multiple-choice questions ask about the inalienable rights mentioned in the Declaration of Independence (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), the name of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 series of government programs (The New Deal) and the three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial). No, I didn’t peek at the answers. I received a good education.
The random sample of 2,508 American adults, ranging from those without high school diplomas to people with advanced degrees, revealed a minimal difference in civic literacy between the uneducated and the highly educated. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed could identify Paula Abdul as one of the judges on “American Idol,” but only 21 percent were able to recognize a phrase from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I had to memorize that speech in high school. What are they memorizing now?
Not much of any use, it appears. Ignorance of America’s history and heritage is a setup for politicians and others who want to manipulate us into a way of thinking that allows them to make decisions that are unconstitutional and unwise.
I have no idea where they’re getting the Paula Abdul statistic, as there’s no question about her on the quiz. What does ISI know about the people taking the quiz, and more importantly, how much can it reasonably infer about the people who aren’t taking it? Are people BSing their responses? By nature, online quiz-takers are a self-selecting group, and it’s not unreasonable to assume that there are people who could ace the quiz and simply don’t have time or interest. How about First Amendment lawyers, or lawyers of any kind, who have to bill their hours and consequently aren’t inclined to spend it lightly? Or parents, who might be interested in taking a test of this kind, but have kids to raise and can’t spare the time between work and family? Or Democrats, who think ISI has an axe to grind and want no part of it?
Though I’m loath to admit it — and I should really hope most Americans are not in the dark about this stuff — you can probably be a well-educated citizen without being able to able to answer abstract questions about what capitalism means, what business profit is, why free markets secure more prosperity than central government planning, and what a progressive tax is. And while Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas are standard fare in college humanities, they’re largely irrelevant to American civic education. So answering, say, 27 out of 33 questions correctly (an 81%) might well be a fair standard of civic education, in which case answering 23 questions correctly is really a “B” instead of a “D+”.
Anyway, if you want to prove the rest of the country is stupid, there are a million ways to do it. But how much does this really tell you about whether Americans are being taken advantage of? How do the quiz results correspond with voting behavior? Weren’t Americans were doing just as poorly, or close to it, on these sorts of quizzes just a few years ago, when they were electing self-described conservatives to Congress and the White House?