Palin got a lot of bad press for being, well, stupid. Particularly when it comes to civics. According to this story however, elected politicians are generally pretty poorly informed. When they took this quiz on civic literacy, they scored, on average, 44%, and average citizens who took it scored under 50%.
Now, I don’t want to start whining about how Americans can’t seem to find Australia on a world map, or express similar dismay over the seeming idiocy of our average citizen, but I was expecting this quiz to be at least moderately difficult. Full disclosure: I missed a question (damned Puritans!), though I suspect it was just from inattention. And I’ll admit there are some odd question constructions there, so this may just be an indication that people do poorly on multiple-choice tests. But it’s still pretty shocking to me that US citizens know so little about the way their own country works and its history.
Dumb politicians
Palin got a lot of bad press for being, well, stupid. Particularly when it comes to civics. According to this story however, elected politicians are generally pretty poorly informed. When they took this quiz on civic literacy, they scored, on average, 44%, and average citizens who took it scored under 50%.
Now, I don’t want to start whining about how Americans can’t seem to find Australia on a world map, or express similar dismay over the seeming idiocy of our average citizen, but I was expecting this quiz to be at least moderately difficult. Full disclosure: I missed a question (damned Puritans!), though I suspect it was just from inattention. And I’ll admit there are some odd question constructions there, so this may just be an indication that people do poorly on multiple-choice tests. But it’s still pretty shocking to me that US citizens know so little about the way their own country works and its history.
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