The American Council of Trustees and Alumni have released a survey titled LOSING AMERICA’S MEMORY 2.0,A Civic Literacy Assessment of College Students. It’s a follow-up to its earlier report, Losing America’s Memory: Historical Illiteracy in the 21st Century. None of the depressing results in either study surprised me, and, I presume, will surprise you, but they do raise obvious questions as well as compel some conclusions.
Among the findings in the most recent survey of more than 3,000 college and university students regarding their basic civic literacy:
- Just over one-quarter (27%) of students knew that Kamala Harris is the president of the Senate.This means that about three-quarters do not know how Congress operates, what the Vice President’s job is, or the history of the body itself.
- Less than half (40%) of students knew that U. S. Senator terms are six years and House member terms are two years. Yikes. I learned that in the third grade.
- Only 37% of students knew that John Roberts is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
- Oh God. Almost half of students surveyed thought Thomas Jefferson wrote the Constitution.
- Not even a third (31%) knew that the actual primary author of the Constitution was James Madison. The survey didn’t ask about George Mason, which I count as a blessing. (“Who???”)
- More than half (51%) of students thought 1776 was the year the U.S. Constitution was signed. (Where’s that wood-chipper?)
- Less than a third of students knew that it is Congress, not the President, who has the power to declare war. Maybe this one can be forgiven because so many crypto- wars recently have been started without official Congressional approval.
- Only about a quarter of the surveyed students knew that the 13ᵗʰ Amendment freed the slaves. (Haven’t they seen “Lincoln”?) Over half (56%) thought it was the Emancipation Proclamation that did it.
- Only 35% identified Mike Johnson as the current Speaker of the House of Representatives. It’s only the third most powerful elected position in the government….
- Ugh. More than three-quarters of the surveyed students didn’t know that the phrase “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” comes from the Gettysburg Address.
There’s more, but that’s enough to make the point, which is “what the heck is so valuable about a college degree if colleges do such a rotten job of ensuring that the United States has a competent and informed citizenry capable of self government?” The answer, of course, is that the degrees are fake and misleading credentials signifying that the owners are educated and worthy of well-paying jobs. A degree once signified upper class wealth and status because only the relatively wealthy and privileged…and the occasional legitimately outstanding student…had the opportunity to attend college. As it devolved into a credential almost totally separated from its alleged purpose—you know, that education thingy?—colleges started giving out ‘As’ regardless of performance, and students increasingly felt that the exorbitant prices they were paying for the credential should guarantee them the degrees (and thus the jobs) they sought, even though their college experience enhanced their knowledge base and skills little if at all.
Talk about “platforming ignorance!”! That is exactly what today’s college degrees do.
Now what? Well, to begin with, let’s stop pretending there is any correlation between degrees and competence, as citizens or as anything else.
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Ethics Alarms 
I typed too fast. I meant “Well informed…on matter of Civics“?
I’m guessing thesign was photoshopped.
Actually the more I think about and look at that pic, the more I am laughing, photoshopped or not.
Those findings are certainly not funny. Sad.
(1) No, because the point is power, not a healthy democratic society. Ignorant people are easier to manipulate. This is about ideology and power. Look at all the new fields in college: gender studies, women’t studies, african-american studies, etc. These are ‘protest and grievance’ fields. There is no knowledge that enriches human existence coming from these fields.
(2) No well informed, educated person who has studied history would be supporting Communism unless they were a would-be dictator who intended to be a party member.
Years ago, we actually cared about the education our students were getting. We used to give the juniors a comprehensive test over math, science, history, and English. There was a committee that reviewed the findings. On year, they mistakenly put a science professor on it (the first time ever). The science professor noticed that the science majors overall, had the best scores in science, math, history, AND English. They also had the lowest GPA’s. The faculty member pointed out that our GPA’s were misleading, perhaps fraudulent, because our top students had bad GPA’s. The solution of the psychology and education faculty (who were in charge of ‘assessment’) was to stop administering the test.
Ah! So that’s why Biden says wanting to eliminate the Department of Education is an “attack on democracy”!
Number two is correct.
Sounds like the survey questions (perhaps combined with the citizenship test legal immigrants applying to become naturalized US citizens must take) would make an excellent starting point for a homeschool or private school Civics/US History/US Government class. A good grounding in state & local history and government would also be important, as that would better enable students to get involved in government at a grassroots level.
Democracy (and the Republic) dies in darkness.
Wouldn’t that area of education be the responsibility of the school system rather than college?
We have the same problem here in Australia. I’m pretty sure there have never been civics classes here, and virtually no one understands what the different areas of responsibility between Federal and State governments are. Our version of all the other questions would be major fails as well.
I’m not certain if I ever took a civics class because of my chequered path through k-12. Some of those questions I could not answer correctly now if they were “fill in the blanks” questions. As “multiple choice” questions my performance would improve a bit, but I couldn’t get them all correct even now. And some of them are facts that need to be updated, such as “who is the speaker of the House?” I actually can’t keep track. When I was teaching undergraduates I knew the current leaders of the G-7 countries but at the moment I don’t know them all anymore.
Would that I could say something intelligent. Let’s try.
1. Many college students fixate on certain objectives and ignore tasks they consider extraneous to their goals. Graduating with a degree in their major and getting a job are important. Also important is paying for college and paying for essentials, and having some semblance of a social life. The details of civics are not important. It’s too far removed from practical life.
For some strivers and those influenced by peer dynamics in the middle or upper middle class, peer derision keeps individuals on their toes. But if large swaths of the peer group don’t care about civics, dullards aren’t mocked and teased for not knowing anything about civics. Celebrity culture or success with the opposite sex or ability to make money or athletic prowess is what is likely to be admired. Only nerds are likely to know all the answers to that quiz.
I can imagine that political science majors or pre-law majors might focus on civics. My guess is that engineering students are simply trying to avoid flunking the weed-out classes and getting decent summer jobs to launch their careers. The same might be true for pre-med or nursing.
2. Being “strange” or “weird,” I started committing some things to memory after getting my B.A., but I’m still not certain it was rational. My main inspiration was probably the media attention to E.D. Hirsch’s original _Cultural Literacy_ book in the late 1980s. I notice that I still didn’t a lot of the things I was supposed to know.
3. At some point it started to occur to me that what is prioritized now for many people is strong personal opinions somewhat independent of factual grounding. For example, many Americans like to say “Trump was the worst president ever” or “Obama was the worst president ever.” But the person who just said that can’t name all the presidents, or probably not 2/3ds of them, and if you ask “Even worse than Buchanan?” you are like to get a blank stare. I propose that many adults in the USA are now encouraged to have strong opinions rather than fixating on any factual grounding.
As a corroborating anecdote, it seems documented that many Americans can’t find countries on a map when we are at war with them. I believe there was a study that found no correlation between a “man on the street” advocating US military intervention abroad, and actually being able to locate the country in question on a blank map of the world.
Thanks for indulging my pet peeve about presidential rankings. And geography. “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography” as said by Ambrose Bierce. Or Mark Twain. Or somebody.
4. Polls are hard to administer properly. I would trust the answers more if students were competing in a tournament so that correct answers brought a financial award. In fact, I think colleges should all give entrance exams and exit exams with cash prizes for top scores and for greatest improvement. A topic for a different essay.
5. One corrective, for some of us, is to imagine having to undergo a “general knowledge” interview by propective employers, or romantic interests, or a prospective future father-in-law. The multiple choice exam on specifics is too arbitary. Here’s my point: I’m a know-it-all and a show-off and I still wouldn’t do spectacularly well on that civics test. But simultaneously, I very often imagine what I have to know in order to have a conversation with an intelligent person without coming across as an idiot. I like to be able to ask an intelligent question and understand the answer I get.
6. A separate pet theory of mine is that Americans don’t understand the difference between “first past the post” elections and “proportional representation” systems in parliamentary systems. My vocabulary here fails me. I’m trying to say that I know smart people who think that we can have a third party here in the USA. Effectively, in our system you vote against the candidate you dislike more. The Greens won’t have any seats in Congress even if they poll 20% in every congressional district. I’m pretty sure I know people who are smart and educated but don’t understand that.
This was written in haste and proof-read just slightly. Thanks for reading.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
I’m with you. It increasingly seems that things I know are being stacked in my mental files behind bits of much less significant trivia.
This post led to me doing some research on the presidential succession — I am sure Jack knows all this stuff, but I sure didn’t.
It turns out that there have been three presidential succession acts passed by Congress. The first one is, in some ways, the most interesting. It set the presidential succession (this is universally after the vice-president, of course) to be first the president pro tempore of the Senate and second the Speaker of the House. That was it.
But wait, there’s more! If one of those people ended up succeeding to the presidency, they would act as President until a special election could be held. Yes, a special election for president. It would be held in November of the year the double vacancy occurred, unless it was already October in which case the special election would be held the following November. Unless the current year coincided with the regularly scheduled presidential election in which case that would be held and there would be no special election.
But wait, there’s even more! The person elected to the presidency in the special election would take office on March 4th and would have a four year term starting from that date. So if the double vacancy occurred say in June 1802, there’d be a special election in November, the new president takes office March 4th, 1803 and serves 1803-1807. The presidential calendar gets reset.
As we all know, this never happened, and some of the framers disagreed with how Congress crafted this solution.
In 1886 Congress took up this task again. They had witnessed a couple of recent occasions where there was no line of succession. In 1881 Garfield was assassinated and Chester A Arthur became president. There was, of course, no vice president but there was also no president pro tempore and no speaker. The previous Congress had adjourned and the new Congress that was elected in 1880 would not meet until December 1881 to elect leaders. A similar situation occurred a few years later when Cleveland’s vice president died in office before Congress had convened to elect leaders.
So if Arthur or Cleveland had died, the line of succession would have been empty. This is what would commonly be referred to as a constitutional crisis.
At any rate, Congress redid the line of succession to include those cabinet officers who were constitutionally eligible to hold the office. However, they dropped the Speaker and president pro tempore (and dropped the special election idea too).
Finally in 1947, Congress passed a new law, adding back the Speaker and president pro tempore, but reversing the order.
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Yes, this is one of those ‘inside baseball’ too long to read posts.
But, I found it fascinating. And no, neither my sister nor I knew who the president pro tempore is right now, although I at least knew it was from the majority party, rather than simply the oldest serving senator.