What's Wrong with our Arizona Schools?

The Goldwater Institute, a prestigious political think-tank organization centered in Arizona conducted an interesting test. They culled 10 questions from the 100 question citizenship test (USCIS) that all immigrants must take and pass with at least a 60% in order to qualify for U.S. citizenship. According to the Institue, the average immigrant passes this test with a 92.4% score. That means they only miss, on average, 8 of the 100 questions on the test.

Through a private research firm, they then administered this test to three groups of high-school age students in Arizona by telephone. They had 1,134 participants. The questions were not multiple choice. The participant had to provide the correct answer from memory.

Here are the questions:
1) What is the supreme law of the land?
2) What do we call the first ten amendment to the (U.S) Constitution?
3) What are the two parts of the U.S. Congress?
4) How many Justices are on the (U.S.) Supreme Court?
5) Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?
6) What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States? <== I'm not convinced this is a civics question.
7) What are the two major political parties in the United States?
8) We elect a U.S. Senator for how many years?
9) Who was the first (U.S.) President?
10) Who is in charge of the executive branch?

I blew question 8. I got the other 9 correct. But Arizona high-school students. Not one student answered correctly more than 7 of 10. Here's how Arizona students did:
Question 1: Only 30% could answer this question correctly.
Question 2: Only 25% could answer this question correctly.
Question 3: 23% got this one right.
Question 4: 9% knew this answer. You've gotta be kidding me!
Question 5: Just over 25% knew the correct answer to this one. Again, you've gotta be kidding me!
Question 6: Surprisingly, over 40% of the students interviewed still got this one wrong.
Question 7: Slightly less than half of the students could not identify the two major political parties in the United States.
Question 8: I fall into the 85% who got this one wrong.
Question 9: Only 27% got this one right. Can you believe that 1.6% actually said that "Barack Obama" was the first president of the United States?
Question 10: 74% of those interviewed do not know who is in charge of the Executive branch of the Federal government.

Only 3.5% of Arizona high-school students that took this telelphone survey scored 60% or better on this test, which was only a subset of the 100 questions that must be correctly answered by an immigrant applying for U.S. Citizenship. And I suspect that the other questions are probably harder and more specific than the slow-ball 10 questions listed above.

Civics are not being taught in our schools. Period. End of story. How can young people be expected to think and act like Americans when they are not being taught how?

Yet I bet if you would ask 100 people on the street what Michael Jackson's most popular and best selling album was, I bet over 90% would answer "Thriller" (which would be correct.)

Our forefather's correctly identified that public schools were absolutely necessary in order to preserve the precious freedoms that we have been gifted with, by the brilliance of extraordinary men and the priceless sacrifice of American blood on numerous battlegrounds of freedom. Ben Franklin, in answering the question "What sort of government has been created?" answered "A Republic, if you can keep it.".

A primary objective of our public schools has been, until recently, the teaching of American civics. It appears that this objective has either been entirely suborned from the American public school system, or it is considered of no great worth by those responsible for administering our public schools. In either case, the result will be the same. An uneducated and untutored electorate, being ignorant of their rights as granted to them by the U.S. Constitution, will be unable to prevent those rights from being eroded away by those who wish for power to gravitate from us, the people to the professional ruling class and the elites (money, industrialists, or progressives makes no difference).

In conclusion, I will quote from the executive summary of this study which was entitled "Freedom From Responsibility: A Survey of Civic Knowledge Among Arizona High School Students".

"In the end more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished was freedom was from responsiblity, then Athens ceased to be free."