I took this civics test, and got the following result:
You answered 56 out of 60 correctly 93.33 %
Average score for this quiz during October: 70.5%
Average score since September 18, 2007: 70.5%
While I’m disappointed that I didn’t score higher (two of my four missed answers bother me significantly more than the other two), the fact that the school whose seniors placed highest only scored 69.56% is horrifying. In the breakdown of individual questions, you find that the question that received the highest number of right answers (“Which of the following are the unalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence?”) still had 15% wrong answers. How many might have gotten it wrong if the test were some format other than multiple-choice for each question?
One might get the impression that the sort of civics education I had in my childhood is no longer in vogue. Actually, given that I have a college-age daughter, I know for a fact that she didn’t have the same type of civics and history instruction I did.
And these are the people who will have to take our country into the future.