Matthew Ladner

A while back, I mentioned a survey of high school students by the Goldwater Institute that used civics questions from the standard U.S. citizenship test. The survey found 96.5 percent of the students couldn’t get a passing score (although students at private schools fared substantially better than those at public schools). Now, the Goldwater Institute’s Matthew Ladner offers a sliver of hope about those results.

Another conservative think tank in Oklahoma was intrigued by the Goldwater Institute experiment and wanted to try it on students in Sooner country. So that think tank used the same set of questions for its own telephone survey and had Ladner write up the results: 97.2 of all Oklahoma students couldn’t pass the test to become U.S. citizens (if they were foreign immigrants).

Keep in mind, the questions are about basic U.S. history and government organization — topics that, in theory, should be known to every literate American. And the answers should be fresh on the minds of high school students since they should have studied those topics recently.

The natural inclination is to blame the U.S. education system. But I suspect the problem really lies in a culture that values instant gratification and knowledge by Wikipedia and Google instead of institutional memory and personal exploration with the bedrock principles of U.S. civics.