Ickler: Lowering the bar on ignorance – Milford Daily News

By Glenn Ickler/Local Columnist

I usually ignore those little boxed teasers that show up on the Internet, but I was intrigued by one headlined Only 1 in 10 Americans can pass this history quiz, so I opened it. The test consisted of multiple choice questions (four choices per question), and each was accompanied by a pictorial clue.

Some samples of the level of difficulty: What year was the Declaration of Independence signed? Who was president during most the 1950s (with a photo of the man)? Who was the commanding general at the end of the Civil War who later became president (again with a photo)? Who is buried in Grants tomb? (No, not really; this was a Groucho Marx favorite many years ago on a quiz show called You Bet Your Life.)

The claim that only one in 10 Americans can answer such Mickey Mouse questions about our history started me on a quest for more information about the state of scholarship in this country. Are we really at this abysmal level of ignorance? What I found is not encouraging.

For example, in a Washington Post column, Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, says, Dumbness has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture, a disjunction between Americans rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history, and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

According to Mark Bauerlein, in his book The Dumbest Generation, a whole generation of youth is being dumbed down by their aversion to reading anything of substance and their addiction to digital crap via social media.

Also in the Washington Post, Catherine Liu, University of California film and media studies professor, lists a plethora of dismal facts:

n After leading the world for decades in 25-34-year-olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place.

n In a poll of Oklahoma public school students, 77 percent didnt know that George Washington was the first president (his picture was on my classroom walls) and couldnt identify Thomas Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence.

n A Gallup poll showed that 18 percent of Americans still believe the sun revolves around the earth. (God only knows how many still think the earth is flat.)

n According to a National Endowment for the Arts report, more than 40 percent of Americans under age 44 did not read a single bookfiction or nonfictionover the course of a year.

n In the U.S. Senate, 74 percent of Republicans deny the validity of climate change despite the findings of scientific organizations all over the world. (She could add that our president says its a Chinese hoax.)

n A University of Texas study found that 25 percent of public school biology teachers believe that humans and dinosaurs inhabited the earth simultaneously.

Atlantic magazine recently carried an article by two education scholars, Richard D. Kahlenberg and Clifford Janey, who believe that schools are failing at what the nations founders saw as educations most basic purpose: preparing young people to be reflective citizens who would value liberty and democracy and resist the appeals of demagogues.

They say that todays schools strive to prepare college-and-career ready students but do not prepare them for American democracy. They point out that in 2013 the National Assessment for Educational Progress dropped fourth- and 12th-grade civics and American history as a tested subject in order to save money.

Its okay to test kids crazy in math and reading, they say. Civic education? Fuhgeddaboutit.

This combination of dumbing down American citizens, combined with a failure to teach students the value of our Constitution, explains the election of a president who has a warped sense of history and shows disdain for the checks and balances inherent in the three branches of our federal government.

Acting as Ignoramus in Chief this past week, the president told an audience that Andrew Jackson, who died 16 years before the Civil War began, could see no reason for the war. (Limited vision in that coffin, I suppose.)

Next Trump said, People dont realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People dont ask that question, but why was there the Civil War?

People I know dont ask that question because they were taught in grade school that the Civil War had something to do with abolishing slavery. Perhaps todays fourth-graders couldnt answer that question, but schools were still teaching American history when the 70-year-old president was a pup. Maybe he was one of those who didnt read a book that year.

Glenn Ickler of Hopedale is a retired newspaper editor.

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Ickler: Lowering the bar on ignorance - Milford Daily News