Recently A Newsweek study showed that more than one-third of American adults are unable to pass the U.S. citizenship test, according to their survey results. According to the result, perhaps the most astonishing find, 29% of respondents couldn’t name the current vice president of the United States; 44% were could not define the Bill of Rights; 6% had no idea what day Independence Day (the Fourth of July) took place on a calendar, and 73% couldn’t correctly say why America fought the Cold War. (Though interested to see what the correct answer was! Are we losing our history and therefore how do we know ourselves and what our “Empire of Liberty” is about?
Civic ignorance, writes Newsweek‘s Anthony Romano, is nothing new. But in today’s globalized economy, a lack of basic knowledge about basic history and public affairs is damaging America’s ability to compete with foreign countries such as China, India, and Oregon.
