Know Nothings

Want more funding for better roads and highways?  Want better schools and higher paid teachers?  What about more fire stations and fire trucks and less fireman retirement pensions?  Better public infrastructure and better ideas start with better citizens.  Where one measure of better is a more informed, knowledgeable, and intellectually engaged citizenry.

Let's start with a pop quiz - - from a test first administered by the Hearst Corporation in 1987:

True or false:  The following phrases are found in the U.S. Constitution:

1. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
2. "The consent of the governed."
3. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
4. "All men are created equal."
5. "Of the people, by the people, for the people."

Eight in ten American thought #4 was in the Constitution (Honest Abe and the Gettysburg Address).  The more telling result was #1 - - 50% guessed the Constitution (Karl Marx, 1875 - - I guessed George Orwell, same thing.  With that answer, difficult to tell who actually won the Cold War.).  None of the five were actually in the Constitution - - always think trick question when someone knocks on your front door.

Here is the result of a 2000 survey in which interviewees were ask to identify William Rehnquist's job -- the correct answer is "The Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court."  My favorite reply was the breezy - - "A Supreme Court judge who is the head honcho." 

About a quarter of American voters are what political scientists call, impoliticly "know nothings" - - meaning that they possess almost no general knowledge of the workings of their government at any level, at least according to studies conducted by the American National Election Survey since 1948, during which time the "know nothing" rate has barely budged.

In some respects, a nation of "know nothings" has produced a civic culture of "do nothings" --  the two not only are correlated but also linked by cause and effect.