THE POLITICALLY IGNORANT

...We would have been drilled for weeks on the answers to State Boards from former years and on everything she could imagine that the examiners might add this year...

...I vote for putting a primary importance on the basic facts of the political process...

...These uninformed students also have strange beliefs—such as that a newspaper should not be allowed to publish criticism of public officials...

...More and more people have come to question whether there is any relationship between the ballot they cast and the quality of their lives...

...There was never quite the same drama to tests once St...

...They put a premium on memory and memory of a limited set of facts, at that—so we were told in our classes in teacher education —and they did not measure the students' understanding of the broad range of the subject matter...

...one may well ask...

...Promote how...

...A third do not know that the Constitution guarantees their civil rights...

...I don't think we can be overly encouraged by the fact that, although the students' information had declined in five categories—structure and function of government, political process, constitutional rights, respect for others, and international relations—their attitudes had stayed about the same in some areas or improved in others...

...We knew she prayed very hard to the Holy Ghost (the Third Person was still called that then) about that and we had heard stories about her last-minute inspirations just before opening the envelope...

...Take Civics...

...We would be sitting tense behind our clean and cleaned-out desks (there was to be no temptation to cheat) when the door would be flung open and Sister Superior would come in carrying a brown envelope...

...I think we had a mental image of a grimvisaged group of examiners sitting somewhere under the dome of the state capitol, stroking their chins, hemming and hawing a bit as they decided whether or not the sisters could be entrusted wkh the further education of the future voters and taxpayers of the state and the nation...

...Most teenagers can still name their president but...

...We took that for granted—and so, of course, did the state examiners...

...Maurice Rosenblatt, director of the Committee for the Study of the Electorate, is probably also right when he says, "In a period in which we made it vastly easier for people to vote, the impulse . . [to do so] is increasingly lacking...

...The Committee for the Study of the American Electorate has been telling us for some time that the decline in participation in the political process as evidenced by voting patterns has been the trend of at least two decades...

...They improved, for example, in relation to rights for minorities, the problems of the poor and an awareness of the need for world peace...

...We knew, that the President was Mr...

...that not even high school students know such basic facts...

...Not only did our own promotions depend on them, but the reputation—nay, we were sure the very future—of our school rested on the results...

...Felix was accredited by the North Central Association and our teachers were therefore adjudged competent to do their own testing wkh examinations they made up themselves...

...A fourth don't know that the Senate is a part of Congress...

...Now it seems, according to the already forgotten headlines of only a few weeks past, the National Center for Education Statistics has found through the National Assessment of Education Progress (did you know these things existed...

...Let us reestablish the necessary links between the how and the who and the changes which should come from improved attitudes...

...In my own teaching career I learned to look down on the kind of testing represented by those old State Boards...

...And there is a lot more that they do not know...

...As a result of the Center's announcements about the political ignorance of the young, The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant of $100,000 to concerned organizations to hold a series of regional conferences to promote citizen participation in the political process...

...We knew very well that it was up to us to be not just as good but better than other schools in the state...

...Not only the future of the school rested on our knowledge in that subject but the future of the country as well...

...And yet we have been assured that the American teenager today is the best-taught and best-informed in history...

...The media, the community and the family can certainly be credited with substantial influence...

...The ritual accompanying the taking of the tests was probably not calculated to increase our anxiety but it did just the same...

...We took k for granted that the board members, surely Protestants all, were prejudiced against St...

...About a third don't know that a senator is elected...

...This lack of information represents a significant decline from what was shown in a similar round of testing six years ago...

...Hoover, no great friend to the farmers but then we weren't that sure that Al Smith would have been ekher.— He was a city man, after all, and had talked in a strange accent when he stopped for a brief few minutes at the town depot during the 1928 campaign.—We were very sure of our governor's name, our senators, our congressman (he was almost a fixture), our state legislator...

...Still I remember the answer to those tests in history, geography and civics as if I had learned them yesterday— and I have forgotten the broad range of much else...

...She would scan the examination paper within very quickly and we would try to divine from her expression just how bad it was going to be...

...The elements of competition against unseen, unknown adversaries was gone...

...The value placed on knowledge says something about the values undergkding that knowledge...

...We knew that we had a mayor-council form of government locally, a county commission system, a bicameral legislature (and we knew how that last was organized...

...Felix...

...fewer than half can name one of their senators or their representative in the House...

...Abigail McCarthy I have never felt that bottomless feeling in the pit of my stomach since —or the same boundless confidence once I had my copy in hand and realized that Sister really had covered everything after all—sometimes in not quite the same words or with the same slant but she had covered it all the same...

...Back, if necessary to the repetitive drill, the sealed envelope— the State Boards—or to equally powerful symbols of the importance of the machinery of democracy of the best of the dwindling number of democracies in our world...

...These were things everyone knew...

...Marie D. Eldridge, administrator of the study cited above and of the health, education and welfare center which made it public, is quite right to say "Political knowledge and attitudes are not acquired solely through the academic process...

...Without an understanding of the Constitution and the political process, however, those nice attitudes will produce no changes in society...

...Still one must start somewhere...

...Sister Hilaria would accept it with due solemnity, hold it up so that we could see that it was still sealed, then open it wkh trembling hands...