Civics Quiz!
Go take this short civics quiz. The quiz was also given to a random sample of American adults. Once you’ve finished, you can examine their scores to determine the percentage of the American public to which you may feel smugly superior.
I missed one question: I failed to identify the source of the phrase “Government of the people, for the people, by the people”. However, considering the knowledge of the average citizen, I think “the blind leading the blind” might be a better description of democracy. Indeed, elected officials scored even lower on this quiz than the general public.
The group responsible for the survey recommends better education in government, history, and economics. That’s all well and good, but education is not the only way to address this problem. We also should consider giving less political power to dumb people. This could be done, in a fairly elegant fashion, by simply requiring everyone who wants to vote to pass the citizenship test which immigrants must pass to gain the right to vote.
One potential problem with such efforts is that the smart and educated might abuse their increased political power to financially exploit the ignorant poor. However, the self-interested voter hypothesis holds up rather poorly in practice, so I do not think this is likely to be a fatal problem. Many government programs which redistribute money to the poor enjoy the popular support of the people whose pockets are being lightened. Furthermore, the particular requirement of passing the citizenship test has definite benefits with respect to this issue. Aside from illiteracy and apathy, there is little to prevent a person from studying to pass the test and succeeding. Abuses of power by educated voters will naturally cause non-voters to become less apathetic. Thus, the system would be at least partially self-correcting.
The benefits of a more knowledgeable (if perhaps smaller) electorate should not be underestimated. Just as an uneducated driver turned loose with an automobile can easily injure innocent bystanders, clueless voters can harm the welfare of themselves and others by enacting bad policies. The right to vote should not be held sacred any more than the right to drive.
[...] Surely the most controversial submission to this month’s Carnival comes from Jacob over at Winter’s Haven. Whether you agree or disagree with his proposal to require people to pass a knowledge test before they are allowed to vote, I think you will agree his article is well-written and thoughtful. It can be found here. [...]
>>We also should consider giving less political power to dumb people.<<
Intelligence/stupidity are not the same thing as wisdom/foolishness. I can think of plenty of intelligent people who are nonetheless foolish. And I can think of a few relatively unintelligent people who are nonetheless very wise.
- M. \”/
I´m swedish and made 29 of 33 (including Gettysburg Adress). Are you not taught this things in school?
Anders Eg
It’s pretty easy to graduate from American public schools without learning much of anything. In the worst cases, some schools turn out graduates who are barely literate.
School administrators and teachers face relatively weak incentives to make their students actually learn anything. Conversely, they usually cause a lot of trouble for themselves when they flunk a student. Top-down attempts to impose accountability (e.g. testing, state standards, and now federal standards with No Child Left Behind) have failed repeatedly.
Unfortunately, the public schools are given an effective monopoly in America. Few parents are rich enough to move their kids to a private school while continuing to pay taxes for the “free” public schools. There’s no bottom-up accountability because parents can’t threaten to take their money and leave a public school that fails to educate kids.
It is not the monopoly so much as the funding model that is flawed. Schools in rich neighborhoods tend to be better than schools in poor neighborhoods. Restricting voting quickly degrades from a smart/not-smart division to a have/have-not division, graduating toward a permanent underclass.
School-choice sounds great on paper, and I’d go along with it if there were strictly enforced standards for education content. Too often in this country it just boils down to keeping kids from learning about evolution and sex.
Undoubtedly, the atrocious state of many inner-city public schools is one of the biggest barriers to economic success for many poor people. And it’s not unreasonable to worry that restricting voting might exacterbate such problems, although I think the fear is overblown for the reasons I mentioned previously.
Regarding school choice, I decided to post a response on the front page.