When the Goldwater Institute gave Arizona high school students a citizenship test similar to the one given to immigrants, it didn't expect much from the students -- but the results shocked even G.I.
The survey found that only an embarrassing 3.5 percent of students who took the exam would qualify to be U.S. citizens if they hadn't happened to be born here.
This staggering statistic is in contrast to about 92 percent of immigrants who can manage a passing grade on the first attempt.
Well, congratulations Arizona high school students! You are not the most civically stupid students in the country.
After catching wind of the Goldwater Institute's expose on basic civic knowledge, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a group similar to the Goldwater Institute, wanted to see how students in the Sooner State would do.
Shockingly, Oklahoma's kiddies managed to do even worse than Arizona's.
Only 2.8 percent of Oklahoma's students could pass the test on the first try.
You would think that anyone with a small amount of dumb luck could guess and manage to at least pass one of these tests. Well there is definitely something dumb in Oklahoma, but it's certainly not the luck.
Some of the questions these bozos couldn't answer correctly are things like whom the first president was, or naming the two houses of Congress.
Matthew Ladner, vice president for research at G.I. claims to be raising money to have a similar study done in Sweden. Ladner wants to know if foreign students know more about U.S. civics than Americans.
Good thinking. Let's try shaming these kids into learning because teaching them sure isn't working.
