{"id":199,"date":"2008-11-30T23:30:06","date_gmt":"2008-12-01T06:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/30\/are-you-civically-literate\/"},"modified":"2009-12-18T09:41:10","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T16:41:10","slug":"are-you-civically-literate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/30\/are-you-civically-literate\/","title":{"rendered":"Are you civically literate?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/americancivicliteracy.org\/resources\/quiz.aspx\">This quiz<\/a> of basic American Civic Literacy is a sobering test of how much US citizens know about their government.<\/p>\n<p>71% of Americans failed the test (less than 60% right).  Less than 1% of the test takers scored above 90.  How well do you know how our government was established and functions?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m proud to say that I missed only one question (32\/33, or about 97%), but I&#8217;m sure I wouldn&#8217;t have done nearly as well if I hadn&#8217;t been teaching a US Citizenship class for the past 5 years.<\/p>\n<p>The statistics show pretty similar grades among liberals and conservatives, men and women.  The biggest difference is between low and high income.  People making over $75,000\/year averaged 55%, while those making less than $30,000\/year averaged 40%.  However, both those grades are failing.  Whites averaged a little better than other races, men a little better than women, Republicans a little better than Democrats.  But every group failed the test.<\/p>\n<p>What does this mean for our country?  How can we trust voters to make reasonable choices?  And politicians didn&#8217;t do even as well as the average American.  How can we trust them to run our government?<\/p>\n<p>How well do you understand our government?  Are you &#8220;civically literate&#8221;?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This quiz of basic American Civic Literacy is a sobering test of how much US citizens know about their government. 71% of Americans failed the test (less than 60% right). Less than 1% of the test takers scored above 90. How well do you know how our government was established and functions? I&#8217;m proud to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daryllafferty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}