38 percent of 1,000 US citizens fail basic citizenship test!
March 22nd, 2011 - 3:53 pm ICT by ANINew York, Mar 22(ANI): The New York-based Newsweek magazine recently had 1,000 US citizens take the official citizenship test - and 38 percent of them failed.
The magazine said that 73 percent didn’t know why the US fought the Cold War, 70 percent didn’t know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the country and 65 percent couldn’t figure out that the Constitution was written at the Constitutional Convention.
Sixty-three percent got the number of Supreme Court justices wrong, and 59 percent had no idea that Susan B. Anthony fought for women’s rights or that John Boehner is the Speaker of the US House of Representatives.
The magazine also reported that 40 percent didn’t know that the US fought Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II, 29 percent couldn’t name the Vice President and 23 percent didn’t know Martin Luther King fought for civil rights.
Experts interviewed by the magazine laid the blame for the country’s cluelessness, in part, on the vast educational gap between the rich and poor.
“Unlike Denmark or Finland, where citizens have a better handle on how their country is run, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English,” said Dalton Coney, a New York University sociologist. (ANI)
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