Are you smarter than an elected official? Probably, but that’s not saying much.
Since I have decided to name my blog site, ” A republic, if you can keep it,” I decided that my first post would discuss how we appear to be losing the fight to keep our republic.
Have you ever heard of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, or ISI? The ISI does many things, but one of their main programs is called the American Civic Literacy Program. It is an annual test to see how much Americans - specifically college students - actually know about American history and the founding principals of this country. While the numbers change some from year to year, they continuously tell the same story: Americans do not have even a basic understanding of American history, especially the founding and Civil War eras, nor do they have a grasp of the economic and political principles that are the foundation of this great nation.
The ISI website is here, and there is a lot of good information there, including a test to see how you compare. Their findings are quite sad really. For example, 89.2% of all test takers scored a “D” or lower on the test. What does it say about our society when 21% Americans don’t know where the phrase, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” and the “separation of church and state” came from?
But unfortunately, there’s still more bad news. The ISI has found that while most Americans think college should be teaching American history and its institutions, they are not. In fact, here is what the ISI found:
The average score for the college graduates who took ISI’s American civic literacy exam was 57%, an “F.” That was only 13 percentage points higher than the 44% earned by those who hold high school, but not college, diplomas.
There are more findings that you can read through on the ISI site. While you’re there, take their test and see how you stack up. Just so you know, I took the test online and only scored an 88%, so I have a bit of work to do myself.
Now, back to the title of this post. What is so amazing, yet so easy to believe, is that elected office holders score WORSE than most Americans on this test. I guess it’s no wonder that this country is in the situation it finds itself in today.
But that wasn’t how we started:
[Jefferson and Madison] stated their conviction that the university (of Virginia) would create leaders to preserve liberty: “Nor must we omit to mention, among the benefits of education, the incalculable advantage of training up able counselors to administer the affairs of our country in all its departments—legislative, executive, and judiciary—and to bear their proper share in the councils of our national government; nothing more than education advancing the prosperity, the power, and the happiness of the nation.”
As a nation, we have lost sight of Jefferson & Madison’s goal, and that is tragic.
In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek devoted an entire chapter to the topic of “Why the Worst Get on Top” (that’s the name of the chapter).
He postulates that this is an inherent part of democratic forms of government primarily for the following reason: as people become more intelligent, their views, understandings, and philosophies will become more greatly differentiated not only from the masses, but from one another.
This makes some sense, of course: as one gains the ability to think and reason for himself, he will likely gain the ability to understand others’ points of view, but will likely not hold the exact same point of view as others. He will hold his own, uniquely-developed idea of things.
Thus, less-intelligent people will tend toward being in agreement with one another more than the more-intelligent crowd. And since elections are decided almost entirely by popular vote, the worst people running for office will usually get elected.
On the other hand, the “more-intelligent” people in our society seem to be college professors, and we all know their bias. So I’m not sure Hayek was completely right on his theory. But it is an interesting thought.