Monday, January 17, 2011

Remedial Constitution?

       Sometimes when High School kids go off to college, they have to take remedial courses in math, reading, etc. to get up to "speed".  Well, when Congress people and Senators take office, they take the following oath:

    I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.  
     
They swear to uphold the Constitution! Do they even know what's in it? Recently, the Constitution was read in the House of Representatives before the start of the new 112th Congress. A lot of Lefties (including Congress people and the media) called it a "stunt" or a "gimmick". Well, maybe the Congressmen and women should be required to take a remedial course on the Constitution, like those college kids.

       The following is courtesy of AOL News.com:
"Each year the Intercollegiate Studies Institute conducts a survey on civics to determine how well and how much our students are learning about how our Republic operates. It’s a great measuring stick, I think, but this year’s reveals so much more than how our kids are doing. In a stunning outcome … those who identified themselves as at some point being elected officials, knew less about government and the constitution than the general public.
But those elected officials who took the test scored an average 5 percentage points lower than the national average (49 percent vs. 54 percent), with ordinary citizens outscoring these elected officials on each constitutional question. Examples:
  • Only 49 percent of elected officials could name all three branches of government, compared with 50 percent of the general public.
  • Only 46 percent knew that Congress, not the president, has the power to declare war — 54 percent of the general public knows that.
  • Just 15 percent answered correctly that the phrase “wall of separation” appears in Thomas Jefferson’s letters — not in the U.S. Constitution — compared with 19 percent of the general public.
  • And only 57 percent of those who’ve held elective office know what the Electoral College does, while 66 percent of the public got that answer right. (Of elected officials, 20 percent thought the Electoral College was a school for “training those aspiring for higher political office.”)
Unbelievable … or is it? I thought most questions simple but then if you don’t believe there’s anything in that “really old” document applies to you, why would you know what’s in it?  Click here and take the test yourself."

Maybe we should upgrade the teaching of American History and it's founding in our schools, also because the general public didn't do very well either. I would think that, at least, 75% of the citizenship of any country should know how it was founded.
I scored 100%.
How about you?
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