So Much Information, Yet, So Little Knowledge

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Can you name the three branches of government? 

If you’re able to list executive, legislative and judicial as the three branches of the U.S. government, you are one of just 26 percent of Americans who can, according to a new poll from the Annenberg Public Policy Center. (Emphasis mine.)

This survey’s results show us that America is having an identity crisis, Glenn asserted on radio Wednesday. “We don’t even know who we are,” he said. 

We have all the information in the world available for us through technology. 

How is it possible that Americans are so ignorant about our own government when we have so many tools available and everyone is required to go to school? 

“The generation with the most information is the least informed,” Glenn said, urging Americans to reach out to one another as we relearn the basics.
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I believe I can answer that last question adequately. 

During the latter six years of my 30 year teaching career in public education I taught at the middle school and high school levels during the first decade of the new millennium.

My experience revealed to me that there was a large number of students who came from single parent households, or dysfunctional families that had various issues which contributed to that dysfunctional circumstance; drugs, sexual abuse, neglect, indifference by the parent to the child's progress in school. Combined that with the advent of cellular phones which only became affordable to the general public, and you have the mix for a younger generation that could care less about their class instruction.

However, there's also the factor of curriculum having been modified to such an extent that most, if not all, Social Studies classes at high schools across the nation never actually taught to any significant degree the structure of our nation's federal government. If it was taught to any extent, it was not given much emphasis. And, at about this time, there was the emerging social attitude of "entitlement" - that they are owed something for nothing, such as being admitted to a prestigious college because they are a minority (except for Asians) and that our country stole from others as greedy capitalists in the past, which has given the youth of our country a concept about America's history as being an oppressor to all other nations around the world. After all, look at our fixation with Confederate statues now!

Youth today know more about Jay Z and Beyonce' than they do about their own country which has given them the greatest opportunity to apply their natural talents, if only they'd listen, work hard, and apply what they've learned. But their response would be, "What? You expect me to do what?" 

Now, we see riots on college campuses to suppress free speech because these youth believe it's fighting fascism, and they've been brainwashed by their professors to believe that anything they hear is violence against their delicate sensitivities. So, it's no mystery to me as to why we are experiencing this deficit of knowledge today.