Citizenship quiz

Newsweek has a terrific series of articles on this Pew Poll, giving a version of the citizenship exam to 1000 Americans - only 38% passed (got 6/10 correct).  They have an article about the differences in scores between likely voters and non-voters - those engaged politically do much better on the test.  I thought that was very intuitive, but the author suggests that compromise happens in the middle, and this result is worrisome because solutions are less likely to be found if the middle is lacking basic knowledge.

I took the version of the quiz in Newsweek with 25 questions.  I missed 4 (not bad!), but would have done better if it was presented as multiple choice (as the online version, with 96 questions, does).  But the real citizenship exam is done this way, as an oral exam of 10 questions.

There is also an essay about teaching history in a more engaging way (I always think about the great book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, about the miserable way that history is taught in the US - always the most popular non-fiction book category, but also most frequently cited as HS students' least favorite subject, hmmm.) Both the author of the book and this essay lay some of the blame with really terrible textbooks.  The essay also suggests posing really interesting questions, like, why was the US revolution so much less bloody than the French one, or, what would have happened if FDR had not been the president during the depression and WWII?