Democracy? Uh, Is That A New Group?
Exactly what are they teaching in our schools these days?
Apparently not civics: A new national survey suggests that, on average, college graduates today know fewer selected basic facts about government and politics than college graduates did in 1947.
Likewise, today’s high school grads appear to know less about government and politics than their educational equals of five decades ago.
For example, a Gallup survey in 1947 found that 77 percent of all Americans surveyed who had graduated from high school but not gone on to college knew which party controlled the U.S. House of Representatives.
Today, barely half - 54 percent - of all high school graduates know that the Republicans control the House, according to a new poll conducted by The Washington Post, Harvard University and the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation.
Political knowledge also has slipped among college graduates: 90 percent knew which party controlled the House in 1947, compared to 80 percent in the latest survey.
This erosion in knowledge about government and politics has occurred at the same time that more Americans are completing more years of schooling, said Scott Keeter of Virginia Commonwealth University, a political scientist who has been tracking declining levels of political information in America. In the 1940s, the average Americans spent fewer than nine years in school. Today, the average American has more than 12 years of formal education.
Not so you’d notice, at least in terms of political knowledge.
Crimestoppers textbook
Everybody suspects that poverty, lack of opportunities and dysfunctional families are among the major causes of crime and violence in American society. But here are two other newly discovered sources of wickedness:
The Bionic Woman - It’s true, argue researchers at the University of Michigan in an upcoming issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. They’ve tracked the lives of 211 twentysomething women since they were girls in the late 1970s. They found those women who watched violent television shows as children and identified with aggressive heroines such as the Bionic Woman and the women in “Charlie’s Angels” were significantly more prone to committing criminal acts than women who didn’t watch much TV violence, reported psychologist L. Rowell Huesmann.
High self-esteem - It’s not low self-esteem but unrealistically high self-esteem that causes people to beat their wives, shoot their neighbors or bully their schoolmates, claims a team of psychologists in the latest issue of Psychological Review. Their interdisciplinary review of studies on aggression suggests that there’s little evidence that violent types suffer from low self-esteem. Just the opposite appears to be true: They tend to have unrealistically high opinions of themselves, and revert to violence when challenged by someone who doesn’t think they’re so swell. So if the goal is to reduce violence, then forget those “I am special” jailhouse chants. “Perhaps it would be better to try instilling modesty and humility,” wrote psychologist Roy Baumeister of Case Western Reserve University and his research colleagues.