The New York-based Newsweek magazine recently had 1,000 US citizens take the official citizenship test - and 38% of them failed.
The magazine said that 73% did not know why the US fought the Cold War, 70%didn’t know that the Constitution is the supreme law of the country and 65% could not figure out that the Constitution was written at the Constitutional Convention.
63% got the number of Supreme Court justices wrong, and 59% had no idea that Susan B Anthony fought for women’s rights or that John Boehner is the Speaker of the US house of representatives.
The magazine also reported that 40% didn’t know that the US fought Germany, Italy and Japan during World War II, 29% couldn’t name the vice-president and 23% didn’t know Martin Luther King fought for civil rights.
Experts interviewed by the magazine laid the blame for the country’s lack of knowledge, in part, on the vast educational gap between the rich and poor.
“Unlike Denmark or Finland, where citizens have a better handle on how their country is run, we have a lot of very poor people without access to good education, and a huge immigrant population that doesn’t even speak English,” said Dalton Coney, a New York University sociologist.
