I Passed. Could Sarah Palin?

After reading about, and seeing, Sarah Palin get the story of Paul Revere's ride all wrong, I wasn't particularly surprised. But then I read the story, which I'd missed last week, of Representative Michele Bachmann's mistake, in a prepared speech no less, telling an audience in New Hampshire that their state was where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. My surprise at that goof was topped moments later when I read about presidential candidate Herman Cain's campaign announcement where he quoted the Constitution as saying not only "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," but also "whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it." You will find neither of those phrases in the U.S. Constitution. They are both from the Declaration of Independence.

I'm beginning to think that the crisis in our public education system is even more serious than I previously believed. Otherwise, how could these three highly visible Republicans make such basic mistakes about our nation's history? Could these folks even pass the test given to immigrants wishing to become citizens of the United States of America?

So I went looking for sample Citizenship Tests online. I found several and took two. The first one I found on The Christian Science Monitor's web site. You can find a link to it in this article, which you might find interesting to read. (Be warned, the CS site seemed to run slowly for me, and it took quite a while for me to complete it.) I answered 95 of 96 questions correctly (99%). You needed to answer 58 questions correctly (60%).

The second test I took was here. (I was able to take this one in less than 10 minutes.) It included a question about Connecticut (you have to select your state of residence before it shows you the questions). I answered 46 of 50 questions correctly (92%), which means I probably moved to quickly through it given my score on the first test. At least one of the wrong answers was due to clicking on the wrong button! A score of 60% was needed to pass this test also.

The questions on the two tests were not identical, though there was a great deal of overlap. And some of the questions that were identical had a different right answer. For example, both tests asked you to name two national holidays, but in one the correct answer was "Labor Day and Thanksgiving," while in the other it was "Presidents' Day and Columbus Day."

When two darlings of the Tea Party make the kinds of mistakes Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann did in the past week, one wonders what Tea Party members themselves really know about the history of our nation and how it operates. Add to that Herman Cain's confusion about the two founding documents of our country, and one wonders about the Republican Party.