US Elected Officials Know Little of Social Studies

From PrairiePundit comes this post commenting on the recent poor performance on a civics and history test by US public officials:

US elected officials scored abysmally on a test measuring their civic knowledge, with an average grade of just 44 percent, the group that organized the exam said Thursday. Ordinary citizens did not fare much better, scoring just 49 percent correct on the 33 exam questions compiled by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).

Among the questions asked of some 2,500 people who were randomly selected to take the test, including "self-identified elected officials," was one which asked respondents to "name two countries that were our enemies during World War II."Sixty-nine percent of respondents correctly identified Germany and Japan. Among the incorrect answers were Britain, China, Russia, Canada, Mexico and Spain.Forty percent of respondents, meanwhile, incorrectly believed that the US president has the power to declare war, while 54 percent correctly answered that that power rests with Congress.

Asked about the electoral college, 20 percent of elected officials incorrectly said it was established to "supervise the first televised presidential debates."In fact, the system of choosing the US president via an indirect electoral college vote dates back some 220 years, to the US Constitution.

The question that received the fewest correct responses, just 16 percent, tested respondents' basic understanding of economic principles, asking why "free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning?"

PrairiePundit thinks that he may have blundered into an explanation of how liberalism works- it requires an ignorance of history and economics to survive. This may also explain our recent election- a recent Zogby poll indicated Obama voters were grossly ignorant of facts related to the election campaign. And liberals think they are so smart!

UPDATE: Not to toot my own horn, but I got a 97%- guess I'm smart too, maybe even smart enough not to be ignored by smarty-pants liberals?

UPDATE 2: The Corner has a good take on the results of this test- think about this:

There seems to be the idea that all the affirmative-action history we're feeding kids (black studies, women's studies, black women's studies, etc.) is a supplement to learning the basics, which they'll somehow absorb no matter what. Instead, the ISI civic literacy test suggests that such instruction is actually crowding out the fundmentals of history and civics. Other than the Declaration's reference to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," the two highest scores — i.e., the ones the largest number of people got right — relate to Susan B. Anthony and to MLK's "I have a dream" speech. The 80 percent who got those right compares to fully one-third who didn't know that Germany and Japan were our enemies in WWII, half who didn't know the three branches of government, and nearly 80 percent who didn't know that "government of the people, by the people, for the people" came from the Gettysburg Address. And elected officials scorced even lower than the general public. OK, I shouldn't be surprised, but it seems to me that students shouldn't even hear the words "Susan B. Anthony" until after they've recited the Gettysburg Address from memory and after they've proven they know who was on the losing side of the greatest war in human history.