As a neat follow up to my previous article about %12 of Americans thinking about a secession of states from the union, I bring you this doozy that makes me really proud to be an American.
On July 4th, 1776, we as a nation found that the Japanese language was too hard to understand so we declared our independence from Japan, or china, or Mexico, or France, or possibly Spain.
This may be news to you, but apparently there are a huge number of people in the US that do not know who we declared independence from. A Whopping %26 did not know. That includes the roughly %20 that was unsure about where we came from, and the other %6 that made somewhat random guesses about it.
The popular guesses were Spain, Mexico, and china, with china leading the pack among that %6.
How in the heck do we end up with almost a third of our population not knowing even the basics? What did we do so wrong that we now have walking vegetables for citizens?
This whole study leads me to believe that it is not so much of an education problem, but as a problem based entirely in the basic society of the United States. I think that the people that did not know were not stupid, but simply did not care.
Like children who can tell you the name of every single cartoon character on television, but cannot memorize their multiplication tables.
According to the statistics, on the whole, the older you are, the more likely to remember the details of Independence Day. This yet again tells me that we as a nation are slowly becoming less and less educated and less and less caring about our roots.
What has happened to us that have caused this nation to be so self serving that it no longer remembers its own history, and the work done that gave them the right of freedom? We have taken that for granted for far too long, and that is why we will someday loose it if we as a nation become any more ignorant of our past. Ignorance of our past is damning our future.
If we do not learn from our mistakes we are doomed to repeat them. How can we possibly learn from mistakes that a third of us don't know about?
For links to other articles I've written
http://rlwoodsiii.blogspot.com/For the original article about it
http://maristpoll.marist.edu/72-don%E2%8...