Maybe Michael Moore is Right

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 I got 90.6. But I think for most fiscal conservatives, Question Number 30 is a trap.

ex animo

davidfarrar

My score today:  32 out of 33 correctly answered — 96.97 %

Not bad - but the first time I took the test a few weeks ago, I only scored 75.75%.  The current economic crisis is pressuring me to learn a lot more about 20th Century history and economics than I would have previously.  I recommend we should all respond to this crisis through curiosity and continued interest in history as it applies to current events.

There are gaps in knowledge which can't be filled merely by retaking the quiz and memorizing the answers.  Take Question Number 8, for example. 

In 1935 and 1936 the Supreme Court declared that important parts of the New Deal were unconstitutional. President Roosevelt responded by threatening to ____. 

The answer according to the quiz is that he responded by threatening to appoint additional Supreme Court justices who shared his views. 

The Supreme Court objected to increased federal government control over the economy and money supply, intervention to control prices and agricultural production by equating those controls with Socialism.  Last week Neil Cavuto expressed concerns about the federal bailouts driving us toward Socialism, to which Ben Stein responded that we've actually had a Socialist/Capitalist economy since the 1930's. 

However, restructuring the Supreme Court with judges more favorable toward Socialism  would have simply confirmed public perception of Roosevelt's dictatorship.  Apparently Roosevent was hoping to mitigate this image, because he actually responded to the threat by restructuring the offending programs such as the Agrigultural Adjustment Administration by making them more palatable to the Supreme Court.  

The best way to use this quiz is to find out where one's knowledge gaps are, then do additional research.  An amusing partner to this quiz is, of course, the very enlightening documentary on uninformed voters titled How Obama Got Elected.  The secondary goal of the film is to outline the remarkable media bias involved in this election, illustrating the powerful influence of mass media propaganda is on the uniformly uninformed.

I don't hold to Moore's assertion that only Americans are idiots (by which I'm assuming me means "politically and historically ignorant", as opposed to people who possess IQ's only marginally greater than their belt sizes).  Most people in the world are undereducated and/or politically/historically ignorant, which is why we're so prone toward influence and propaganda based on image and emotional appeal rather than philosophy.  Having a science or math focus does not predispose one to be any more historically, civically, philosophically or politically superior to Hannity's or Leno's Man on the Street unless university curricula demand those courses as prerequisites toward the math or science degrees.  In most universities, this is not the case (nor has it been for generations). 

We can blame the NEA/AFT for starters, but is there more to the story than union dominance over our academic system?  If we follow the money, we'll find that a coterie of America's tax-exempt foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Annenberg, et al) has designed and initiated every wave of educational reform since John Dewey and his progressive education.  

Bill Ayers is now considered a "respected college professor" entitled to guest lecturer credibility and stewardship of millions of dollars in educational reform donations.  If you look into his progressive educational agenda, it's firmly rooted in the Summerhill methodology which pretty much does away with competition, grades, structured classes and other form of "educational oppression" that would turn students into robotic tools of so-called capitalist warmongers. Ironically, dumbing down these students simply makes them even more ripe to participate in mass political actions and/or protests stimulated by emotional appeals and headed by attractive "power to the people" demagogues spouting catchy slogans ("Together We Are Many", "Yes We Can", "It Is Enough", etc.). 

Toward the end of the 1920s, Carnegie funded the American Historical Society to prepare a report detailing what the future of the U.S. should be. The seventh volume of this report specifies that "the future belongs to collectivism".  In the Reece Committee Staff Report on Relations Between Foundations and Education, Assistant Research Director, Thomas M. McNiece wrote:

    What this investigation does seem to indicate is that many small grants have found their way into questionable hands and many large ones...have been devoted to purposes that are promoting a departure from the fundamental concepts of education and government under our Constitution...

The Reece Report was developed in the 1950's.  How interesting is it that similar claims were made in the Fall of 2008 by Dr. Howard Kurtz in his investigations of  Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge's use of private and public funding in Chicago school reform?   I expect that NEA/AFT are merely symptoms of a much deeper root cause which has been plugging along without objection for many generations.  I hope that the Internet, with its virally proliferated Civil Literacy Test and articles such as Ruwe's, will help sound a wake-up call.