Fewer than half of Americans can name the three branches of their government

American Thinker ^ | 18 Sep, 2022 | Eric Utter

[MtnClimber]

Nearly all Americans can name three or more genders, but can even half of us name all 50 states?

The most recent Annenberg Public Policy Center annual Constitution Day Civics Survey found that fewer than half of Americans can name all three branches of government — Executive, Legislative, and Judicial — a drop-off of 9 percentage points from just one year ago. (This is likely because a larger percentage of Americans attend "institutions of higher learning" than ever before. I'm not joking.) At this rate, no one will be able to achieve this remarkable feat by 2028. This is doubly sad when one realizes that nearly every single child in the country possessed this fundamental knowledge by the age of 12 or 14 fifty years ago. And 100 years ago. And 150 years ago. Whether they went to school in a large city or in a one-room schoolhouse on a Midwestern prairie.

Perhaps even more mind-boggling, roughly a quarter of Americans surveyed could not name a single branch of the federal government.

Perhaps even more disturbing, the survey showed an increase in the number of respondents who were unable to name any of the five freedoms guaranteed under the First Amendment to the Constitution. (Freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and to petition the government.) Just over one quarter of respondents were at a loss to name even one First Amendment freedom. In the previous survey, conducted in 2021, 56 percent of respondents identified freedom of religion, compared to only 24 percent in 2022. In 2021, half of the respondents noted freedom of the press, as opposed to only 20 percent in 2022.

Is it any wonder, then, that government is denying those freedoms and treating citizens with the wrong political opinions like "terrorists" or "enemies of the state,"

[antidemoncrat]

Hey, the universities and el/hi school systems are too busy teaching “woke” subjects like gender identity and racial equity than worry about teaching history or STEM.

[know.your.why]

Tyrannical leaders/parties prefer to KILL the intellectual populus first. I believe that if the progressive liberal left leadership could silence their political enemies (dead or imprisoned) simply because of dissention, they’d do it in a second.

[xp38]

This is how Idiocracy comes into being.

[dforest]

I can hardly stand watching those “man on the street” interviews asking younger people questions that should have been able to be easily answered. Some of these interviews are on a campus somewhere, some are on beaches etc.

I used to laugh at the ignorance, but now it just depresses me.

[EinNYC]

All part of the replacement of Americans with illegal criminal invaders. They won’t have to know the 3 branches of American government. All they’ll have to know is to pull the D lever on election days and graciously accept their freebies. Meanwhile, the preparatory work for this has been going on in our public schools. Instead of learning English, American history, science, and math, the public school kids (and some of those in idiot-run private schools) are being groomed for the takeover, their brains being stuffed with admiration for the gay lifestyle, CRT, white privilege and other libtard nonsense.

[logi_cal869]

It's got electrolytes!

[T.B. Yoits]

I can hardly stand watching those “man on the street” interviews asking younger people questions that should have been able to be easily answered. Some of these interviews are on a campus somewhere, some are on beaches etc.

What they're not showing are all the people who ignore the clown with the mobile phone asking people questions as well as all the people who get the questions correct.

It's easy to find idiots and easy to project that they're a larger percent of the population than they are.

[enumerated]

I would bet 80% of Republicans and Independents can name the three branches. The ones who can’t are Democrats.

I’m becoming increasingly convinced that Democrat voters are just plain stupid, and that there is a strange phenomenon in our society whereby stupid people can easily pass themselves off as reasonably intelligent.

The fact is that stupid people are able to get decent grades in school, and even do well in job interviews - because in school and certain job interviews, being a stupid, compliant, group-thinking suck-up to authority - is actually an advantage.

[skeeter]

Not surprising. A good portion of that half just arrived.

[dforest]

I know, but still there are a whole lot of true idiots running around that don’t even know they don’t know anything and one thing they do know is they don’t care.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

You would figure if they didn’t learn it in school (”this is boring”), they would have picked it up as adults by paying minimal attention to what’s going on. Or they could put in the effort to break away from the cultural dreck a while and reduce their ignorance by looking it up. Amidst the junk of the internet, there is a lot of good information.

I teach a class that helps immigrants prepare for their naturalization interview. At least my students know.

[Huskrrrr]

The Welfare department, the Food Stamps department, and the Gimmee department.

[mbs6]

Big Government
Big Business
Big Media

[Lizavetta]

I lay the blame directly on our education system. All those hours with our children…now we know they were not being taught the basics.

Blame must also be placed on the voters who more often than not ignored school board elections, and probably even more so when their children were no longer in the system.

Now we are reaping the whirlwind of damage done by leftist teachers, leftist curriculum, resulting in colossally brainwashed and ignorant people who have infested all our institutions and who vote.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Funniest part about it, is most people that cannot name the three branches of government are liberals who major in political science or some other liberal curriculum.

[deport]

A little help needed.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4094221/posts#comment

[D Rider]

What about the 4th branch?

"The independent administrative agencies of the United States government, while technically part of any one of the three branches, may also be referred to as a 'fourth branch'. The U.S. intelligence community has also increasingly been seen as a fourth branch."

Sadly, there is a whole lotta truth to an unelected self-serving 4th branch.

[curious7]

Such ‘citizens’, and I use that term loosely, shouldn’t be allowed to cast a vote. Perhaps it is time to have a couple random questions as a civics test before you get to vote. Fail the test, no vote for you!

[Zathras]

That is pretty good.

[moovova]

It’s sad that The Three Stooges was the first thing we thought of.

We are so screwed.