Rarely is the question asked (at least until a president of the United States asked it): "Is our children learning?"
Well - is them?
It's a question that nags at me, editor of an online magazine devoted to such things as the beauties and the befoulings of the Chesapeake Bay and the oceans - especially in times like these, when, as our president also says, "You're working hard to put food on your family." Really. What if, while I'm trying to make this project pay for the noodles with cream sauce and capers I'll heap on my loved ones this evening, what if the readers I want don't even know where the Atlantic and the Pacific is? I mean are.
Woe, the answers are in. They know less than fish. Fish, at least, can find the Pacific. That ocean's location, according to a survey by the National Geographic Society of 500 young American adults ages 18 to 24, is a mystery to 29 percent.
That's almost one out of three who can't find the shore, or name what they're looking at where the beach gets wet.
There'll be no sure answer from the 58 percent who can't find Japan, the 65 percent who can't locate France and the 69 percent who get lost looking for Great Britain. Half can't even point to New York on a map.
Five years and 4,000-some American deaths into a war, as National Geographic points out, only 17 percent could locate Afghanistan and fewer than 15 percent could find Iraq. And never mind the one in five Americans who, according to the National Science Foundation, think the sun revolves around the Earth.
Meantime, Stephen Prothero, chairman of the department of religion at Boston University, is lamenting that the U.S. is one of the most religious countries on Earth, but Americans know almost nothing about religion.
At the Pew Forum's biannual conference on religion, politics and public life, Mr. Prothero said he has to explain to his students that Matthew was an apostle, not a cast member of Friends. Recent surveys show, he added, that most Americans don't know Genesis is the first book of the Bible; one in 10 think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife; and a sizable minority believe Sodom and Gomorrah were a happily married biblical couple.
This is scary, Mr. Prothero notes, because politicians so frequently invoke religious reasons for their positions. Some knowledge of religion is necessary, he adds, "so we can flush out the demagogues who have a kind of religious invocation, where they're sort of invoking God or invoking religion without actually having a religious argument underneath that invocation."
