Americans' Astounding Lack Of Basic Knowledge

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We've all seen those dramatic examples of the ignorance of average Americans, such as Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" or the comedian from Canada who goes around asking Americans ridiculously over-the-top questions about our northern neighbor.

I've been seeing a lot of examples first-hand lately because I play "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" on Facebook. It's different from the TV show. Each game consists of ten players and the scores are multiplied by the number of people who missed the question. Over the past week or so, I've taken note of some questions that at least six out of ten people missed. Examples:

• 
  In mathematics, which of the following symbols is used to denote a ratio? (The correct answer was colon, while incorrect choices were things like apostrophe and exclamation point)
  


• 
  Which country has a famous highway system known as the "autobahn"? (Eight out of ten either missed this one or lifelined it)
  


• 
  In Spain, which meal is usually served around 9 PM? (Answer: "La cena", dinner)
  


• 
  In Washington DC, what is K Street known for?
  


• 
  Known as the "metric highway", Arizona highway 19 displays distances in what units? (Eight out of ten missed it or lifelined it; they apparently had trouble distinguishing among the choices of kilometers, kilograms, kilowatts, and kilobytes)
  


• 
  Of the following combinations, which is worth the most money? The choices were forty rolls of pennies, two rolls of quarters, twenty rolls of nickels, or five rolls of dimes. Seven out of ten people got it wrong.
  

It's bad enough that people can't get basic questions like these right. It gets worse when you consider the questions that most people DO get right: questions about television, pop culture, and celebrities. Even worse, it's obvious that the celebrity and pop culture questions require paying attention at a very high level of detail. For example, what kind of tattoo a certain actress has on her ass, what color dress an actress wore to her wedding, which celebrities have been hooked up romantically, and details about viral videos and reality TV stars.

So while people are lacking in basic knowledge, they are obviously paying a great deal of attention to the lives of celebrity chefs and reality TV stars. And obviously they aren't learning anything of substance from these people. In an interview with Rollingstone.com, reality star "Snooki" was asked who she wanted to win the presidential election and why. She gave the sort of eloquent and insightful reply that you would expect: "Obama, 'cause he's our president."

Then again, it's not as if the people in charge are any better much of the time. Responding to critics who've wondered what the hell Massachusetts senator Scott Brown has been doing for the past couple of years as far as dealing with serious issues, he said "Each and every day that I’ve been a United States senator, I’ve been discussing issues, meeting on issues, in secret meetings and with kings and queens and prime ministers and business leaders and military leaders, talking, voting, working on issues every single day."

Secret meetings with kings and queens? Seriously?

There's been a lot of articles on news sites in recent weeks about whether the American people or Congress critters or both have been getting dumber over the years. As if to illustrate the point, I've found several of these articles to be very poorly written, with incoherent trains of thought and various glaring spelling and grammatical mistakes.

Also, the articles don't tell us much. They trot out a mountain of statistics about what levels of formal education Americans have and say nothing about the actual level of knowledge they have.

Alas, it doesn't seem like any asteroids will be wiping out humanity any time soon.