Montage by Niko Yaitanes/
Harvard Magazine; images by Unsplash.
Several months before the invasion of the United States Capitol threw the nation’s seat of legislative power into peril, the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s survey on civic knowledge found that barely half of American adults can name all three branches of government, and 20 percent cannot name any rights protected by the First Amendment. Remarkably, these figures constitute
improvements on the results of the previous 15 years of this annual survey. Even more troubling, the separate World Values Survey has found that since the 1950s, ever fewer numbers within each birth cohort in the United States has ranked it “essential” to live in a democratically governed country. Not even a third of Americans born in the 1980s think democracy is vital. This state of affairs follows prolonged disinvestment in the fields of history and civics: today, a new report reveals, federal spending per pupil in these subjec