The Tea Party Rewrites The Constitution

[jaxx]

The Tea Party Rewrites The Constitution

The Tea Party movement has begun a disturbing new initiative to rewrite constitutional history in American classrooms.

The Georgia-based Tea Party Patriots group plans to “celebrate” our constitution’s anniversary on September 17 by pushing schools to incorporate lessons from the Idaho-based National Center for Constitutional Studies. This particular organization believes that the constitution was “divinely inspired.” Bill Norton, the leader of the Tea Party Patriot’s “Adopt a School” program, gives seminars around the country for the NCCS.

<..> “It’s indoctrination, not education. They’re so far from the mainstream of constitutional thought that they are completely indefensible,” said Doug Kendall, director of the Constitutional Accountability Center in Washington, D.C.

This is not the first time conservatives have tried to rewrite history. The notoriously conservative Texas Board of Education has tried to downplay the role of American Indians in American history in addition to trying to distort the history of the civil rights movement. It also attempted to amend the Texas curriculum to say that the civil rights movement created “unrealistic expectations of equal outcomes” among minorities.

http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/0...stitution/

The tea party has unleashed the radical rightwing like never before. They have got to be voted out.

[Dimwitted Fool]

Well, these guys at the National Center for Constitutional Studies are a bit scary, but what's even scarier is that they know a lot about the Constitution and I doubt many of us could hold much ground in a debate with them, no matter how wrong they may be about certain particulars.

(Like that church and state thingy.)

Try a quiz and see how you do:

http://www.nccs.net/constitution/

The teabaggers sponsoring them, though, remain the ignrant shits they started out as.

[Treestar]

(05-29-2011 09:59 AM)Dimwitted Fool Wrote:  Well, these guys at the National Center for Constitutional Studies are a bit scary, but what's even scarier is that they know a lot about the Constitution and I doubt many of us could hold much ground in a debate with them, no matter how wrong they may be about certain particulars.

(Like that church and state thingy.)

Try a quiz and see how you do:

http://www.nccs.net/constitution/

The teabaggers sponsoring them, though, remain the ignrant shits they started out as.

Just spent some time at that site! Very interesting.

Tea Partiers would flunk those quizzes.

[Dimwitted Fool]

Damn! I flunked the quiz I took.

Take the wingnut stuff out and there's some really good info in there.

[RoyGBiv]

(05-29-2011 10:56 AM)Dimwitted Fool Wrote:  Damn! I flunked the quiz I took.

Take the wingnut stuff out and there's some really good info in there.

Don't beat yourself up. I just took a quiz with ten questions. I got 2 of them "wrong," but several I got "right" I did so because I realized they were looking for a specific answer rather than a correct answer. With constitutional questions, the "correct" answer is very often not something that can be answered yes/no or with a multiple choice quiz like this.

Take for example this question, which showed up in my quiz (and which I got wrong and pretty much knew I was going to get wrong unless I guessed correctly):

"When new states were created after the adoption of the Constitution, the federal government sold off all public lands in those states as rapidly as possible to help pay the national debt. This brought all of the land in these new states under the control of the states, except for the federal government's military bases and federal building sites. In which group of states did the federal government reserve a large percentage of the public lands?" Possible answers were southern, central, northern, western.

The "correct" answer according to the quiz is "western states." For that answer to be correct, we have to have a more specific time period because there were no "western states" at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. Any state created after the adoption of the Constitution was technically a "western" state by the terms indicated with the possible answers.

The problem with the question is that it is typical of multiple choice quizzes that the developers try to make harder with tricky phrasing. The whole thing revolves around phrase "new states," which makes "western" the only possible correct answer. However, the intent of the quiz is to test Constitutional knowledge, which you know going in and are thus thinking about, and the bit of the Constitution that deals with this is Article 1. The remainder of the question makes it seems as though the question is directly about that article and the cession of various lands by New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, all of which had vast areas of land they ceded to the federal government before and after adoption of the constitution. It is Virginia, NC, and Georgia that are generally associated with this, i.e. they were the only "states" with ceded public lands after the adoption of the constitution until Congress started carving out the NW territory into states.

So, it's a trick question in the sense that it's testing more whether you play close attention to the wording of the question than your constitutional knowledge. I suspect this is the case with a a lot of them.

[Dimwitted Fool]

(05-29-2011 03:02 PM)RoyGBiv Wrote:  <...>

So, it's a trick question in the sense that it's testing more whether you play close attention to the wording of the question than your constitutional knowledge. I suspect this is the case with a a lot of them.

The version of it that I took had maybe half of them worded like that, and required a lot more knowledge of historical context than basic Constitutional knowledge. One even asked about British trade preferences in 1667!

I'm not saying knowing the historical context of the Constitution is a bad thing-- just that trying to turn college level essay questions for history majors into multiple choice questions for the general public isn't such a good thing.

[RoyGBiv]

(05-30-2011 06:17 AM)Dimwitted Fool Wrote:  

(05-29-2011 03:02 PM)RoyGBiv Wrote:  <...>

So, it's a trick question in the sense that it's testing more whether you play close attention to the wording of the question than your constitutional knowledge. I suspect this is the case with a a lot of them.

The version of it that I took had maybe half of them worded like that, and required a lot more knowledge of historical context than basic Constitutional knowledge. One even asked about British trade preferences in 1667!

I'm not saying knowing the historical context of the Constitution is a bad thing-- just that trying to turn college level essay questions for history majors into multiple choice questions for the general public isn't such a good thing.

Precisely.

The thing is, with most of these, I understand the context, but I have no way of knowing if my understanding of the context meshes with what the person who wrote the question is actually trying to find out.

I know it may sound silly, but the more I think about that question, the more irritated I become, not just at it specifically but at the questions like it we all encounter all the time. We're presented with choices and have to choose one of them even though the best choice may not be among them.

I could write a lengthy essay on the Northwest Territory and the territory ceded by the southern states and their path to statehood just from what's in my head. By by the terms of that question, however, I am "wrong" and thus get thrown in with the statistical group that knows nothing.

[The Stapler]

(05-29-2011 10:40 AM)Treestar Wrote:  Tea Partiers would flunk those quizzes.

Teabaggers are merely the useful idiots in this power struggle. There's big money behind the effort to remake society and stack the deck against the working & middle class.

[Treestar]

of the Constitution!

[KonaKane]

Not to brag, but I recently took this civics/constitution quiz by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and got 89%. Take a crack at it and see how you do....

http://www.isi.org/quiz.aspx?q=FE5C3B47-...2BB31E2692

[RoyGBiv]

(05-29-2011 08:43 PM)KonaKane Wrote:  Not to brag, but I recently took this civics/constitution quiz by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and got 89%. Take a crack at it and see how you do....

http://www.isi.org/quiz.aspx?q=FE5C3B47-...2BB31E2692

93.94 %

And I am going to have to research one of the two I got wrong because I don't believe the answer they say is correct. -- Never mind. I read the correct answer incorrectly.

Sure is a lot of stuff in there about free market systems.

[Dimwitted Fool]

(05-29-2011 10:24 PM)RoyGBiv Wrote:  

(05-29-2011 08:43 PM)KonaKane Wrote:  Not to brag, but I recently took this civics/constitution quiz by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and got 89%. Take a crack at it and see how you do....

http://www.isi.org/quiz.aspx?q=FE5C3B47-...2BB31E2692

93.94 %

And I am going to have to research one of the two I got wrong because I don't believe the answer they say is correct. -- Never mind. I read the correct answer incorrectly.

Sure is a lot of stuff in there about free market systems.

I got one wrong and was about to argue, but after thinking about it-- same thing, they were right and I just answered too fast.

Yeah, for a "Civic Literacy Exam" there's a lot more economics of all sorts in there than one would expect.