Last week PoliTech, a non-partisan student political group at Texas Tech in Lubbock released a video, Politically Challenged. In the edited video host Courtney Plunk asks Tech students basic questions such as, “who is the vice president of the United States?” “From which country did America gain its independence?” and “Who won the Civil War?”

“We did? The South?” replied one student – a black student! – in response to the question about the American Civil War. The other black kid didn’t know the correct answer, either.

For the other questions, most students simply replied that they didn’t know. Most of them came up short. Waaaay short.

Until they were asked about Snooki, that is…

“I have to say, I find some of the responses shocking,” said Mark McKenzie, assistant professor of political science who studies political knowledge and behavior. “They’re jaw-droppingly shocking.”

Still, McKenzie said that if the interviewers had asked the same questions on any street in America, they likely would’ve gotten the same responses. “This is the type of thing that you’d see out in the population as a whole,” he said.

This is true, except for one huge caveat: these are fucking college kids. One of the students was a history major, for God’s sake!

Four decades of cuts to education, defunding and now privatizing so profits can syphon even more resources from public schools and this is what we get.

Unfortunately, the findings are nothing new. American citizens have demonstrated ignorance of the workings of their government ever since researchers began measuring Americans’ political acumen back in the 1930s. The reason boils down to two factors: interest and time. Most people aren’t all that interested in history or politics, and between careers and having babies most people won’t dedicate one second to educating themselves on important issues.

PoliTech president Raul Cevallos claimed the sample size for the Politically Challenged video was about 30 students. Of that group, only two got every question right. “Obviously it’s edited, but it’s definitely a clear representation of what we saw,” he said.

The Civil War answers were particularly disturbing considering that over half a million people died in the conflagration. It was only about 165 years ago. That whole slavery thing. You’d think College kids would at least remember that much from school.

Their ignorance is purely due to intellectual laziness, because all you have to do is type in a question on your Smartphone to get an answer. You don’t even have to get off your ass to ferret out information.

But those kids sure as hell know about our worthless ‘Pop’ culture, don’t they? Every single student featured in the clip knew what TV show Snooki was on: Jersey Shore!

Wow, at least I learned something. I had no fucking idea who Snooki was…

But you can’t totally blame them. Those students are the victims of the rampant anti-intellectualism gripping the USA. This trend extends into our elementary, high schools, colleges and research institutes. Basic education has been thrown out the window, having been replaced by training for low-paying corporate jobs. More and more, if an education doesn’t lead directly to a high-paying job, it isn’t worth having. College graduates today make good little drones, but they cannot think independently or critically.

They are not prepared to be truly engaged citizens.

The problem is we don’t have a real education system in America: we have by-rote training, specifically geared to doing some kind of corporate data input / military work. Things like history and geography – much less civics and politics – are simply not taught in schools anymore.

It’s no accident. The One Percent doesn’t want a well-educated populace which might figure out what’s really going on. How can citizens recognize the difference between truth and falsehood if they don’t know what happened 100 years ago, fifty years ago or even last year? We have a truly anti-intellectual culture in the USA. Ignorance really is bliss.

It’s sure as hell not the teachers’ fault! I guarantee you that teachers taught those kids who won the goddam Civil War multiple times during their pre-college education. The information reached their eardrums but somewhere between their ears and their cerebral cortex and their Smartphone something went wrong.

But even so, I refuse to believe that a 20-year old college student’s lack of knowledge about something as basic as who won the Civil War is due to poor teaching skills. No fucking way. There are some facts which anybody raised in the U.S. should know simply by being alive, awake and aware.

Those kids will be paying off their student loans until they are old and gray, and they will never understand why.