Civics: A Dependable Japanese Car or Informed Citizenship?

It's a reasonably well-known (and embarrassingly so) that most Americans know very little about who governs them and how they are being governed. But all is not lost; rest assured that many of those same folks will likely be able to rattle off all sorts of pop culture trivia, which, you have to admit, comes in very handy when playing Trivial Pursuit and winning radio station contests. But when it comes to civics, we're a mostly uninformed electorate.

Want to find out for yourself? Here's a little test you can conduct in your own community. Ask a friend--or a stranger if your looking to make new friends--the following questions:

1. Who's the mayor of your community?
2. Can you name 3 Utah legislators?
3. Who are Utah's 2 senators in Washington, D.C.? (A a tricky follow-up, ask them how many senators there are from Utah!)
4. What are the three branches of government?
5. For what purposes are sales and incomes taxes used in Utah?

Don't be surprised when the average person can only answer two of these questions correctly. How do I know this? Well, in recent weeks we've been out in the streets (and in the malls) with the good folk of Utah asking some of these very questions. And while we find the occasional well-informed citizen who can rattle off an accurate response to every question asked, the majority really don't have a sense of who they have elected, the decisions made by those they elected, and how our political system functions. (By the way, if you attend the ULCT Local Officials' Day on Jan 17, we'll be showing a rather hilarious video of these interviews.)

So why does this matter? Should it matter? Well, we think it should. There are a myriad of reasons and I'll not list them all (mostly because I don't them all), but at the most basic level, an informed citizenry can ensure that those they elect will act both responsibly and responsively.

My next post will highlight some of the materials the ULCT has produced to help our school teachers make our young little Utahns a bit brighter on the topic of civics...at least the local government portion of it.