P.T. Barnum Was Right! (apologies to Jay Leno)

Today, safely ensconced in that port city to the south, huddled by the A/C having survived the usual insane traffice here, I came across this little tidbit on the Washington Post site.

In this age of polling, hardly a day goes by without some new report about the state of American public opinion. But pollsters rarely acknowledge the well-documented finding in political science that citizens know little about current events in general and even less about overseas events. This so-called "knowledge gap" between domestic and international news was the subject of this study.

What most amused me about this is that when I fired up my sister-in-law's computer, I got the home page for the Verizon Central news service for the Internet. It offers three choices to click on for "News Headlines."

1) US News
2) Business News
3) Entertainment News

That's all folks! One of our biggest telecommunication companies assumes that those three choices represent all that an American would be interested in.

The article concludes with the obvious: "The fact that Americans tend to be less than well-informed about international affairs raises important questions about the formulation of foreign policy."

Now I teach a swath of this American public the facts of World History and can testify that they know very little about their world. That does not bother me - they're there to learn. But they have absolutely no curiousity to find out about their world. That bothers me.