Upon reading the Nov. 5 Features article, "Revamped citizenship deemphasizes trivia in favor of current politics - to mixed reviews" by Marisa Carberry, I was surprised at the reactions of the students quoted in the piece. Several students, it seemed, claimed that because the average Tufts student passed the U.S. citizenship test by only one question, the test is too hard. I would propose an alternative interpretation of this little datum: The average Tufts student is unfit to be a citizen of the United States of America.
While insightful and detailed, Carberry's article failed, in my opinion, to provide a very important point of analysis. A lot of fuss was made about how senior David Becker felt that the old test "is not a good indication of an applicant's desirability as a citizen." But there was no discussion about what makes a desirable U.S. citizen so that we might tailor the current exam to promote such qualities in potential citizens!
Although there may be other qualities of a citizen that we want to look for in applicants, it seems to me that the "citizenship portion" of our current test is designed to measure ability to effectively participate in our democratic government. (Hopefully, it will not be necessary to mount a defense of this quality as absolutely necessary for good citizenship, as its value is fairly obvious.) Using this as our criterion, let's evaluate the 20 questions and see if they do, in fact, measure this ability.
Some of the questions, admittedly, are mere trivia that are related to the lore surrounding the founding and history of our nation. For instance, sample questions like "Who wrote the 'The Star-Spangled Banner?,'" "Name the amendments that guarantee or address voting rights" or "When was the Declaration of Independence adopted?" are not strictly necessary to know if you only need to be capable of understanding and participating in our current system.
However, questions about the Constitution ensure that each prospective citizen has carefully studied that document which, as the foundation of our system, must certainly be required reading. (I'll grant that it might be more useful to ask about which rights it protects, rather than what the numbers of these rights are.)
And even a cursory study of American history will quickly provide the answers to such queries as "Independence Day celebrates independence from whom?" or "Name some countries that were our enemies in World War II." I can't imagine that people complaining that the test is too hard are talking about these questions.
This brings us to the other 13 questions, which are all directly concerned with the way our government operates. [Editor's Note: As mentioned in the original article, the Daily printed 20 questions from the hundreds of questions that comprise the old test available online. The questions printed by the Daily are not necessarily representative of all categories of questions on the test.]
Are these questions really necessary knowledge? Some of them have to do with the way people interact with the government: One needs to know the timetable of federal elections to be able to participate in them, and one needs to know that when newspapers refer to "the White House," they mean the executive branch.
Others have to do with the structure of the government: The type of government, the difference between senators and representatives and basic powers of the executive and legislative branches are covered. And most importantly (and easily forgotten these days), citizens are expected to know that all government officials are ultimately held to the law of the Constitution and that all their power comes from it and from us, the people.
I would very much like to see Ethan Tannen, who claimed in the Nov. 5 article that these questions are "ridiculous," articulate the argument that it is unreasonable to ask immigrants to know these questions, based on his own trouble with the questions.
However, having determined that over 60 percent of the questions should be answerable by someone who is prepared to take an active, effective role in our government as a citizen of the United States, and that even the more trivia-based questions are relatively basic, I now make my fairly modest proposal: Rather than base the difficulty of the citizenship test on the abilities and knowledge of spoiled college students who are only in this country because they were lucky enough to be born here, let's set our sights a little higher, shall we?
Let's make our citizenship tests based on what we want our country to be and require that all citizens take them at age 22 or so, after they've had a chance at a proper college education. The ones that score below passing will be deported, leaving room here for more interested, informed and qualified immigrants, people who actually care about the way their country works and how they're going to make a difference here.
This solves two problems: All our immigrants will be high-quality, and our waiting lists will be shorter, since the deportation of those who couldn't be bothered to learn the basics of our country's operation after two whole decades of living here will allow us to raise the immigration cap.
Okay, maybe that treatment is a little harsh. But can we just take a step back and examine the facts? When confronted with a citizenship exam that they couldn't pass, the reaction of Tufts students was to whine, "This is too hard!" rather than take 20 minutes away from watching Tila Tequila on MTV and Wikipedia the difference between a democracy and a republic.
Yes, participating in our government is an important (perhaps the essential?) value for us Americans, and yes, it might take a little background research to do it properly. But it's an essential feature of living in a constitutional republic, the form of government carefully crafted by great minds over two centuries ago that still persists today in the greatest nation in the world!
I wrote this response so that students who looked askance at the questions on our citizenship test would look a second time and think about why those questions are on there, rather than simply brush them off as unreasonable.
Thank you for reading, and please don't stop with this article. Get your facts straight!
Lucas Walker is a senior majoring in philosophy.
