Today's Must-Read: High School Civics Edition

OK -- this should scare you, even if nothing else does:

Unfortunately, many Americans lack fundamental civics knowledge, according to the recent Constitution Day Civics Survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, and therefore cannot understand current events.

“In light of the information in the news about First Amendment issues, the ignorance of the public about the First Amendment is startling,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of APPC, tells Newsweek. “So there are times in which one needs knowledge about the Constitution to make sense of what's happening in the news environment,” she adds. “In particular when rights are at issue it's important that people understand what their rights are as they read the news.”

The results, published on September 12, reveal that more than half of Americans (53 percent) believe people in this country illegally have no protections under the Constitution. If that weren’t startling enough, only about a quarter (26 percent) of Americans can successfully name all three branches of government, with one-third of respondents unable to name a single branch, 27 percent who knew one branch and 13 percent who knew two.

It gets worse.

There's a reason Betsy DeVos was named Secretary of Education -- and it wasn't to improve the general public's knowledge of how this country works.

Actually, I'd like to blame Trump, but we've been a while getting here. Don't look for it to get better, if for no other reason than those who don't know don't care and don't want to learn, and, since the right has taken over the majority of state houses, no one's going to make them.