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Comment by thwayunion | Hacker News Reader

US civics education is horrendous. Only 30% of US students are proficient in civics standards. About half of US adults sampled couldn't even name the three branches of government; an elected US Senator said "Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive". A huge majority wildly misunderstand the first amendment [1].

I used to volunteer with a civics ed non-profit. Students, almost all whom had already completed their required civics curriculum, entered our program with all sorts of wildly insane misunderstandings of American governance.

[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:g4DAnD...

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> an elected US Senator said "Our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive".

I should stop having impostor syndrome.

>all three +political+ branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive

Would this be more accurate? I'm not sure the judicial branch is considered political enough for "one group" to "have".

It's not how the term "branch" is commonly used. You could say it, and people would know what you meant... but then, people understood what the Senator meant in the first place.

For that matter... the Judicial branch is quite political, and is widely considered to be "had" by one particular political party. 2/3 of its members were nominated by that party, and nominations have been increasingly subjected to ideological litmus tests. (Which they must then pretend not to have until confirmed.)

> US civics education is horrendous. Only 30% of US students are proficient in civics standards

And 100% of them repeat the tired cliche of name-dropping "Founding Fathers" in every reddit thread.

Now imagine how the minds are blown when they learn that the US legislators haven’t actually legislated, which is to say actually written a bill, in living memory.

The actual process by which laws are passed resembles the schoolhouse rock version about as much as Roger Rabbit resembles criminal proceedings.

> all three branches of government. … You know, the House, the Senate and the executive

While it's objectively the case that this is not accurate, control of those three is commonly called a "trifecta" by pundits and political operatives, so that's probably the source of the confusion.

No, I don't think so. "Trifecta" is a fairly recent term for that.

Knowing that the judiciary is set up to be independent is pretty critical.

Define "recent"? This 2007 article uses the term: https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/2664-wall-street-rea...

My point is that this could easily be a slip of the tongue, the kind of mistake that I could see myself making when speaking extemporaneously. But making that mistake would not mean that I didn't understand the difference between the three branches of government and the three distinct "federal electoral prizes", so to speak.

Knowing that we're talking about Tommy Tuberville, I'm obviously less inclined to offer him the benefit of the doubt, but we are still jumping to conclusions.

2007 is definitely "recent" when we're talking about the Constitution.

I think you'd find that shocking percentages of Americans don't understand any basic information. Probably not even who's the Vice President, or who's next in line of succession after the VP.

Of course, the mentioned Senator from Alabama wasn’t elected because he was competent. Alabama appears to have different priorities.

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