U.S. Students Dumber than Ever

ourth and eighth-graders tested nationwide really screwed the pooch on a recent history exam, while 12th-graders were about as dumb as expected, the Education Department announced Thursday. The Bush administration was not impressed, calling the results "a shocking wake-up call of historicalistical proportions." More than 29,000 students took the history test that's part of the National Assessment of Educational Ineptitude, known informally as "Operation: Dumbo Drop."

Among fourth-graders, 67 percent had at least a basic understanding of the concept of history itself, though few could name any specific events. 13 percent showed no sense of events happening in the past at all, beyond a vague concept of everything happening "yesterday." That was three percentage points higher than in 1994, the last time the test was given.

Some 29,600 students, 87 percent of them apparently high on drugs at the time, took the test in 2001. The randomly selected test-takers answered multiple-choice, short-answer and essay questions with only a slightly higher success rate than a control group of lab mice trying to play "Axel-F" on a small Casio keyboard during the exam. Students were alarmingly befuddled by questions like these for fourth-graders:

Pilgrims came to North American in the 1700's fleeing what in Europe?
(a) the bubonic plague.
(b) religious persecution.
(c) Napoleon's army.
(d) Godzilla.


Only 45 percent answered correctly with (b).

What was a major cause of the Civil War?
(a) East Coast rap calling out West Coast rap.
(b) People in the North and in the South disagreed over slavery.
(c) Montel Williams.
(d) The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand.


Correct answer: (b); 57 percent answered correctly.

The answers to the multiple-choice questions, however, looked like the minutes from a meeting of MENSA when compared to the short-answer section of the test. Asked to write in their own answer to the question "Who led Germany during World War II?" 57 percent of the students wrote "Arnold Schwarzenegger." The second and third most-frequent responses were no less alarming: "Tupac!" and "banana."

Deanna Norvich, an education historian and NAEI board member, called the students' answers "fuckin' hilarious" and said the seniors' scores were "about what you'd expect from a bunch of Taco Bell trainees."

"Since the seniors are very close to voting age or already have reached it, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see more professional wrestlers elected to public office in the near future. I'd be frightened if I weren't looking at the bright side: No way in hell someone younger than me is going to come and take my job in the next millennia. These kids couldn't operate a salad shooter."

She added: "Clearly, our high schools are failing to teach U.S. history well to these paste-eating morons. And by the time they're seniors there's no way you're going to get them to stop fucking and doing blow long enough to learn about Benjamin Franklin. It's just not happening."

According to the National Assessment Governing Board, the independent group that develops the NAEI for the Education Department, only 17 percent of fourth-graders scored above the "vegetable" level. Of those, 11 percent scored at the "head injury" level and another 3 percent fell into the higher "slow country cousin" grouping. Alarmingly, only 2 percent scored in the "can handle plastic silverware" group, the highest level attained in the test this year.

To be sure, many questions were tough, especially those asked of older students. An example:

There were many significant factors that led American colonists to form the First Continental Congress in 1774. Among them were colonial frustrations with laws passed by the British Parliament. What is your name?

Thirty-nine percent got that one right.

The NAEI is given in different subjects periodically, though always to predictably pathetic results that make adults feel smart again after their bank account has been drained by a ten year-old hacker. The 2001 national history test was the first given since 1994, when it was designed to test the effects of crop dusting on the nation's youth.

NAEI scores in geography are scheduled to be released this summer, with Vermont crossing its fingers that the state will be recognized for the first time ever on an NAEI exam.

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T'was the night before Christmas, and all through Bricks Manor, not a creature was sleeping, because my neighbor's house was all the fuck on fire. I shit you not, communauts, this was one bizarre-smelling Christmas. I barely saved the fireworks I keep buried in my lawn, and Foghat took a big black Christmas shit after gorging himself on some kind of half-melted attic insulation. This Christmas wasn't lacking Santa, just sanity.

As the most plausible recorded version of that night's events goes, Omar Bricks had just settled down for a long winter's nap with his trusty basset hound Foghat at the foot of the bed, watching for gremlins, when from out by the lawn there arose such a clatter, I jumped up and screamed "What the fuck??" like a pissed-off ninja. Away to the window I flew like The Flash, not as fast but just as naked. Or was that The Streak? One of those guys. And anyway, yeah, the new house they'd just finished building on Dale's old lot was way the hell on fire.

For a second, brave thoughts of dashing in heroically and getting all my shit out of there whizzed through my brain, like a half-remembered action movie. Then I realized the flames were like forty feet high and that camping gear was borrowed anyway. Sure, I'd left some boxes of crackers and shit in there too, but they were probably all brown on one side due to the raging inferno that was lighting up the neighborhood like the Griswalds' Christmas decorations. And in all likelihood, eventually I would get more crackers.

So instead, Foghat and I broke out the lawn chairs and took in the show while those fire department nuts went all Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the roof and shot us dirty looks for not sharing our toasted marshmallows. I think we had the entire fire department for three counties out there by the end of it, those guys get on their walkie-talkies and word gets out like it's a high school kegger. Most of them were just standing on the front lawn, trying to piss out the fire with recycled lite beer, so in all likelihood those guys actually had come from a high school kegger. But just the same, some of those guys were handy with a disposable camera, meaning Foghat and I did get some killer keepsake shots posing in front of the inferno plus some action shots of us dragging drunk-assed firemen away from the blaze like we were David Bowie-sized heroes.

So all in all, it was a good time and not a bad way to spend your Christmas Eve. That is, until the next morning, when I start getting calls from some crackpot arson inspector because the wiseass finally found my missing camping stove in the smoking wreckage. What a dickhead. Like I'm going to burn down an entire house just so I can collect the insurance settlement on a shitty Coleman propane stove. That dude must've got his arson license out of a box of Honey Smacks.

Tragic as my losses in the inferno may have been, I did have the satisfaction of being proved right in the public arena. That'll teach Martha Stewart to try and tell me you can't slow cook s'mores by setting a crock pot on fire. Once those arson vultures had dug out what was left of my crock and we cracked it open like a dinosaur egg, Foghat and I chowed down on the best s'mores this side of Valhalla. Shank that, Dragon Lady.

And truth be told, I had been a little sad after they finished building that house so fast, taking away my personal playground and cash cow, or as I came to call it, The Money Pit. No more guided tours or selling rolls of fiberglass insulation to tourists as souvenirs, no more crashing through unfinished walls like the Kool-Aid guy to the glee of neighborhood kids, and no more re-living the nail gun scene from Lethal Weapon with Foghat at two in the morning. Talk about your cold shower letdowns.

But now, by the grace of God, or at least the God of crock-pot fires anyway, I'll get to live it all again like some kind of glorious re-run. 2005 already looks like it's going to be an Omar Bricks kind of year. And regardless of what those contractors have been saying, I give them lousy odds at keeping the mysteriously destructive "neighborhood vigilante" out of the construction site this second time around. The trick is that you don't have to break into a house if you can fool the construction guys into building it around you after you're already inside.

Bricks out.

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So I'm sitting there, explaining to the sheriff about how if a pizza delivery dude leaves his car running in front of your house while he jets in to bring your gaywad neighbor a pizza, it's totally kosher to sprint out and take his car for a spin for a few days or whatever, when I shit you not, that Eric Clapton reggae song comes on the radio. Right there, in the car, while the cop is leaning in my window and his breath is stank like Thai food and I'm trying to remember if Grand Theft Auto is a felony or just some shit they made up for the video game.

I'm sitting there, explaining to this dude about civil disobedience and Johnny Tremaine and all that, and about the legal precedent of Roper vs. Furley in 1968 and whatever else I can skewer onto the bullshit-kabob I'm cooking up for the guy, when I start to think I may have broken on through to the other side because there's no way this song comes on right then. I didn't even know the radio station had that record, as far as I can tell all they've got is one each from AC/DC and Pink Floyd that they picked up at a yard sale somewhere and they keep playing them again and again like your annoying ten year-old neighbor kid.

But sure as that cop's breath smelled like a loose Chinaman's ass they were playing the goddamned Clapton song. I think I may have screamed, quietly, when it came on, though I'm not sure if the cop looked uncomfortable because of that or just because he doesn't like Clapton. Not that I'd blame him, you hear all about the police backlash when shit like "Fuck Tha Police" or "Cop Killer" comes out but nobody said a word when it was "I Shot the Sheriff," even though that's about as specific as you can get. I guess they don't take it seriously when it's a white guy singing the song. Or maybe most sheriffs are just pricks and the rest of the cops are just like "Right on."

Well, just my luck this guy actually is the sheriff, and I don't think he's a Clapton fan either. Not even when Clapton jammed with the Beatles and porked George Harrison's wife, and that's some pretty cold shit. I don't know what kind of music you're into if that doesn't do it for you; maybe he was a big fan of that Mexican polka shit that's always playing in the kitchen at restaurants. I guess somebody else has got to like that stuff, since it's not like a bunch of dishwashers own radio stations.

So I'm sitting there thinking this goddamned station just sank my battleship outright, since after I hit the water fountain I really only had the cop's good graces to bank on to avoid some kind of harsh retribution. I'm not sure what the penalty is for borrowing some random pizza guy's car and using it to practice your stunt driving, but I'm sure they'd at least make you walk home, which I wasn't too excited about.

All I can say is thank God I spent my childhood on up honing the ability to lie through my teeth. They had the pizza guy's license and registration, so I started going off about how I didn't look like the picture anymore because I'd had a sex change to become a woman, you know, because I thought it would be fun to have tits and stuff. But that hadn't worked out since then I couldn't sit out on my lawn with my shirt off anymore, so I got a sex change back, but they kind of fucked it up so when I shot out of the tube I didn't look the same as I had before. You think it's like the Sneetches in that one book, but it's actually much more complicated than that, yadda yadda yadda. Yeah, maybe it wasn't Shakespeare but it wasn't too bad considering the circumstances.

Actually I'm not sure if they believed my story at all, they might have just let me go because the deputy had to pee really bad. The way he was dancing around I thought he was excited to see how the story ended, which at the time I thought was pretty stupid since all he had to do was look around to see that it ended with a Fiesta covered in piñata fragments, half-submerged in a public fountain. So in retrospect I bet I was saved mainly by the length of my story and the size of the Big Gulp weighing down on the dude's bladder.

Which you know, isn't the most badass way to get away from the cops, since it didn't involve any Panamanian gun-runners or anything, but I'll take it. Bricks out.

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