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Consider the following results from recent tests:
Just 22% of high school seniors had a "proficient" understanding of how the American government works.
And only one in 25 scored at the "advanced" level.
Just one in four seniors could think of just two ways the US system of government prevents the exercise of "absolute arbitrary power." (Among the 14 possible answers were such basics as the Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military - and the right to vote.)
A third of high school seniors didn't know the Bill of Rights was written to limit the power of the federal government.
Not one in ten seniors could identify two ways a democracy benefits from the active participation of its citizens.
Just over a third knew that the Supreme Court pointed to the Constitution's 14th Amendment when it began to overturn segregation laws.
Nearly three of every four students don't think about the First Amendment or say they take its rights for granted.
Seventy-five percent of students said they thought flag burning was illegal, nearly 50 percent believed the government could censor the Internet, and many students didn't think newspapers should publish freely.
In other tests, an obscene proportion of high school seniors couldn't find Iraq on a map, and only a slightly smaller group couldn't locate Mexico.
College seniors - from such schools as Yale, Northwestern, Smith and Bowdoin - don't fare any better.
For example, only 23 percent of this college group was able to correctly identify James Madison as the "Father of the Constitution," while 98 percent knew that Snoop Doggy Dog is a rapper and the same percentage correctly identified Beavis and Butthead!
The moral of this story is that if Americans had to pass the same test as the one being proposed for immigrants, most of us would find ourselves getting deported.
But the solution is not eliminating the test for immigrants - my late mother-in-law would have applauded this idea. The solution is educating Americans.
In virtually every international comparative test of Americans' knowledge of critical subjects, the US scores behind most industrialized countries in most subjects.
Today, most of the public discussion centers around our deficits in science and technology. Bill Gates and many others have pointed out that more than half the engineers working in America today came here from somewhere else. And that the number of foreign graduate students at American universities has dropped like a stone since 9/11.
Of course science and technology are important.
But how effective are these tekkies - whether immigrant or native-born - likely to be as citizens if they are clueless about what America is, what it stands for, how it got to where it is, and how to participate in fixing it.
Think about it: When was the last time you heard about an American school at any level starting a class in civics?
Civics - the word itself has practically become a dinosaur in our lexicon - has gone the way of teaching art and music in our public schools.
But civics teaches us to be good citizens.
Like Esther, the immigrant.
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