NP - Could you pass latest citizenship test?

[alice wellintown]

Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it
accumulates in the form of inert facts.

— Henry Brooks Adams

The Education of Henry Adams

Perhaps a person who applies for citizenship needn't know all those
specific and inert facts about the nation's past or even how its
political machinery works.

Why do citizens need to know that Martha Washington was a good host
and that George smoked hemp with Dixon & Mason?


I'd be more impressed if a candidate for citizenship could read
Banneker's letter to Jefferson and explain what its historical
significance and the impact of Banneker's use of irony or recite E.E.
Cumminings' poem "next to of course god america i" and explain its
significance and its irony.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h71t.html


"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water