If you ever need a primer on why young people don’t vote, especially in mid-term elections, then you’ll want to watch the below video. If the students interviewed in the video are indicative of young Americans as a whole – and we have no reason to think otherwise – then we’re doing something wrong. A Texas Tech student group called PoliTech decided to go around campus and interview random students, asking them questions about basic U.S. facts that everyone not living in complete solitude should know, followed by questions about celebrities in the movies and on television. Specifically, they were asked who won the Civil War, what nation America gained her independence from and who the vice-president is. We’re guessing that most of you answered these questions in the time it took to read this far. Another set of questions were asked about pop culture: What TV show does “Snooki” star in, who is actor Brad Pitt married to, and who was he married to previously? Guess which questions were the hardest for these young people to answer? Most of the students just said, “I don’t know” to the first set of questions. Or if they did try to answer, they further embarrassed themselves. Who won the Civil War? “America!” Who is the Vice President? “Is that a trick question?” But when asked the questions about Snooki, the same students who could not tell us who our current Vice-President is had no trouble saying, “Jersey Shore!” Or naming the two people Brad Pitt has been married to. Is it not a sad state of affairs when so many Americans know about Brad Pitt’s marriage history, but cannot name our current Vice-President? It’s Joe Biden, by the way. Just in case you didn’t know that, you heard it here first. Spread the word. We realize that this is a Texas university, but they are not at all alone in their ignorance. This video could have been shot anywhere in the country, with roughly the same results. Right now, there are students who attend some our most prestigious universities who have no clue who our VP is or much less about basic U.S. history. When the PoliTech group made the video, they were quickly criticized by other students at Texas Tech for singling them out as dumb and ignorant, so the group put out the below statement: “We are confident that if we were to perform this same experiment in any other university in the nation, we would receive similar answers,” PoliTech said in the statement. “Could these students have answered these questions correctly if they were on a written exam? We believe so. But the video shows that political matters are not what’s currently on college student’s minds. Instead, they are pre-occupied with useless pop-culture that is constantly being fed to them by today’s media.” That last sentence is key. We realize that pop culture in general is more exciting to follow for many people than learning about U.S. history, but there is absolutely no reason why so many people are clueless about who our VP is. Watch it below, and feel free to do many double face-palms as you do so.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 14:48:45 +0000