We Need to Learn Our History, Not Just Make the Citizenship Test Harder
The Trump Administration recently announced its intent to toughen up the U.S. citizenship test, with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow stating that the current test is “just too easy.”
Truth be told, more than 90% of those seeking to become U.S. citizens successfully pass the test in question. Individuals seeking to become Americans take much care in preparing for this exam, studying hundreds of questions in sample test banks and taking classes, all in the hopes of becoming an American citizen.
While Edlow may see, as he stated, the need to require applicants to write an essay on what it means to be an American or a need for the federal government to “really understand whether someone has a true attachment to the Constitution,” he is missing the much larger issue we have.
That issue is a simple, yet frightening, one. Yes, we can clutch our pearls about how much immigrants must know about our nation in order to gain U.S. citizenship. Or we can take a long, hard, honest look at how immigrants seeking citizenship now know far more about our nation, its history, and its government than our natural-born citizens.
For the last eight years, I have been surveying Americans about what they know about American history, using only questions that can be found on practice tests for the U.S. citizenship exam. What have we learned? Only 4 in 10 (42%) could pass the test, answering 12 of 20 questions correctly, according to the most recent national surveys from the Driving Force Institute. And for those under the age of 45, only 27% scored a passing grade.
And that’s on a multiple-choice exam, where they are literally given the correct answer in a choice of four. For those seeking actual citizenship, not such options are provided.
That means the majority of Americans can’t pass the citizenship test. That only 17% knew what year the U.S. Constitution was ratified. That less than half (43%) knew that Woodrow Wilson was our president during World War I. That only 43% knew that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a general during World War II, with 12% insisting he commanded troops during the Civil War. And that despite all of our talk about the U.S. Supreme Court these days, only 51% know that we have nine justices on the Court.
We should be embarrassed by how little we collectively know about the nation we either love or loathe. Regardless, we should be ashamed that our opinions and social media posts and TikToks about our representative democracy are largely based on a collective ignorance of the topics on which we are declaring our expertise.
Next July, we celebrate our nation’s 250th birthday. Fifty years ago, during our bicentennial in 1976, we came together to embrace our national history and our national culture. In addition to the parades and lectures and celebrations, CBS Television broadcast a series of “Bicentennial Minutes,” a series of one-minute videos highlighting significant moments in our nation’s history. These videos, along with the Schoolhouse Rocks! segments that began broadcasting in 1973, served as the foundation for educating an entire generation (Gen X, for those wondering) on all things history and government (not to mention grammar).
Fifty years later, it is time to recapture that lightning in a bottle. The 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation is a time for celebration, for reflection, and for learning. It is time to teach all who call the United States home about our essential people, places, events, and artifacts, as well as the untold stories that are largely left out of the textbooks. The textbooks that have failed to teach American history to generations of learners, books that have struggled to show that history should be interesting and relevant to all of us.
Five years ago, we launched the Driving Force Institute to transform the teaching and learning of American history. Building on the successes of projects like Schoolhouse Rocks! and Bicentennial Minutes, DFI produces short films, each about two minutes long, on American history, government, and civics. All films are available online, all are available for free, and all demonstrate the value of history and our knowledge of it. At 62 million users and counting, DFI is now the largest producer of American history education films in the world. By July 4, 2026, more than 1,000 short films will be available to all. The perfect gift for our 250th.
Rather than trying to seek ways to make it harder for individuals to become citizens, we should be directing our attentions to addressing our collective deficiency in American history knowledge. We should be doing more, across all mediums, to make history interesting for all learners. We should be doing more to demonstrate that our nation’s history is relevant to all, regardless of what they might think. We should do more so that we are all thinking like historians, asking questions, pursuing knowledge, and seeking out the information we need to be successful students, workers, and citizens. And we should do more to ensure that we are learning American history.
If we are to build a stronger and more equitable nation, if we are to continually improve our civil society, if we are to make the most of our representative democracy, we must learn, understand, embrace, and apply our history. The good and the bad, the dark and the inspirational, all of it.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “We are not makers of history. We are made by history.” It is time we understand from what we are made. And when 60% of us cannot pass a basic history test, we are far from that understanding.
