International Herald Tribune Editorial - America, the exam

International Herald Tribune Editorial - America, the exam
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: December 26, 2006


Name one famous battle from the Revolutionary War. Name one of the major American Indian tribes in the United States. Name one of the things that Abraham Lincoln did.

If you can answer these questions, you may be qualified to become an American citizen. If you can't, you may be one already.

This is one of the oddities exposed by an effort to overhaul the naturalization exam. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services wants to make the test more meaningful at a time when the civics knowledge of native- born Americans is dismal. The aim is to encourage applicants not to memorize trivia, like the colors and number of stripes on the flag, but to understand the basic history and core principles of American democracy.

That goal is sensible, though not everybody is happy about it. Immigrant advocacy groups fear that the new test will be too hard, requiring a competency in English out of the reach of many new arrivals. Some advocates have complained that the cities chosen at random for the experiment are unrepresentative of the immigrant population. The agency somehow missed New York City and all of California, which is ample reason for Asians, especially, to feel left out of the process.

Immigrants are famously rich in gumption; they need it to handle what the bureaucracy throws at them. But if they make it, they will have a credible claim to knowing a lot more about America's history and laws than the average man and woman in the street.

With that in mind, Americans may want to start boning up. Here are the agency's suggested answers for the sample questions above.

1) Lexington and Concord, Trenton, Princeton, Saratoga, Cowpens, Yorktown, Bunker Hill.

2) A partial list: Cherokee, Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, Iroquois, Shawnee, Mohegan, Chippewa, Huron, Oneida, Sioux, Cheyenne, Lakota, Crow, Blackfoot, Teton, Navajo, Apache, Pueblo, Hopi, Inuit.

3) Saved the union; freed the slaves; led the United States during the Civil War.