What are your rights? 'D'oh'

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Most Americans have an easier time naming members of the cartoon Simpson family than listing the five freedoms granted by the nation's founders, a survey by a museum released on Wednesday said.

Here's a hint: one of them is not the right to own and raise pets, an error committed by one in five respondents.

Half of 1,000 Americans randomly surveyed by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum could name at least two of the five members of Fox Television's Simpson family, the stars of the network's long-running show.

But just 28 percent of respondents could name more than one of the five freedoms listed in the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment -- about the same proportion that could name all five Simpson family members or could recall the three judges on Fox TV's top-rated "American Idol."

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In case you forgot, the Simpson clan's names are Homer (owner of that exclamation of ignorance, "D'oh"), Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie.

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"It took hundreds of millions of dollars to turn American education around in that short a period of time. Where did the money that inflamed this epidemic come from? How was it spent? How did the mainstream of experimental psychology meet up with a mainstream of millions of dollars?

The answer, it must be admitted, is enough to make one feel distinctly uneasy. The new psychology tapped the richest existing vein of American wealth and philanthropy and, in short order, won for itself the backing of almost unlimited funds. Here were its new buildings, its endowments, its publications, its research facilities, transportation, salaries - the wherewithal to spread like wildfire throughout the entire fabric of American education.

The checks were to emanate not from the uptown headquarters of Columbia Teachers College in New York City's Morningside Heights, but from No. 26 Broadway, around the corner from the financial capitol of the world on Wall Street.

No. 26 Broadway was the most famous business address in the country, perhaps in the world. It was the corporate home of the Standard Oil Company, owned and operated by John D. Rockefeller, Sr. The story of how the resources of the great oil monopoly came to be used in the spread of a new psychology covers a period of some 40 years, and begins with Mr. Rockefeller himself."

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Educational results far exceeded those of modern schools. One has only to read old debates in the Congressional Record or scan the books published in the 1800's to realize that our ancestors of a century ago commanded a use of the language far superior to our own. Students learned how to read not comic books, but the essays of Burke, Webster, Lincoln, Horace, Cicero. Their difficulties with grammar were overcome long before they graduated from school, and any review of a typical elementary school arithmetic textbook printed before 1910 shows dramatically that students were learning mathematical skills that few of our current high school graduates know anything about. The high school graduate of 1900 was an educated person, fluent in his language, history, and culture, possessing the skills he needed in order to succeed.

A similar view of the power of philanthropy was expressed by Board trustee Walter Hines Page (later to become editor of the Atlantic Monthly, ambassador to Great Britain, and early advocate of America's entry into World War I) to the first executive secretary of the Board, Wallace Buttrick:

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In case you forgot, the Simpson clan's names are Homer (owner of that exclamation of ignorance, "D'oh"), Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie.