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The danger there is that the people who write the test end up having some power. They can choose a biased set of questions or even demand wrong/biased answers.

The danger there is that the people who write the test end up having some power. They can choose a biased set of questions or even demand wrong/biased answers. Being political issues, often nobody knows the right answers anyway. So we'd need elections to choose who writes the tests and then who gets to vote for them? The great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people. It's a way to thrash out difficult decisions where the people deciding are the same people who end up affected by them. There are gaps in this idea of course, like persecuting minorities and voters being more concerned about their tribal membership

caseysoftware 9y ago
You're very correct. In the US, we've had variations of that in the US under the guise of a literacy test.[1] Promoting "understanding" sounds like a great idea until the test itself is made a weapon against groups that are considered "undesirable" by the majority of the populace. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
warrenm 9y ago
> great thing about democracy is that no matter what goes wrong to the country internally, the blame lies with the people who voted for those politicians, or didn't bother to vote, which is most people In the abstract, this is true. In the perception, it's always the leaders that screwed up - or whomever they can blame. In democracy, as with most politics, perception is reality