This summer, I involuntarily became part of a very brief social survey of the American educational system that was, to put it mildly, a humbling experience.

I was sitting in an English pub, sipping my cider, minding my own business when an Englishman—an Oxford student, nonetheless—approached me and asked if I knew where Greenland is.

” Greenland?,” I replied bravely. “Any idiot knows where…”

Guess what. I had to think about it. The only reason I could answer him at all was because I remembered John Lennon. When asked by a reporter how he found America, Lennon replied “Turn left at Greenland.”

So I managed to skim by that question, but my intellectual esteem did not emerge entirely unscathed. To be honest, there are relatively few countries that I could point out on a globe and I have to admit I’d be lucky to fill in a U.S. map and get all 50 continental states in the right place.

Now before you come to the conclusion that I’m simply an acute ignoramus (which may be the case anyway), humor me and see if you can answer any of the following questions:

What is the Pythagorean theorem? List three qualifications to be a U.S. senator. How many Supreme Court justices are there? List five of the 10 rights in the Bill of Rights. Name five of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence. Where is Burma? What is the modern name for Cambodia?

The fact is, a majority of American college graduates would have a difficult time answering any of these questions. At one time, surveys predicted that only 30 percent of college freshmen could locate the continental U.S. on a globe.

This month’s Time magazine reports that there are 700,000 Americans with 12 years of education who can not comprehend a newspaper or fill out a job application.

It’s easy to drop all these problems and figures into the laps of our educators but the problem, as we at NIU should well know, is not with the educators but with the lack of federal support behind them.

During the Reagan years, according to Time, defense spending has risen 37 percent to annual levels of nearly $300 billion while funding for education was reduced 20 percent. So what they’re basically saying is the U.S. is headed toward having enough military power to destroy the world 10 times over but no one to read the instruction mannuals?!

Maybe that’s not as absurd as it sounds. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like much is going to be done about the lack of federal support for education because there simply isn’t enough push from those most effected—us.

Responsibility for educational funding is generally passed to the state and local levels where, even with tax increases, there will never be enough money to generate long-term changes in the quality of our schools.

Buildings need to be maintained and, in many cases, reconstructed; resources and modern equipment needs to be introduced to public schools to keep students on top of current technological advances; salaries need to be increased to maintain quality faculty and to attract up and coming college graduates to the teaching profession.

Throughout the 1988 presidential campaign, neither Bush nor Dukakis has yet outlined a program that has a feasible pricetag or a strategy that holds water.

The primary objective of any political candidate is to obtain votes. Unfortunately, college-age voters have the lowest percentage of turnout at the polls.

Think about yourself seriously for a moment as a future graduate, a future parent, perhaps even a future teacher. The strengthening of this country depends upon its youth, and our next president will need to feel the pressure from voters before we begin to see reasonable levels of federal support for education at all levels.

Hopefully, when the time comes to vote, we’ll not only show up, but we’ll be informed enough to make the right choice—at least with regard to the issues that most involve us.