I thought as I got older that my fears in life would become less. It just doesn’t seem to work that way even with knowledge and common sense on my side.

Like many of you, my fears are probably considered irrational. Topping my list of scary things are: spiders, falling and breaking a hip, heights, distracted drivers on cellphones and school shootings.

My list has actually grown to include uninformed voters. And something I saw the other day really put the fright into my night. I was watching an on-the-street news reporter asking college age students some rather simple questions. It was their answers to his inquiries that really scared me.

Question: What is the capital of the United States? One out of three people answered correctly that Washington, D.C. is our nation’s capital. Two others answered New York City. What?

This same generation of so-called scholars also did not know how many dimes are in one dollar. One answered: four quarters. While that is technically correct, quarters are not dimes.

On the political side of questioning, only one out of three also could name the current vice president of the United States. The name of Vice President J.D. Vance escaped the minds of the others who said they voted during the last presidential election. Obviously they didn’t know who they did or did not vote for in 2024.

This lack of basic knowledge about the country in which they live really has me afraid. It’s one thing to just not care about who you cast a ballot for or even if you vote, but it’s another thing to have no idea what you are doing when you enter the voting booth.

Be afraid, be very afraid if this is the majority of our future voters. It’s been a very long time since I was in a classroom setting. So I have to wonder what is being taught in our schools today with regards to the basics. I do know that test scores in our country among our younger students are somewhat abysmal compared to other countries.

There is a lot of finger-pointing as to the reasons behind student failure. While parents are always considered our first teachers, not all parents are equipped to help their children with STEM projects or trigonometry. Educators, too, are often put upon to be the cure-all for each student’s particular weakness in the classroom.

Somewhere there has to be a balance that protects our children from simply moving on to the next grade regardless of his or her ability to read. Some things are just unacceptable.

I don’t claim to be all-knowing. I make mistakes. Math was never my best subject, but I know how to balance a checkbook and figure percentages off when shopping.

Let’s aim to do better for the future of our country and get back to teaching the basics of life.

And for the record, there are 10 dimes in a dollar.

Heather Ziegler can be reached via email at hziegler@theintelligencer.net.