If the overarching goal of public education is to produce good citizens, the idea currently being floated by Attorney General Derek Schmidt makes a lot of sense.

Schmidt said he was inspired by efforts of the Joe Foss Institute to make passing a U.S. citizenship exam a high school graduation requirement in all 50 states, but his suggestion is more moderate. Schmidt recently asked the Kansas State Board of Education to integrate the test that immigrants applying for U.S. citizenship must take into the state’s middle school curriculum. Rather than making passage of the test a requirement for graduation, he suggested a voluntary program in which middle school students would be rewarded in some way for passing the exam.

The questions on the citizenship test are not complex. A sample test on the Joe Foss website asks how many members serve in the U.S. House, the name of one state that borders Mexico, who wrote the Declaration of Independence, one cause of the Civil War, the legal voting age, etc. Yet, various studies indicate that many Americans couldn’t answer those questions.

A national survey conducted last year by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania found that only about a third of respondents could name all three branches of the federal government and about a third couldn’t name even one. Only about a quarter of those surveyed knew that a presidential veto could be overridden by a two-thirds vote of the House and Senate. About a fifth of Americans incorrectly thought a 5-4 Supreme Court decision is sent back to Congress for reconsideration.

America has a glorious democracy, but the ability of that democracy to function depends on informed citizens who vote and participate in their government. Obviously, many Americans don’t have the basic knowledge to do that.

In outlining his request, Schmidt said he didn’t know whether civics education has declined in Kansas and the U.S., “but I know they are not where all of us would want them to be.”

Knowing how the government operates and how to participate in it is a basic life skill for all Americans. Requiring passage of a citizenship test for high school graduation doesn’t seem unreasonable, but setting up a voluntary testing program in middle school is at least a step in the right direction.