Not to be offensive... why do Americans have such a poor sense of geography?

Thread Necromancy! Oh the horrors!

 

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What do you think?

 

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I think all relevant factors were included in the stats I posted.

 

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Is that why credit history is so unimportant in financial transactions?

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You wanna post the credit rating of the US? Feel Free.

A poster made an erroneous statement about the wealth of a group of nations - I corrected him/her on it. Feel free to do the same, if you think you can.

 

I would be more interested in the aggregate dollars circulating in the world, or the M3 as it is called by the US Federal Reserve. Any idea what the current figures are?

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Why?

Nope.

 

I went to country school from 4th to 8th grade. My teacher hammered geography and we did stamp collecting. Got to town school and I was a GENIUS in geography compared to my classmates.

An engineer I worked with (foreigner) was amazed also. He said he had never met an American that knew where Sri Lanka was and that it used to be Ceylon. As an American, that embarrassed me.

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Your post suffers from the same misconception as many of the others in this thread - that of assuming that your own story is indicative of some type of statistic. It isn't. Barring further details about your conversations with this "foreigner", we can't know how many people he's surveyed or who they were. For that matter, you haven't even told us where he was from.

The only thing we know about him, thus far, is that he has a position which isn't likely to give him lots of face time with the public.

 

What!? :wtf:
Where did I mention a single number to even hint at a statistic? I just typed a personal experience story. The 'foreigner' wasn't doing a survey. He wasn't keeping track of the Americans who knew geography. Maybe he might have if he knew there was gonna be a quiz later.

Quit trying to translate and assume I'm saying something I'm not.

 

Can someone please tell me a real world situation in which it would be essential to know that Sri Lanka used to be Ceylon? Exactly. I know what I have to, none of that obscure shit that you'll never use.

 

These personal anecdotes are basically worthless to the thread.

 

Anybody come up with any answers for the above yet?

 

Certainly helps to know which country you're fighting with.

 

My only point was, why do people restart these threads after they've clearly gone into the discard pile called page 2 and above. I'm surprised that you even found this thread, to be honest, lol.

 

Uh-Uh

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While Chasers is a biased source, They did feature a video in which Americans could not recognize that the map was wrong as everything was in the wrong place. I honestly can't claim to know all 50 states, but i do know all 6 states and 2 territories of Australia. and i most definitely know the capitals of all the nations the U.S has been at war with. And I'm only 15.

 

To be fair, many in Ireland often seem to be a little unclear at times as to the name and scope of their nearest neighbour nation-state. (That'd be "the United Kingdom", or if you really want to be irredentist about the Norn Situation(TM), "Britain". "England" doesn't even have a formal legal or political existence as such, despite its widespread popularity as a metonym for UK/GB.)

 

On the one hand, it's my experience that Europeans aren't really as much better about this stuff as they claim to be. I live in one of the largest cities in the United States, and the lion's share of Europeans I've met while travelling have never even heard of it. The few that have are unable to place it on a map with any accuracy at all - they end up pointing to spots a thousand miles away, typically in Mexico.

Likewise, knowledge of geography isn't just about being able to name the capitals of countries or locate them on a map. Just as important is understanding the relative sizes of different entities, their terrain and climate, latitude, demographics, etc. And this is, again, an area in which people who like to bitch about American geogrpahical ignorance display marked ignorance of American geography. Knowing that we're that big country in the middle of North America, and being able to point out NY, DC and LA, doesn't really add up to much. You still end up with fools who think one can drive from CA to FL in a day, or visit Northern and Southern CA in a single day, or make a day trip from SF to the Grand Canyon, etc. And I can't tell you how many Europeans have asked me, with a straight face, about my experience as an immigrant to the US, when they learn that I grew up in NM. The fact that I speak with an American accent doesn't even slow them down.

Lastly, geographic knowledge of the facts-and-figures type is highly forgettable. It's not really an education issue (everyone I went to school with was forced to memorize the locations and capitals of every country in the world, every state in the US, etc.) - it's that these sorts of rote facts are quickly forgotten when they aren't used for anything, and the geography of, say, the Caucausus just doesn't come up much in the daily lives of the vast majority of Americans. As, I imagine, the geography of, say, the St. Laurence Seaway doesn't come up very often in the daily life of most, say, Russians.

 

"One of the largest" meaning what? Largest ten? Largest hundred? Largest thousand?

While I wouldn't entirely disagree with you -- witness my pointing out that the thread-starter made an error of a somewhat similar nature to the very one he was complaining about/mocking USonians for -- I think you're somewhat in danger of equating "knowledge of US geography" and "knowledge of non-US geography in its entirety", as fields of equal significance and scope. Is not knowing all the US state capitals quite on a par with not being quite sure of the difference between a country and a continent, for example?

As defences of Americans against charges of insularity and exceptionalism go, that one could itself be seen as somewhat, well, insular and exceptionalist.