As I was watching an episode of the 1995 cartoon Pinky and the Brain, this scene came up as they are coming up with another scheme to take over the world. After laughing at the joke, I began to wonder how true this statement actually was. Were Americans really uneducated on geography or was this just an over exaggerated joke on the unintelligence of Americans?
Similar
to what Brain said during his comedic remark, the graphs and charts above and to the right show
some of the statistics that were found through the survey. Almost everyone in
the survey could locate his or her own country, the US, on a world map. This
being said though, 6% of the 520 people in the survey could not identify it,
which is about 31 people. 135 people could not identify Australia on a world
map, even though it’s also a continent. Even worse, 390 out of the 520 people
in the survey could not identify Indonesia. That is 3 out of 4 people they
surveyed. Statistics for Indonesia are close to the statistics they found for other
various Asian countries. Even within the US, some of the 520 could not identify
all of the states presented correctly. On average, they only identified half of
the 7 states correctly.
With
the continuing globalization of the world, it has been increasingly more
important to be knowledgeable about other countries. Recent technological
advancements have allowed people from different countries and cultures to
interact in less than a second. So why does the American society not find
geography very important? Geography is not a mandatory core requirement for
schools like math, science, and English are across the country. Some experts
believe that the cause of this lack of knowledge is due to the fact that our
education emphasizes performance and achievement over knowledge. Although many
schools are increasing the amount of upper level courses, the US student
performance is still lower than many other countries in science and math
literacy (Newman 2014). Even with high scoring students, many of them study to
the test and forget all the information afterwards. Instead of rewarding
students with the greatest knowledge, our education system rewards students
that are good test takers. Another reason for Americans testing so lowly for
science, math, and geography is that our society is so focused on entertainment
and celebrities that being knowledgeable of global and even national issues has
less value than knowing who is married to whom. Even those who have earned some
type of college degree still do not know some basic geography.
As a whole, the American society
does not find geography and other content areas important, which is why there
is not an emphasis on courses in these areas at schools. This is not due to the
individuals in this survey being unintelligent, but a lack of societal
institutions making this information seem necessary for the increasing
globalization in the 21st century.
I find it interesting as to why people in the USA do not have much knowledge about global geography. As a country we are very involved with issues concerning many different countries, I wonder as to why we are so unknowledgeable about these topics. We are exposed to so much social media that are focused on celebrities, beauty products, and "perfect individuals" that we choose to put out focus on that and make that the most important things in our life. While other things such as the geography of the world and other things that go on around the world, that might actually affect us are put off to the back of our minds.
ReplyDeleteComing from someone who has lived over seas their entire life, primarily in Africa I can sympathize with this. Living in the US I have gone from living in countries like Mozambique, and Kenya to living in Africa. Many people I have encountered in the US have a very limited knowledge about Africa, so much so that Africa is generally seen as a country instead of a continent. Originally when I came to school at Lewis and Clark I introduced myself as coming from Maputo, Mozambique which gives people both the city and country in which I lived. Unfortunately as I previously stated many people did not know where this is, so as time went on I began simply saying I was from Africa. What I found that separates those who understood that Africa was more than just "Africa" almost spoken in terms of a country, was whether or not they asked the simple question of where in Africa or what country in Africa I was from.
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine back in high school did a study similar to this and had very similar results. It seems to me that lack of geographical knowledge can be attributed to two primary factors. First, is the separation of America, or more specifically the American public, from many world events. We feel so distanced that sometimes it's easy to forget that America isn't the entire world. Second, I feel a lot of this lack of knowledge comes from the over generalization of media when regarding world events. For example, how many times have we heard the words "Middle East" thrown around, rather than the name of a specific country?
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