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Re: Agreed (Reply to this comment)
by vicfar
Indeed geography is a particularly sore point for Americans, surpassed only perhaps by our (or their?) generally complete ignorance of history.
We do a little better on other subjects; lack of interest in the world and in the past simply betrays two major traits of the American character: we lead the world (and therefore we don't need to know the followers), and we are projected toward the future, and therefore analyzing the past is best left to geeky Europeans.
Needless to say, both attitudes are very dangerous...
Cheers
Vittorio
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Aug 17 '05
8:38 pm PDT
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Agreed (Reply to this comment)
by MiDoyle
Vicfar:
Why this appalling ignorance of geography in a country with an international outlook, in a country that seeks to lead the world technologically, militarily, scientifically?
I think part of the problem is that, in all honesty, I don't think we are a country with an international outlook as much as the media and politicians would like to believe. The vast majority of Americans have no passport and no interest in seeing how anybody else lives. We have been encouraged to continue to think we are the best at everything without looking at the realities of how we actually live and how our actions impact others. This is why the electorate can continue to ignore inconvenient facts of this administration. Whether it be through incompetence or ignorance, we like ourselves way too much.
I got 17 of 20 by the way. cheers
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Aug 16 '05
8:02 am PDT
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Re: Re: Re: Re: My mother teaches at an inner-city school... (Reply to this comment)
by _haggis_
Man, V. Don't go picking on sports. Without sports how would we learn how to scratch ourselves and spit?
Hags
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Jun 30 '05
2:11 pm PDT
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Re: Re: Re: My mother teaches at an inner-city school... (Reply to this comment)
by vicfar
OCF,
you just read my mind. My rant against sports is in the works! It will be one of my next ones...
Vittorio
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Jun 29 '05
8:43 pm PDT
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Re: Re: My mother teaches at an inner-city school... (Reply to this comment)
by oldcomixfan
It would be even more impressive if you could spontaneously point out from the top of your {and a talk show host's} head: Rupes Recta, Oceanus Procellarum, Olympus Mons, Maurolycus, Sinus Sabaeus and Phil Donahue's mysterious and elusive Bald Spot. And this is why 94.653% of average American guests automatically assume the host is a genius after spotting a copy of Sky and Telescope sitting on the coffee table while 97.3542% of them can't find their home state right beneath their feet. It works every time even if you do get lost on regular occasions after crossing the county line.
You want to know what I think is fundamentally wrong with our schools regardless of how much money is alledgedly spent on them? Too much emphasis on sports. It's rarely a comment of "how's the kid doing in Biology {or Geography, etc.}" and more like, "so, is that son/daughter of yours gonna go all the way to the state finals this season?" whenever the parents bump into each other at the Supercenter. The Chess Club is for sissies, as per usual stereotype, and their exciting victories and agonizing defeats are never ever mentioned at all out of deep shame.
The Chess And Geography teams need cheerleaders and pep rallies too, dammit!
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Jun 29 '05
7:38 pm PDT
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Re: My mother teaches at an inner-city school... (Reply to this comment)
by vicfar
V.,
good comment, but regardless of the subtleties of interpretation, the answer is hardly surprising: Americans don't know geography. I already knew that. I live here.
All you have to do is put a blank map of America in front of someone and ask him to identify the states. It was done to me when I was a postdoc, and everyone was amazed when I got them all 50 correct. None of the Americans did that, and a guy from California could only identify 7-8 states! He had no idea where NY state was...
A survey I heard about on TV a long ago stated that only 10% of Americans can identify the capital of Canada, our neighbor. Canadians are not much better, because only 50% of Albertans knew the capital of British Columbia (the province next door)! Mexico, apparently, is just as bad, judging by the survey.
It is a peculiar American problem: we do not believe in a curriculum, which is what Italy had when I grew up. There were things which every Italian had to know, like basic historical things (almost every Italian knows the exact day when Charlemagne was crowned, or the day when Italy entered WWI), or basic geography (like where the 5 continents are, or the capitals of the Italian regions, or the 5 longest rivers and where they flow). There are songs, poems, mnemonic tools to help you with that.
What is amazing in the US is the huge disparity between one school district and another...there are indeed kids who know a lot of geography (my son challenges me in geography games), but the majority of Americans are deficient even on the very basic facts that this survey explored.
It is a general lack of interest in the world at large that Americans have. Europe is for tourists. And, whereas Italians are curious about political events or elections in France or the US, very few Americans even give a minute of thought about what might be happening in France or Italy - as a matter of fact these countries are not even in their radar screen unless they are sitting in a restaurant.
This "closeness", this "insularity" is typically American, and I doubt that it exists anywhere in the world (even Japan opened its doors!)...
BTW, I apologize also for starting a sentence with "And", but I have news for people: it is allowed in English, even though only to convey a special emphasis and not routinely...
Thanks for the comment
Vittorio
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Jun 29 '05
11:00 am PDT
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Re: hey there Vittorio... (Reply to this comment)
by vicfar
Tom,
thanks for the comment. I agree with you that a major problem lies with family life, but TV and other tools make it more and more difficult to reclaim your children vs. when I was a kid, especially since in most families the woman also works.
I also had to think about Christianity, and mentally tally the populations of the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe, South America, the Philippines, etc...because I know there are a lot of Hindus out there! But it came to well over a billion, in the end.
The education problem is a big one, I know, and I don't have a solution. I just think it should receive a higher priority than it currently has.
Vittorio
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Jun 29 '05
10:41 am PDT
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My mother teaches at an inner-city school... (Reply to this comment)
by verbatima
Not all the money ostensibly spent on education is, umm, spent on education. I don't know about other places, but the public school system in NYC is extremely corrupt. The Board of Ed (now the "Department of Ed", same difference), gets enormous funding, but very little of it trickles down to the children and the teachers. The administration is overbloated with sinecures, and bureaucrats are not only paid enormous salaries, on par with top-level fed. officials, but enjoy numerous perks, from complementary chauffeurs to conferences in "the Islands". In fact, the schools are the very bottom link in the food chain -- they get whatever is left of the money after the bureaucrats are sated. And it isn't much. (Sorry to have started a sentence with an "and".)
Then again, statistics can be analyzed from so many different angles. I noticed, for example, that while most European students could find Sweden on the map, their performance was considerably weaker on the El Nino question. The countries with the best performance on the religion question also happen to be the most uniformly Christian, with fewest immigrants of other religions; while countries with large immigrant and/or non-Christian populations scored lower. This just goes to show that no matter where you live, the local picture will invariably affect people's view of the world at large. (By the way, the definition of Christianity has the potential for creating confusion, because in the United States, the media and even educational literature often segregate "Christianity" from Catholicism for some reason. I think it's incorrect, but it may affect people's performance on the question.) Finally, surprisingly few Swedes (considering their overall performance) knew where the Pacific Ocean was.
There is another wrinkle in the statistics. Unlike in many other countries, schools in the United States are funded with local taxes -- which is to say, they are not funded uniformly. How the funds are distributed (i.e. bureaucrats vs. schools) is also decided, to a large extent, on the local level. Differences between the quality of education in schools which are, sometimes, only a few miles apart, can be drastic. This raises the question of how the "random pool" of survey participants was chosen; in this country, to get a truly random group, the survey administrators would need to take participants from different geographic areas and different school districts. Unfortunately, the NG site does not disclose that information.
Then again, what do I know about evaluating statistics? I am an ex-French major, for crying out loud -- and a graduate of an NYC public school from a working-class neighborhood, to boot.
Regards,
V.
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Jun 29 '05
10:10 am PDT
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hey there Vittorio... (Reply to this comment)
by sleeper54
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you said...
" . . .I had no trouble getting a 100% score, and I am sure most people on this site would score the same."
I missed the dang religion question..! Fetch my dunce cap..!!
Our community school district is in the middle of a multi-hundred million dollar construction/reconstruction 'Schools First' program financed by a one cent sales tax surcharge.
Several years into the project, it has become apparent that decreasing sales tax receipts will not fund the total program as originally planned. Great planning and leadership by our elected school board leaders.
Of course, test scores and overall achievement levels continue to drop despite all this money being spent on public education.
Public education as practiced today is a rat hole. Parents need to reclaim control of their children and their education. As it is today the whole system challenges the top ten percent, pulls along the bottom ten percent and ignores the middle eighty percent.
Not a recipe for a quality future.
...tom...
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Jun 28 '05
10:14 pm PDT
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