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Home Front
Survey: 85 percent of young Americans could not find Iraq on a map
2003-02-18
Survey Results: U.S. Young Adults Are Lagging
They always seem to be lagging, don't they? Until they throw somebody like Sammy out on his ear.
Despite the daily bombardment of news from the Middle East, Central Asia, and other world trouble spots, roughly 85 percent of young Americans could not find Afghanistan, Iraq, or Israel on a map, according to a new study.
Hope the pilots know where to drop the bombs
Sounds like an indictment of the schools, not of the students. If you don't teach geography — not the hardest subject ever — why would you expect kids to know where Bhutan or Swaziland or Iraq is? It takes less than an hour to learn to read a world map, and less than a week to become passingly familiar with its contents. Maybe if schools took a little time off from group hugs that'd happen?
Americans ages 18 to 24 came in next to last among nine countries in the National Geographic-Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey, which quizzed more than 3,000 young adults in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States. Top scorers were young adults in Sweden, Germany, and Italy. Out of 56 questions that were asked across all countries surveyed, on average young Americans answered 23 questions correctly. Others outside the U.S., most notably young adults in Mexico, also struggled with basic geography facts. Young people in Canada and Great Britain fared almost as poorly as those in the U.S.
Gosh. You think that might have something to do with the way those countries are situated? If you live in Luxembourg and border France, Germany and Belgium, you tend to have more of an awareness of borders. Britain borders no one, and they can still find France and, in the summertime, Spain.
Among young Americans’ startling knowledge gaps, the study found that
  • nearly 30 percent of those surveyed could not find the Pacific Ocean, the world’s largest body of water;
  • more than half—56 percent—were unable to locate India, home to 17 percent of people on Earth; and
  • only 19 percent could name four countries that officially acknowledge having nuclear weapons.
Several perhaps interrelated factors affected performance—educational experience (including taking a geography course), international travel and language skills, a varied diet of news sources, and Internet use. Americans who reported that they accessed the Internet within the last 30 days scored 65 percent higher than those who did not.
No wonder that most Americans here on board are trigger happy, when they don't even know which country the US is going to attack, it must be like packman on the PC.
Posted by:Murat

#23  Maps? They're still using maps? Who needs maps, we got GPS .... and lasers ..... and J-Dams. We'll find what we need to. ;^)
Posted by: Jabba the Tutt   2003-02-18 23:16:08  

#22  Marat sounds like those peace queers who want to save the "Iraqi people"by.........keeping Saddam in power.
Posted by: Hugh Jorgan   2003-02-18 22:48:24  

#21  I don't think Murat could find his ass with a map.
Posted by: tu3031   2003-02-18 12:00:57  

#20  haha - leave it to murat to kick start a conversation!
Murat you're being a little harsh about the geography thing. After all, the reason why the rest of the world is so much better at picking out countries on a map is because they always seem to be in conflict with their neighbours. If I was being shot at, invaded, harrassed, made fun of, dumped on by every country surrounding me, I would be good at geography too. Maybe because the U.S. hasn't seen that much conflict on its soil resulted in poor grades in geography. If true, it is the rest of the world that should take lessons from the U.S.
Posted by: RW   2003-02-18 11:47:39  

#19  (sigh) Murat, if we were trigger happy, your boss would've been dead for about a decade now.
Posted by: mojo   2003-02-18 10:03:33  

#18  Bulldog..re:
""nearly 30 percent of those [Americans aged 18 to 24] surveyed could not find the Pacific Ocean, the world’s largest body of water" ...I feel obliged to point out that numbers present at the marches may only represent a small fraction of those who left their homes that morning with the intention of finding the start lines."

Ha ha, you make a good point! But even if there were an equal number of those who intended to march as compared to those who wanted to march but got lost, there are still 289,000,000 MORE Americans that chose NOT to march. 289 MILLION!

Here are some comparison's for you ...one million show up for the Rose Parade and 2 million show up for Macy's parade. And millions upon millions more show up for the 4th of July Parades. Frankly, comparatively, Murats numbers are looking downright pathetic.
Posted by: becky   2003-02-18 10:02:57  

#17  But Murat, those who believe going to war is justified have satisfied themselves the net result is a decrease in human suffering, that it is morally right to go to war, and that not to go to war when you can do so could be compared to not intervening when some guy down the road is starving his kids, raping his wife and daughters and smashing his brothers' heads against the wall, on a daily basis. And that neighbour's abusing a household of 25 million people.

Maybe I'm spoiling any elegance my argument had by going on, but...

Twelve years ago he marched into his neighbours house, shot some of his family, and declared the place his property.

Twenty years back he was engaged in a fight he started with another neighbour in which a million or more members of both households were killed. During that time he killed using chemicals, sometimes against the distant relatives of his who lived in the garden in a Wendy house.

And he rewards with cash the parents of the uneducated kids of his neighbour's neighbour who regularly run to the guy's house next door to them to blow themselves to smithereens in the kitchen.

This guy's an ugly moustachioed midget a few blocks away, and you could take him out, no problem. Would you sit on your sofa and tell yourself it's not the right thing to do, it's morally wrong to walk in and stop it happening any more?

There's no reason at all to believe that Saddam will become a benign head of his household simply due to international diplomatic pressure.

A military campaign to remove Saddam is likely to involve a few thousand civilian casualties and would free the Iraqi house from tyrrany.

You do the moral maths...
Posted by: Bulldog   2003-02-18 09:37:15  

#16  Murat,
I'll wager you any amount of money that we will kill far less innocent Iraqis than Saddam already has. Just like we killed far less Afghanis than the Taliban had. We wouldn't even be doing any of this if the Islamofascists had left us alone. Beware awakening the sleeping tiger. We're awake, we're mad as hell, and we ain't gonna take it anymore!
Posted by: Denny   2003-02-18 09:32:00  

#15  Bulldog,
Maybe it is not the right comparison but you can compare Vietnam with Iraq for my part. I would ask was it right to wage that war which killed so many people, today most people would say nay, but in those days people where tagged communist when they voiced against it.
Whether or not a credible philosophy closing the eyes for civilian casualties I do regard evenly evil as the Osama Bin Laden deed, he didn’t give a damn about civilians too.
Posted by: Murat   2003-02-18 09:08:20  

#14  My apologies, Murat, but I'm still finding it hard to discern your anti-war stance from an I-really-don't-care-if-the-Iraqis-have-to-live-under-Saddam-and-his-descendents-for-generations-because-I-don't-believe-taking-action-militarily-can-ever-be-justified stance.

Pacifism will never be a credible philosophy. Do you know the eggs and omelettes analogy? You have to break the eggs to make the omelette. Or you can just sit and watch them to rot.
Posted by: Bulldog   2003-02-18 08:51:28  

#13  Bulldog,
Oh, so you consider that in my opinion the US is morally inferior to the Islamic world, right?
May I ask what gave you that idea? I don’t remember that I ever talked about Islam vs US. On the contrary of what you maybe think about me, I am not an Arab nor do I have a high esteem of Arab culture. Maybe you can still not grasp that killing innocent people, be it Iraqi Arabs as in this case (still regarded humans in Europe and Asia), is regarded crime by the rest of the world. Even if this vocation is underlined by the "necessity" of downing a dictator.
Posted by: Murat   2003-02-18 08:37:43  

#12  Becky, in reference to the original article:

"nearly 30 percent of those [Americans aged 18 to 24] surveyed could not find the Pacific Ocean, the world’s largest body of water"

...I feel obliged to point out that numbers present at the marches may only represent a small fraction of those who left their homes that morning with the intention of finding the start lines.

Especially if, as I suspect, there's a fairly strong correlation between geographical knowledge and political wisdom: link
Posted by: Bulldog   2003-02-18 08:24:26  

#11  "It is not meant as a bashing"

Then why did you make this comment:

"No wonder that most Americans here on board are trigger happy, when they don't even know which country the US is going to attack, it must be like packman on the PC."

That certainly looks like bashing to me.
Posted by: Robert Crawford   2003-02-18 08:17:39  

#10  oops, I see that I gave the useful idiots waaaaaaay too much credit. Assuming that there were 500,00 US appease marchers (I'm being generous) that means that as of 8:54 this morning, 289,782,846 people didn't find it in their interest to march.

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
Posted by: becky   2003-02-18 07:57:29  

#9  Murat's geography may be good, but sadly his history is lacking. How else can you explain his ignorance of the millions upon millions of people who have been brutally oppressed or massacred by totalitarian regimes or in fighting against Islamists - just during the last 100 years?

The desire to protect our freedoms (the likes of which have not been recorded by any civilization in the last...oh say.. 10,000 years) does indeed keep us "trigger happy" and will continue to do so as long as there is breath in our bodies.

Fortunately, the 249,500,000 Americans who DIDN'T march in the peace rallies last weekend are wiser than logic-impaired Murat.
Posted by: becky   2003-02-18 07:39:02  

#8  I was at UC Santa Cruz during GWI.
When people speak of 'pacifists', the only image that comes to mind is of the perma-grin types who'd fried their brains with waayyyyy too many drugs.
Posted by: Dishman   2003-02-18 07:26:53  

#7  "...it was a big question to me why Americans particularly are more trigger happy than the rest of the world"

Murat, Murat, Murat... Take a while to consider who is the aggressor here. On the one hand you have the US. They're trying to implement a UN-sacntioned use of force against the Baghdad regime, as a last resort against a demonstrably dangerous threat to local and world peace. This in the face of delaying tactics employed by a handful of European nations who want Saddam to remain in power for reasons of national self-interest.

On the other you have an assortment of, terrorists whose preferred targets for murder are are civilians, rabid Imams calling umpteen times a day for jihads and issuing fatwahs against anyone who disagrees with what they say, and regimes of the kind of barbarity most of the world thankfully grew out of many centuries ago.

Please explain to me why, in your opinion, concisely and logically, the US is morally inferior to the Islamic world. For an additional ten points please write a short essay entitled "Why the arab world eschews democratic government, and how this is to the benefit of arab culture", or "How Islam has changed the world for the better".
Posted by: Bulldog   2003-02-18 07:20:13  

#6  Reminds me of the Doonesbury cartoon: only 13% of American teenagers can find Iraq on a map... but they're all Marines. :-)
Posted by: Q2   2003-02-18 06:59:58  

#5  Hope the pilots know where to drop the bombs....That's why we have smart bombs. If you think we're trigger happy now, wait until the kids figure out that they would have to look at old copies of National Geographic to see titties.
Posted by: dsaucer   2003-02-18 06:38:54  

#4  I didn't know that this was such an influential site Anon, thanks for the tip maybe I can turn everyone in the world into a pacifist now :)
Posted by: Murat   2003-02-18 06:00:53  

#3  i wonder what percentage of people could name the northern Ivorian rebels as Islamists? 0.1%? Nobody knew because the PC media refuses to use the word 'islamic' in conjunction with aggression.

We are in WW3 and nobody in the West even knows.

If Murat does a good job, everyone will think it is all America's fault and that the USA are the enemy, then we'll sit like ducks and wait to be infiltrated and blown up by Islamists.
Posted by: anon   2003-02-18 05:31:22  

#2  That's a mistake of mine, I forgot to select where to file it, the selection must have stood on terror networks.

It is not meant as a bashing, as a none American it was a big question to me why Americans particularly are more trigger happy than the rest of the world. I guess the far from home war has for the most the effect of watching a movie.
Posted by: Murat   2003-02-18 05:19:28  

#1  This as expected, thanks to educationnal standards, but... What exactly is this doing in "terror network", hummm ? Do I feel some prejudice, here, Murat, or did your finger slip...? Anyway, this is not going to make a point, only making you seems bitter. Still, I'm almost glad to see some country-bashing not aimed at la belle France for a change (but feel free to resume at any time).
Posted by: Anonymous   2003-02-18 04:56:22  

00:00