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. |