If you don’t know where you are, how do you know where you’re going?

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Now for years and years we have been hearing about how bad Americans are in geography and general world awareness. Recently a National Geographic report has come out that tested over 500 young adults (18-24 year olds) that continued to prove this point. Now the report itself is almost 90 pages long, so I’ll just break down some of the more shocking points for me.

• 63% of respondents could not locate Iraq or Saudi Arabia on a map of the Middle East.
• 75% of respondents could not locate Iran or Israel on a map of the Middle East.
• 75% of respondents could not locate Indonesia on a map.
• 88 % of respondents could not locate Afghanistan on a map of Asia.
• 74% of respondents believe that English is the most widely spoken language in the world (It’s Mandarin Chinese)

Now a major point with this set of statistics is that all of these locations have been mentioned ad nauseum in media. Indonesia was mentioned mainly during the tsunami but coverage of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Saudi Arabia can be found on just about every news outlet on TV and print. Apparently Americans, especially young Americans, are not aware of anything outside of their own national boundaries. As far as they are concerned, these anonymous countries on the other side of the world are just a way for the good ol’ US of A to test their newest way to put a boot in some infidel ass!

So what you say! They don’t know need to know anything about any other countries. As long as they know about the greatest country in the world that’s fine. I mean who cares about all those third world nations anyway? I send Sally Struthers my $5 a month to help them. Well here’s some news for you…

• 50% of respondents could not locate New York state on a map of the US
• 43% of respondents could not locate Ohio on a map of the US
• 67% of respondents could not locate Louisiana on a map of the US

Beyond that, geographic and world awareness skills are deemed as not vital skills by the majority of the group.

• 38% of respondents said that speaking a foreign language is “not too important” vs. 14% that said speaking a foreign language is “absolutely necessary”
• 32% of respondents would miss a conference call scheduled with colleagues in another time zone. (cannot compute time differences between time zones)
• 21% of respondents said it’s “not too important” to know where countries in the news are located.
• 34% of respondents would go in the wrong direction in the event of an evacuation. (a fictional map and scenario were given in which they were told a hurricane was advancing and to identify the city to the northwest in which they could go)

The second and fourth bullet points are pretty important things to know if you are going to survive in your job or in the world in general. We are moving toward a global economy and twice as many young adults feel that knowing a foreign language is unimportant. As a country, we need to get our heads out of our asses if we still want to be competitor in the global economy. We are already in a bad situation. We are a country that isn’t educated about personal finance (evidenced by our growing national debt and bankruptcy rates) and world awareness. We do not have discipline as evidenced by our growing obesity rates and the behavior of children (you really didn’t think you were going to get a blog where I didn’t mention that did you?!).

As sad as a realization as it is, all civilizations must fall. There are a lot of similarities between the fall of Rome and the path the US is walking. Before we know it, we’ll have a country full of these idiots.

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Tags: americans, dumb, geography, map, rome, world awareness