The other day I read an article on the American ignorance of the world geography. I completely agree, however, I think that the finger should be pointed on the educational system and the way they teach geography. Isn’t it part of the elective subjects in high school? Also, I am sorry but the Americans do live on a different continent so I would cut them some slack when they don’t know where Slovenia is.
All that said, I do have some pretty funny stories about this whole issue. Most of them come from the times when I was attending a college since that is where you get to talk to a lot of people and they find out you have an accent and then they ask you where were you from and than it goes all downhill from there..:)
Anyhow, my best story comes from one of the parties I went to. I started talking to this friendly all-American girl and as soon as she found out I was from Prague she got really excited, telling me that she had spent 3 weeks there! So we talked for a good 45 minutes about “Prague stuff”, places she had visited, clubs she went to, the food she ate….she then grabbed one of her friends that walked by and excitedly said: “Look I met a girl from Yugoslavia!” I looked at her, waiting for her to correct herself but nothing happened. When she saw my ‘look’ she became somewhat self conscious and said: “ Well, what, you are from Yugoslavia, right? Prague?”.
I tried to tell her as sensibly as I could that Prague was not in Yugoslavia but in the Czech Republic and as far as I can remember, she took it bravely. However, I just couldn’t believe she had actually physically crossed the borders of the Czech Republic, spent three weeks there and thought she was in Yugoslavia (former Yugoslavia)!!!!!
Other questions that people – mostly American students – would ask me were: 1. Do you guys have traffic lights? ( I would answer: “No, we just dance naked around the fire”) 2. Czechoslovakia is (I gave up correcting them on that one) next to Turkey, right? 3. You guys speak Russian? 4. Oh yeah, that’s by the sea, right? And the list goes on…
Instead of insulting them and making them feel stupid I chose to have a more of a “Jesus-like” attitude and I look at it as an educational opportunity and I patiently, non-judgmentally try to correct them. Although at times it may be a challenging task I feel like that is part of my purpose in life….
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I think the Czechoslovakia thing is funny. I tell people that I spent a couple of years in the Czech Republic, and half of them then try to correct me. “You mean Czechoslovakia?” They ask. Now, if they’re just wanting to establish the relationship between the Czech Republic and the Czechoslovakia that they learned about it school, fine. But when I say, “It used to be Czechoslovakia, but they separated twenty years ago,” and they STILL try to correct me, that’s when I get annoyed.
I also taught in Poland, where they teased me because Americans don’t know geography. I tried to defend my countrymen. After all, it isn’t quite fair for people to say, “Americans don’t know as much about my country as I know about theirs.” For better or for worse, America is a world-wide presence, in politics, news, pop culture, etc, so most of the world knows something about America. The same can’t be said about all other countries, again for better or for worse. So no, I don’t think Americans are completely stupid for not knowing the capital of Cameroon off the top of their heads, or for sometimes confusing the Rhine and the Danube, or not being able to immediately name all the countries that border Thailand.
However, when I got home, I decided to conduct a survey in an Arizona mall, to prove that Americans know something about Poland. When I stopped people, my first question was, “Can you tell me what continent Poland is on?” That’s where my defense of my countrymen fell apart. The number one answer? A blank stare. Followed by a tentative, “England?” and a few–thank goodness–answers of “Europe.” When presented with an unlabeled map of Europe, several pointed to nearby countries: Germany, the Czech Republic, Ukraine. Only two got it right away. Most just shrugged helplessly. So, I guess maybe the rest of the world is right about us. Sorry.
Haha Melinda
No need to apologize.
It really is not their fault. After 12 years of living here in the US I come to realize that my geography is not as good as it used to be. What bothers me that even when I want to be active and read the news to find out what’s going on in the world, it’s still hard to do. Most of the internet sites/newspaper list the domestic issues first (naturally), then cooking, then celebrity news, then health….and God knows what else before you get to find out something about the other world! So I think if it was more in their faces they would do better on your Poland test. But good job for being proactive!
Melinda, I used easy geography on an ESL test for Czech high school kids’ ability to describe the locations of places. I wrote a list of what I thought were really easy cities on the board, and the kids — who had allegedly been taught geography — immediately complained that they didn’t know where the places were. Finally I gave up and told them to draw a map, and if their description matched the map, I’d give them the points. However, they were still trying to do their best. Hardly any of them could put US cities in the right place, most of them thinking LA was where New York is, and many of them put Miami in Brazil. I also got gems like, “Munich is on the northern coast of Germany across the Danube from Hamburg.”
Among the seniors, I got essays on the United States saying that we consist of 13 independent countries and several colonies of France, Great Britain and Holland.
I rubbed these results in the faces of my Czech colleagues who were so smug about how much better educated their kids are than Americans’.
I also met an employee in a Czech bank who couldn’t distinguish between North and South America, thinking it was all more or less the United States.
I don’t think Czechs are smarter than we are.
As for Americans knowing less about other countries, ask the Poles and Czechs about the latest events in Macedonia or Albania. If they’re like the Germans, they won’t know what to say. A Mexican engineer I know has a theory about this. He says, “People don’t follow the news in inferior countries.” As an example, he says Mexicans know everything that goes on in the US and fault Americans for not knowing about Mexico, however Mexicans generally know nothing about what’s going on in Guatemala, right on their southern border!
It is true that if someone asked me in high school where Miami was, I would probably flake
I think I would do ok on Los Angeles though!
By the way, Jamie, perhaps you would be interested in a linguistic debate (of which Staci is also part of)? You can find it at the end of all of the comments of this post:
http://czechmatediary.com/2011/11/03/the-most-difficult-question-to-answer-is-how-are-you/
There are people in both countries that know and don’t know the geography. However, I think that because the U.S. is such a huge country, people don’t have to know anything about other countries to be considered smart or successful. That is not the case about the Czech Republic – in order to “survive” over there an average Czech needs to know much more about their surroundings than average American. A perfect example of this is when a Czech presidential candidate didn’t know where the castle Kuks is and why it is special, he was ridiculed in the Czech media and called incompetent for a president. After that “debate” his candidacy was pretty much done. Do we really need a president that will know what’s at Kuks castle but will publicly claim that there is nothing wrong with the term “deviant” when talking about gays (but that’s a different issue)?
I like and agree with Jamie’s comment about the inferior countries. People in Czech don’t know what’s going on in Macedonia or Albania for that exact reason. They consider those countries as unimportant and unintersting. Similarly, the Americans consider other countries the same way. I went to Canada one summer to visit some Canadian friends and relatives. I brought my very successful and very smart American (almost-ex) husband. When they asked him who the Prime Minister of Canada is, he simply responded: “and who the f*%$ cares??” Although he was the first one to actually voice that, i think that it is an attitude of many towards many “inferior” countries.
Whether Americans know geography and what’s going on around the world also hugely depends on where in the United States they live. I used to live in California (Nothern, which is considered “smarter”) and I used to have to correct almost everybody about Czech Republic vs. Czechoslovakia. Now I live on the East Coast and I have to say that it RARELY happens that people don’t know the difference… Some of them even know who Vaclav Klaus is…
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