>Japanese students can't place N.Korea
>
>Wed Feb 23, 3:08 AM ET
>
>TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea (news - web sites) has menaced Japan
>with missiles, kidnapped its citizens and stands between it and a
>place in the soccer World Cup finals, but one in four Japanese
>high-school students can't place the country on a map.
>
>
>Only 76 percent of high school pupils in a survey by an academic body
>could locate the reclusive communist state, despite a daily
>bombardment of news about it in the Japanese media.
Further...
<http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa111797.htm>
In a December, 1989 article by Gilbert M. Grosvenor, the President of the National Geographic Society, in National Geographic focused on the lack of geographic knowledge by Americans. The Gallup organization had been hired by the Society to determine how much (or little) Americans knew about locating places when compared to citizens of nine other countries. Respondents were asked to match numbers on a world map with a list of sixteen places. Among 18-24 year olds world-wide, on average, Americans were least able to provide correct answers. They averaged 6.9 correct out of 16. In fact, only 86% of Americans could identify the location of the United States on a map. Of the sixteen places, Americans had the most difficult time locating the Persian Gulf (only 25% were accurate). This survey, along with many other contemporary ones showed that the "social studies" curriculum utilized in schools in the United States for some time had failed.