"Actually that doesn't sound too bad, since you have to be at the 90th percentile of US high school seniors to locate the Mississippi River & the Rockies on an unlabeled map "
i don't think many schools, if any, teach geography any more...i mean grade, middle and high schools....
i've had dozens of community college students who were bright, even sophisticated and mature, who didn't know shit from shinola about geography...
some of them only knew about road maps, from driving, but had little or no idea where places in the united states were found on a map...when it came to the world, complete zero...
they were never taught anything about it, so how could they know?
fs