I can’t find it on their website, but some time between March and July of last year the Guardian published the results of a survey in which British people were asked really basic geographical and historical questions about America. I mean, really basic.
You know where I’m going with this.
Of course, I’m sure Americans would do even worse asked the corresponding questions about Britain.
It seems that i interpreted the OP a little differently from everyone else. Or at least, i interpreted the general direction of the argument differently.
The arguments on this thread have generally moved along the line posited in the OP, whereby:
But the issue is, i believe broader than this. Of course it’s natural that, on the whole, people in other countries will know more about the US than Americans know about those countries. Like it or not, the US is the biggest player on the global stage in many different categories.
As an Australian living in the US, it has been my experience that Australians generally know more about the US than vice versa. And this is, as i said above, perfectly understandable.
But rather than focus on the US versus “any other country” (like Australia or something), i think it’s worth asking about people’s general knowledge of and interest in the broad issues that make up truly international news. And it is here that the US suffers, partly due to its size, but also largely due to the emphasis of the US media.
International news in the US tends to concentrate on international stories that directly affect the country, whereas media outlets in many other countries (especially relatively unimportant ones like Australia - sorry fellow Aussies, but it’s true) have a much broader focus when covering international news. What counts as news on the international stage is much more broadly defined in many other countries than it is in the US.
There is an interesting book by authors R. Wallis and S. Baran called The Known World of Broadcast News (London: Routledge, 1990), which compares broadcast news in the US and other countries, especially western and northern Europe, and finds that news broadcasts in the US devote a considerably smaller proportion of their time to international news than do European news outlets. They also concluded that the US stories were generally less comprehensive and gave less background.
Now, this does not mean that Americans are ignorant. The rise of the internet, and wider distribution of global news channels like BBC World Service via the cable TV system, means that many Americans are as well informed as any people in the world. Many of my American friends have a staggering breadth and depth of knowledge about global issues. But if you get nearly all your news from the network news programs, as many Americans still do, then it is likely that you will be less well-informed on international news issues than your counterparts in many other Western democratic countries. (I don’t profess to know very much about news distribution in the developing countries).
I haven’t touched on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the US education system. I’ll leave that for another time, or for someone better informed than i am.
I think the real issue has been found here. US media sources really are rather US-centric. There is very little time and effort paid into really understanding what is going on in other countries outside of what is affecting us. The only exception that I can think of, having grown up in Southern California, is Mexico. The Los Angeles Times prints a LOT of news about the comings and goings of our neighbor to the south, whether it affects us or not. I suspect because of the large immigrant population. However, whether a significant number of people bother to read those articles I can’t say. But I would suspect there aren’t 
The other fact of American omnipresence in world culture is also a factor. However, I’ll again point out that a lot of the times this leads to erroneous impressions, such as the one that almost everyone is packing heat.
I’d address casdave’s point about the two tiered education system, but it would take forever and I have to get going to practice. I’ll just state that it’s largely not true…if you would like me to get into it further we can start another thread if you’d like.
I’ve met Americans online who (say they) think Australia is an American state. I don’t know if they’re for real, but I’ve heard other Australians say the same thing.
I’ve also been surprised during the last few weeks to see Americans debating the morality of watching people starve on Survivor 3 when so many in Afghanistan are starving - completely oblivious to the fact that people were starving in the world before September, and will continue to starve long after Afghanistan has disappeared off the front pages.
Whilst hardly a representative sample, you could do worse than start with Dopers Downunder
Here in Canada there’s a show called “Talking To Americans.” It’s a Jaywalking clone where the Canadian host tells Americans on the street wacky things about Canada (e.g. the polar ice cap is split, and Canada wants assistance to glue it back together) and the foolish Americans believe him. Big yuks ensue.
The Canadians eat this stuff up. As a Yank living in Canada, though, I’ve been living “Talking With Canadians” for years.
Canadian: So, what state is Wisconsin in?
Canadian: Why don’t more Americans speak French?
Me: Well, most Americans who learn a second language learn Spanish.
Canadian: [mildly outraged] Spanish? Why Spanish? I mean, Quebec borders on the US. They should learn French!
Canadian: Of course, one difference between Canada and the States is that we say “pop,” while you call it “soda.”
Me: Actually, I’m from Wisconsin, in the midwest, and I grew up calling it “pop.”
[confused pause]
Canadian: But in the States they call it “soda,” right?
I think there’s ignorance on both sides – hell, most people everywhere are ignorant about much of the world outside their own neighborhood. However (in my limited experience), American ignorance is more likely to take the form of simply not knowing anything about other countries, while people in other countries are more likely to think they know more about the US than they do.
For instance, the average American has no clue whether the death penalty exists in Spain. The average Spaniard not only knows the death penalty exists in America but has a strong opinion about it … but if you were to ask him how often people are executed, under what circumstances, or what sort of public debate exists in the US about the subject, you’d get some seriously wrong answers. (During my first trip to Spain in 1996, I met several people who told me how barbaric my country was for hanging people. Although I’m personally opposed to the death penalty, I felt obligated to point out that the individual in question asked to be hanged.)
It’s true that the American media gives a disproportionate amount of coverage to local and national news, and that many US schools don’t require world history and geography when they should. I would like to see these things change, but I don’t think it would cure ignorance in general. In some cases a little learning is a dangerous thing, and it’s probably no worse to have an undereducated populace than a slightly educated one addicted to shooting its mouth off about how people in other parts of the world should be running their countries.
I’m a Canadian, and in all my life I’ve met maybe four other Canadians who could correctly cite the number of states in the United States. The usual guess is 51 or 52.
And you’d be amazed how many Canadians don’t know how many provinces there are in Canada.
First, let me state that I agree with you that the majority of people in all countries should have better knowledge about the rest of the world.
I’m a European. I have travelled extensively, I have many friends worldwide (not netfrieds - people I’ve met during my travels 
), and I work in at international environment. Of course I can’t speak for everybody, but I can give some anecdotal and circumstantial information. In my experince, many people do indeed view Americans as unusually ignorant. I often hear the expression “ignorant Americans”. The epithome “ignorant” is in everyday language often as tightly connected to Americans as the epithome “polite” Frenchmen or “efficient” Germans. This is of course merely prejudice. But let’s take a look at what this prejudice might be founded on. I don’t think it’s as simple as the OP states.
Some people might measure knowledge about the world in how much two people know about each others countries. IMO that’s a very simplified and skew measure, and it’s not my impression that a majority of people use this standard. In my experience, most people try to apply a more global perspective, and question how much the average American knows about all other countries than their own, comparted to how much the average Italian or Kiwi knows about all other countries than their own.
The Euorpean image of ignorant American is usually connected to Americans as less knowledgeble about other cultures, other languages, world geography and history. We are often stunned by American tourists who say things like “The Colusseum - it’s more than a thousand years old” or “What a pity the Scots built this great castle so close to the railway station”. Or when you talk about Uzbekistan and Azerbadjan, you get they reply “I haven’t been to those cities”. Also, many Americans, even young people, (and Brits!) speak only one language, whereas it’s very common that younger North West Europeans or East Asians speaks 3 languages.
This in just anecdotes, and I’m not using it as evidence that Americans are indeed less knowledgeble - I just try to explain what factors I think forms this image.
I have not seen many controlled studies measuring level of knowledge or education. I remember one study where schoolchildren from different parts of the world (US, Africa, Europe and perhaps something more) were assigned the task of drawing a world map. Now, most children and many adults have a tendencty to draw their own part of the world as proportinally larger than it is. But the interesting thing here was that the American children made the largest distortion of their countries relative size, and also, they made more errors regarding the geography of the rest of the world. (I can check the reference if someone is interested, I don’t have it available right now.)
Then I’ve read some studies on student achivements, off hand I only remember the Third International Mathematics and Science Studies (TIMSS, but again, I can look up references should anyone be interested. One study of (I think) 11 countries showed that US students performed above average in reading tests. The TIMSS however, showed that US students performed surprisingly low compared to many other countries. The study sample was 0.5 million students from 41 countries. The US students only outperformed 4 countries in both maths and science - those countries were Iran, Cyprus, Portugal and Lithuania. In all, the students of East Asia outperforemd both European and US students with the exception of Hungary, Finland and I think Czech republic (perhaps I forgot some country here). Interesting to note is that rich European nations like Germany and Britain also scored surprisingly low compared to the East Asian students, although not as low as the US.
Here’s a like I found about the TIMSS:
http://brookings.nap.edu/books/0815711832/html/7.html#pagetop
I think we also need to be a bit careful about determining whether or not Americans are ignorant by referring to cultural forms like Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking”, or the “Talking to Americans” show brought up by wumpus.
Firstly, you never know how many people they have to interview before they find someone to say something really stupid. And secondly, “Jaywalking” is very wel known, and i’d be willing to bet that a lot of people know that they will only make it onto the show if they say something stupid or controversial.
An Australian show called “The Footy Show” (about football, approprately enough) used to do something similar on the streets of Sydney when i lived there, and probably still do. What made this show particularly offensive was that they would pick on recent immigrants and make fun of the fact that their spoken English was not very good. IMHO, you’re not much of a comedian if you need to get your laughs like this.
You mean it’s not?
I tend to agree with most of the reasons stated above, but I’ll add one more.
The US was settled by people who had the express desire of leaving the old world. Whether religious refugees, debtors, vagabonds, whatever, they generally shared the explicit feeling that Europe didn’t have much to offer them. Successive wave of immigrants were mostly made up of people who were looking for new opportunities, new waves of living, etc. Moreover, they enshrined many of these values in their institutions. Should we be surprised that six or eight generations later, their children share their values?
Conversely,the people who valued tradition and history, who emphasized the collective good of the group rather than the bold individualism … well, they stayed home.
The values that have made America a success (insofar as it is) are freedom, independance, and an optimistic orientation toward the future. Unfortunately, yes, that means they aren’t as respectful of tradition, others, or the past as they might be. Nobody’s perfect, and you can’t have one without the other.
America is Elvis. We got out of town with nothing but determination, confidence, and a whole lotta sex. We went on to the big city, knocked 'em dead, worked hard, made it to the top with sweat and rhythym. And now we live in a big house with green carpet on the ceiling and 3 TVs, because we want to and because we can and because we don’t give a damn if someone says its tacky. No, we never got any book learnin; never really wanted it.
And yes, we probably will die of a drug-induced heart attack in the bathroom.
WiwaxiaI’ve read your post, like, four times and I’m still not entirely sure what you’re trying to saying.
You state that the issue is more complicated than I stated in the OP and that you’re not trying to say that Americans are ignorant, and then list anecdotes of ignorant Americans or incidents where Americans performed poorly in comparison to most people of other countries.
You were defininity driving somewhere with this, I’m just not sure where. Clarification?
furt wrote:
I only agree with you up to a point here. I think you read too much of the modern notion of American “bold individualism” into the motives of the early colonists. Over the past twenty-five years or so there has been considerable debate among American historians over the extent to which liberalism dominated American thinking in the period before and after the Revolution, and the extent to which the concept of republicanism was dominant (note: these two terms meant something different then than they do now). The republican notion of collective good seems to have been very strong during the period, including the notion that all citizens needed to act not purely from selfish motives, but rather with virtue in order to maintain the republic’s strength. The use of citizen militias and the opposition to a standing army were examples of a republican tendency that has its roots in the thinking of Macchiavelli.
(for those interested, some sources include:
Joyce Appleby, “The Social Origins of American Revolutionary Ideology”, Journal of American History, vol. 64, no. 4 (March 1978).
Joyce Appleby, “Republicanism in Old and New Contexts”, William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 1 (January 1986).
Bernard Bailyn, The Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution
Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
J.G.A. Pocock, The Macchiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition
Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept”, Journal of American History, vol. 79, no. 1 (June 1992).)
The preamble to the Constitution reinforces the idea of a collective good in the United States, calling as it does for the formation of “a more perfect union” and the promotion of the “general welfare”. And if you go back even further to the Massachussetts Bay puritans, there was a very definite sense of community and the common welfare in their mission to America. They were chosen by God to be a beacon to the world. In the words of one of their leaders, John Winthrop,
On a more modern and prosaic note, i don’t believe that Americans reject or even dislike tradition. Firstly, popular reverence for the Founding Fathers, the Declaration and the Constitution etc., show that tradition is very important in this country. The rush of wealthy Americans to purchase British titles in the 1970s and 1980s shows that many felt that financial success and American individualism were not enough, and that they needed a closer connection to the older traditions of Europe. And, like my own compatriots from Australia, Americans show considerable reverence for the age and tradition represented by European cultures and landmarks.
And i believe that a respect for tradition and a positive outlook towards the future are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
It’s not that people were oblivious to the problems before; they’re simply forced to confront the moral problems now that the news has emphasized the plight of the poor and starving elsewhere.
(Making the moral problem worse is that the Africa Survivor features a group of people who are used to a relatively good quality of living, who go for a short while to “survive” wretched conditions that many people in Africa survive for their entire lives, and then they get to go back to their relatively good quality of living. And they do this to get $1,000,000, meanwhile such-and-such village could probably have food and clean water for a good long time for everyone in the village if they had $1,000,000 given to them just for “surviving.”)
Thanks for reading my post. I’m sorry it’s disorganised. I was trying to say:
There is indeed, in Europe, an “image” of Americans being ignorant.
This image might be pure prejudice or it might be well funded - but in any case I try to describe some stuff that I believe is causing this image, ergo the anecdotes and the studies.
Anecdotal evidence is typically what creates prejudice and incorrect generalization. It might be valid or it might not be valid. Studies of the type I referred to are in my opinion better measurements of general knowledge.
So, my idea was to show the reasons why I don’t think the European image of Americans as ignorant is resting only at a person of one nationality judging an American from what the American knows about this persons country.
Rather, I think it’s a mix between anecdotal evidence and in perhaps also the international education studies. (The TIMSS studies are rather well known among people who have the slightest interest for knowledge and education - they were all over the newspapers in several European countries, since the results were somewhat surprising and the fact that east Asian students were so dominating in performance, was a sobering thought for many European countries as well.)
Personally, I can’t tell whether Americans are more ignorant that people from other nations. I don’t have sufficient information to draw any final conclusions. The TIMSS studies are only measuring certain aspects of educational performance. Very important aspects IMO, but still only some aspects and we can’t generalize the results of teenage student population to adults. From personal anecdotal experience (which I don’t trust until I see it confirmed in controlled studies) it seems like Americans, at group level are less knowledgeble than people from Europe or East Asia. So you see what I mean - I have a personal perception, but I don’t know if it’s correct or not, and I believe many Europeans share my perception but some might take for granted that their perception is correct without further evidence.
The important question IMO is - if this would indeed be the case, what implications does it have? And if it’s not the case, how do we get rid of this erranous belief?
I was always under the impression that europeans have considered themselves more worldly and sophisticated then us since the beginning. Why expect them to change now?
Marc
We have loads of Colusseums in Yorkshire and not one is older than 1930, most are now bingo halls since the decline of the Silver Screen.
I’m not sure how you can debate this without resorting to appalling sterotypes or trivial examples.
Now I don’t consider myself as ignorant but I’m certainly ignorant of the machinations of say New York parking regulations. Being conversational in say US politics and/or geography doesn’t make me an expert on the US either.
IMHO, Americans are disinterested (note, not uninterested) and detatched from the consequences of US actions on those outside the US.
I’ll try to illustrate my perspective with an analogy. Suppose you work in a small branch office in a substantial corporation, with many branch offices and head office on the east coast.
From head office comes a directive on a substantial, mandatory workflow/procedural change. Now this thing makes eminent sense and offers substantial cost benefits in head office where the tasks are handled by dozens of people, in two different departments, which happen to be in two separate buildings.
It doesn’t do anything to assist you, because you do both jobs, and a couple of others. It’s going to add a couple of hours to your workload. It certainly doesn’t help that the deadline doesn’t allow for the 3 hour time differential. It’s not the first time this has happened. You need the money and other work is pretty hard to get.
Are you inclined to call them ignorant? Yep, you certainly will know more about them than vice versa.
Are they ignorant? Nope, a lot of smart people work at head office.
Are they inherently smarter than you? Nope.
Do you loom large in their frame of reference? Nope.
Can you do anything to change the procedure? Probably not.
Does being treated this way get up your nostrils? Yep.
What would you do about it?
Pity us poor people who learn English as our first language!
You are Italian. You grow up speaking Italian. You need to learn a 2nd language. What do you learn? English, of course. It is the dominant language in international business, science and to some extent (I hear) diplomacy. What’s more, many of your friends speak it too, having learned it for the same reasons. This bascically holds true whether you are born in Spain, Germany, Russia, even someplace like Thailand or Nigeria…if you want to learn a 2nd language, English is your most logical choice.
Now, suppose you grow up in England, the US, Australia or as an Anglophone Canadian. What 2nd language do you learn? Well, lets see. There are more Chinese on earth than any other nationality, but they are (at the moment) mostly confined to China for economic and politcal reasons, so you are not likely to run into many of them. Japanese? In the 1980s it looked likely that Japanese would surpass English as a language of business, but a decade of economic stagnation in Japan has stopped that trend. German? This was a widely used international language in physics and chemistry in the early 20th century, but it has mostly been supplanted by English. Russian? Again, in the 80s, this looked like a good choice for science, but the collapse of the Soviet Union has made it seem less useful. Spanish? Good choice, at least in the US…Spanish speaking people are the fastest growing segment of the population. But not an automatic choice even in the US, and probably much less useful in, say, Australia. French? The international language of diplomacy…a century or two ago.
My point is that it is a little unfair to pick on people who speak English as a first language for not knowing more languages. They already speak the dominant language for business and science in the world. An English speaking American can converse with most of the people in two of the biggest countries in the world, which happen to be contiguous (US and Canada). He can travel hundreds of miles and still be able to speak the language. The same is true of Australia.
Having got all that off my chest, I must say that I am routinely appalled by how little most other Americans know about world affairs, history, geography. There are questions on “Millionaire” and “Jeopardy!” almost every week that I consider relatively easy or at least reasonable, that absolutely stump the contestants. Speaking of Jeopardy!, it recently got moved from its long time slot in the Boston area and got replaced by some show called “Access Hollywood”, a kind of 60 Minutes for airheads, or for people who find “Entertainment Tonight” too challenging. The general trends are not hopeful.