Don't they teach anything about Other Countries in US Schools?

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this particular thread about learning another language, a poster mentions that they were unaware of the existence of an Irish Language. This left me a bit gobsmacked, as I just can’t imagine how someone could not be aware that there’s an Irish language- it is, after all, the Official Language of Ireland and I would have thought that most educated people would at least be aware that there is an Irish Language spoken by people who live in Ireland.

When my fiancee and I were visiting the US earlier this year, we spoke to lots of Americans as we were in queues etc at Disneyland, and while everyone was really nice and polite and friendly, quite a few admitted they had absolutely no idea where Australia was, other than “In Southern Hemisphere”, and of the rest, most could only name Sydney as an Australian city and seemed quite surprised to discover there are actually other cities in Australia.

The point of this thread is not to make fun of, roll eyes at, or point fingers at the Geographically Challenged, though, but I am curious as to what they actually teach about geography in US schools, when you’ve got a percentage of the population (admittedly a very low percentage, but a percentage nonetheless) that is unable to place Australia on the map? Is the Geography curriculum in the US entirely given over to studying US states, with a nod to Canada, Mexico, and that Commie Island in the Caribbean? And given that we live in an age of the Internet, does anyone with any sort of education really have an excuse for not being able to place any other moderately sized country on a map? What’s the story here?

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When I was in school, we were taught nothing about other countries except how to name them on a map, with the exception of where they overlapped us in history class (such as being in a war with us), and that was taught from an essentially exclusive US perspective.

We are isolationist in both thought and deed (when we’re not randomly attacking somebody). At least we’re consistent (except for that).

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When I was in high school, political correctness was already hitting us and we didn’t spend a lot of time studying Europe. I learned that the official languages in India are Hindi and English, though.

4

Most of us never learned much about Australia except for what we picked up from The Sound of Music and the fact that it’s where Russel Crowe is from.

:wink:

5

Thank God for your winky-smiley! I was about whooshed into going “TSOM is set in AUSTRIA, DAMMIT!”

Anyway, all we really know about Australia, we learned from Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max.

6

Well to be fair, I wasn’t taught anything about Ireland in school in London (and that’s 3000 miles closer than the US is!).

We mainly studied English Monarchs in the Middle Ages in history.
Geography taught me that rivers run down to the sea and how to draw a free-hand map of Scotland.
We didn’t study politics.

As for other countries, I learnt where Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union, West + East Germany and Czechoslovakia were. That seems a bit dated now.

You can visit any part of Ireland and speak English, so the mere existence of Gaelic is all I know. (I presume that’s the official language you refer to?)

7

Oh, I was going to make the Austria joke! :frowning:

8

I remember learning that Canada has a parliment, some of them speak French, and that they don’t celebrate Thanksgiving. That about sums up what we learned about other countries in school.

You know that UPS commercial where the guy is supposed to stick a pin in China and can’t? Really not that surprising. You should hear the questions about geography I get asked at work when things come up about where places are.

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When I visited Ireland in 2000, I was told, by various unrelated Irish people, that the Irish language had nearly died out, and was now being taught in schools as a foreign language to the Irish children in an effort to save/reclaim it. While there were lots of signs in Irish (Gaelic), there were always signs in English placed above them. It was clearly a country attempting to become bilingual, and I’m glad for their sakes’ that they’ve become so successful in such a short time. But it seems to me that not teaching American kids about a dying language in the 80s and 90’s isn’t really unusual.

That being said, no, they don’t teach much about Other Countries in US schools. The thing about US schools is they spend more time on history than current events, generally speaking. So I could probably tell you the major exports of Ancient Rome sooner than the major exports of Bolivia today. (Oh shit, is Bolivia still a country?)

Even American history is covered in a stupid way. It seems like every year of American history starts with the bloody pilgrims, works its way through the Revolution and then the Civil War, and then it’s summer vacation and time to go home. Next year, it’s the fucking pilgrims again. Lather, rinse, repeat. They seem to have fixed this a little bit, as my son got all the way up to World War II last year - the year reserved for studying government and capped off with the mandatory Constitution test.

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And nobody ever has the guts to use a HS History book that discusses, or even mentions, Vietnam.

Most kids learn about the war from Rambo movies. :smack:

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You think we spent any amount of time at all learning about Canada, Mexico and Cuba?

In Grade three, we spent what seemed like years studying the Ashanti region in Ghana, and its spider god myths, and in fourth grade we spent a similar amount of time on India, focusing mainly on the caste system (or at least that’s what I remember all these years later). Other than a very brief unit in 7th grade social studies about Chinese communism, that was it as far as studying other countries.

Americans are notoriously ignorant on matters of geography. While most could find the US on a map, there have been college students who can not then find their own state or city (I recall news coverage of one partcular survey, showing one student’s answer map with the word “Miami?” written across the state of Michigan, probably a thousand miles away.)

Just last year, The National Geographic Society released the results of their Geographical Literacy Survey of 510 randomly-selected young American adults:

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Essentially it does come across as a foreign language to much of the population. However, there are areas, and people, where it is still used in everyday life and for whom it is a mother tongue. Relatives of mine were brought up in such an area, even though they don’t have Irish-speaking parents, they are themselves fluent in the language. When talking with friends they’ve grown up with, and who themselves always have spoken Irish at home, maybe 80% of the time they’ll be using Irish. One of their elderly neighbours, now in her nineties, struggles to hold a conversation in English.

Given the importance placed on Irish heritage by so many Americans, it seems a shame that the mere knowledge of the language’s existence is lacked by some. It might also help avoid some hideous mispronunciations (one case).

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I agree with WhyNot: the focus, in my limited experience, is much more on the past than the present.

Here’s the break-down of my social studies classes in a (fairly good) public school system. I graduated in 2004, just for reference.

3rd grade: city history
4th grade: state history
5th grade: US history from beginning to revolutionary war
6th grade: US history from revolutionary war to World War I
7th grade: US history from World War I to present
8th grade: Civics
9th grade: World civilizations from beginning to roughly 1500
10th grade: World civilizations from 1500 to present
11th grade: US History from beginning to present
12th grade: Government

World civilizations covered the Middle East, India, China, Greeks/Romans, Africa, South America, and Europe.

As you can see, we never had official geography of any kind–not US geography, not world geography. The emphasis was firmly on the past, except for the bits on United State government. I’ve talked with my college friends about this, who come from many different types of schools from across the country, and their experiences are broadly similar to mine. Not that our anecdotal experiences are necessarily a good indicator of anything.

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When I was in Ireland(1996), as we were waiting for our horse tour to gather, my family and I were sat in a living room with a group of giggling teenagers. They thought it hilarious to speak Irish in front of us to make fun of us. For all I know though they might have been asking each other where the bathroom was.

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I have no idea who that is, I’m not “up” on popular music. But I do know what you mean. I cringe when newbie neopagans ask me what I did for “Sam-hayne” last Wednesday. (Samhain)

And I named my daughter Caileigh, at the insistence of my husband, who was in the midst of teaching a University course on Irish history while I was pregnant. Gonna be spelling that one to form-filler-outers for the rest of my life. :smack:

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It’s much easier to snow people about how your effective your “Shock & Awe” campaign, and subsequent “winning their hearts and minds” will be when people have no basis for comparison to previous failures of similar doctrines.

Besides, why should we learn anything about other countries? It’s like languages; if those ferriners want to speak to us, they can say it in English. Ditto with math and science; that’s something you pay some brown person to do so you can get back to promoting your Amway scheme and check up on your fantasy PGA tournement.

Stranger

17

I did grow up learning a lot of geography, but I think it was all my mother’s doing–she had maps all over the place. I can pronounce Samhain, though! Hah!

But in school, we just didn’t do maps a whole lot. We did some history (what I remember is: California, Pilgrims ----> WWI several times over, Ancient Greeks, um, unions and punji sticks). I grew up before political correctness brought countries like India and Ghana into the curriculum, but I don’t remember learning anything about Europe either anyway, except that the English were bad and now they’re OK.

International current events consisted of the Russians, I think. Samantha Smith was huge news, and so was the Challenger space shuttle. That’s about it.

I knew a girl in high school who was asked to find Africa, and she pointed to Brazil. But she was a pretty bad student anyway.

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Is it just me that doesn’t find the results of the Geographical Literacy Study (posted by scotandrsn) at all disconcerting?

That’s not surprising. News bulletins seldom give “how to find” guides. They’ll show Iraq, and its neighbours, with the major cities highlighted, and possibly the main Sunni, Shia and Kurd areas.
And arguably, the priority here is correct. The people of nation X might be offended to know that people can’t point out X on a map, but knowing exactly where X is is actually less important than other information about a nation (e.g. politics, “internal” geography, economy etc), and having only a rough idea of where it is in the world is sufficient for most things.

People who travel a lot tend to know more country locations, but that’s because when you’re visiting a region then it becomes important to know exact country locations.

Right, but they wouldn’t mention religion in a news story about a disaster, would they? Have any news agencies mentioned the breakdown of religions in Mexico recently?
It’s not the salient information.

Perhaps they were confused by exactly what was meant by ‘native’. In an awful lot of the world, english is a required language, and whether it’s officially native or not…so what?
Ireland is a good example here. Gaelic is the official language, so English wouldn’t count as a native language. And yet, far more people can speak English in Ireland than Gaelic.

To me, it seems like a question designed to surprise the respondent. A simpler question would be “What is the most widely understood language in the world?” to which the simple answer is english.
Note, I’m not saying that this is a good thing: I think English is a pretty poorly designed language, but that’s off-topic.

Well, is it absolutely necessary? When you live in a wealthy english-speaking country of vast size, and english is the de facto language of business worldwide?

Perhaps the situation will change in the future, but right now I can’t help agreeing that to the average american, a foreign language is a “nice to have” not “absolutely necessary”.

19

Nope. They don’t teach much. In recent trips to the US, quite a few had heard of Dubai (not because of anything they learned in school… just the local marketing here). Almost none had heard of the Czech Republic (where I live part time).

We had to know all the countries on blank maps in 8th grade, but not know anything useful about them such as what products are made there, what languages are spoken, major religion etc… nope, just the names. With no further discussion, mostly they are forgotton. :frowning:

I can’t understand it - I mean how can you not have heard of a country - it’s not like we are talking about some small village in rural Uganda!

I doubt many would do well on this:

20

It’s the language of the Bible, after all!

Seriously, one of the nice things about growing up overseas is that world history and culture are right there. You don’t have to study them academically, at least for the place you are right now, and it comes more naturally later. (And yet I only speak one language now. :frowning: )

That being said, I have to say that I wonder if Americans really are so dumb compared to other cultures. For one thing, a European is going to be aware of other cultures and languages because they’re so close to his/her borders. A Dane doesn’t need to learn about Germany and Norway in school. I mean, unless they have Irish roots, how relevant is it to an adolescent in Nebraska that there’s an Irish language. Outside of some counties in the west, most Irish speak English day to day. My Irish friend cheerfully admits his Irish is “crap” and “bad book Irish.” It seems a pretty obscure fact to hang a complaint about American ignorance on.