I always wonder how many Europeans can point to Michigan on a map. It’s right there, it’s got a distinguishing feature, and cars come from it.
Putting states on a map isn’t comparable to countries. Countries are analagous to cultures, trade with one another, fight one another. People most often self-identify with countries. (And our cars don’t come from Michigan. Come to think of it, I don’t know which country/countries mine was built in.)
Huh. I guess I’m in that small percent that had a lot of geography and learning about other countries. Of course, my high school is now an “International Studies” magnet school (although it just began when I graduated). Most of the classes were offered and lots of people took them. The social studies classes that were mandatory were World History, World Geography, and US History. You needed one other elective, too. The only time we did not talk mostly about other countries was in US History and US Governement & Econ.
But while I like to think I know at least a little bit about other countries, I could probably not place them on a map. I know about where they all are, but could never point them out. I still can’t place all 50 states, so that tells you something about how good I am at that.
My thinking has always been that I really only need to know where something it if I’m going there. As I have never been out of the US, I don’t know many places in other countries.
Well, there’s what kids get taught in school about other countries, and there’s what they remember 20 years later standing in line at Disneyland. Those people learned algebra in school too, but most of them don’t remember any math more complicated than figuring out the tip after dinner, and plenty of people can’t even do that. Or they took 2 years of spanish in high school and all they remember is “hola” and “adios”.
The sad fact is that most people learn only enough to get by in school, and promptly forget anything they don’t use in their daily lives. And a carpenter or mechanic probably uses 10 times more math than your average white collar office worker.
Both my kids’ history books had extensive sections on Vietnam. In fact, a depressingly large part of them concerned events after I went to high school.
BTW, this is nothing new. When I was in Junior High, in 1965, a study came out bemoaning how few people knew where Vietnam was.
We soon learned. If we want to have us know where you are, we can invade you. 
The question this statement was relevant to related to which country on a short list had a majority Muslim population (Indonesia, South Africa, Armenia, India). The vast majority of the 75% of the respondents who did not know that it was Indonesia (64%, making up 48% of total respondents) thought the correct answer was India. These are 18-24 year olds, who were all in school when attacks against non-Muslim wearers of various head wraps were in the news, and STILL they think India is majority Muslim? That speaks to a level of ignorance I can’t help but find disturbing.
Here’s where we point out that AP US History goes up into the 1990’s – and, IIRC, my AP teacher had a parallel curriculum for her Standard students.
We also had a Geography course in 7th grade, and a world history course in 6th grade that I skipped in favour of an independent study. Seeing as I’m at an almost ridiculously international school these days, I don’t really remember what learned there as opposed to here, but I can say that every student in my USD got a basic shakedown of the world. More on Canada that on Azerbaijan, but you get the idea. That said, the focus does tend to be on American history and government/society, but the stuff is still there.
… and now I see that AP US History has already been mentioned. Sorry.
I was living in Santa Barbara years ago, and I was offered a job in Newfoundland. I honestly didn’t have the faintest idea where it was when the possibility of a job was first brought up. (Its a big island off the east coast of Canada, north and east of Nova Scotia, which is north and east of Maine. 1.5 time zones ahead of East Coast Time, closest point in North America to Europe. - Not that you asked) Anyway, despite my abysmal ignorance, I took the job and moved in winter. Kind of a big transition from SoCal.
I had a fifth grade geography class in which we had to learn the capitals, major cities, natural resources, and export products of all 102 nations (dating myself. there, of course).
Apparently. my education differed from that of many others. I lost out in the world history category in high school, as our history was pretty much Eurocentric, although my college world hstory, (while still pretty lame), was good enough to indicate all the major civilizations outside Europe and how they mostly predated Europe or European contact.
Oops. I left out the point in the above autobiographical sketch. When I moved to Newfoundland in the winter, I really wished I had had a good geography class, so I would have known what I was getting myself into. Of course, then I mightn’t have gone.
You have kangaroos: Under Construction
What else did we need to know? 
Kidding! I recall learning about other countries while back in school, but that was some time ago. Old geezer speaking.
The US History book I use (The Americans) entensively discusses the Vietnam War. In fact, I have never seen an up-to-date US history book that didn’t. 
This never did develop into a debate and is now more of a poll of American memories of social studies.
Off to IMHO.
I think the idea was more that no one ever gets that far in the history book. Generally, you start at the pilgrims or thereabouts, get to somewhere around 1900, and it’s June. So hardly anyone actually makes it to the modern history part. I know we never did, but for some reason we spent a lot of time on Tammany Hall and the Teapot Dome scandal, two things which made pretty much no sense at all to me at the time.
Right, but like **dangermom **said, we never got that far in the book. We got about halfway through every textbook we had in social studies. I’d flip ahead and notice that eventually there where candid photographs, and then further back there were even color photographs, but we never got past the first few pages of stiff black and white costumey photos.
Here’s Miss Teen USA 2007 from South Carolina’s answer to the following question: “Recent polls have shown that 1/5th of Americans cannot locate the US on a map. Why do you think this is?”
Miss Teen USA 2007 from South Carolina
Sigh. I love the ‘such as’ part of her speech.
We studied geography in the 7th grade and I was quite good at it. I come from one of those weirdo families where our dinner time conversation involved naming state and country capitals, locations, languages spoken, periodic charts of the elements, etc. As far as history went, we studied the Revolutionary War and the Civil War as well as California history and California/Mexico history. Years later I learned that I was more familiar with the history of Mexico than of anything on the East Coast. My Dad was Canadian so I learned Canadian and some British history from him at those interminable dinner time conversations. He was an Irish-Canadian, so his view of the British wasn’t favorable.
I did a google search on the Doukhobours (spelling varies), a bizarro cult in Canada that my Dad taught me about and is always my show-stopper when discussing Canada - I’m usually the only US person who has ever heard of them. My Dad always shook his head saying that they protested in the nude and were arsonists - also mentioning that they weren’t very attractive nudes. While I didn’t find any well-written histories of them, I came across this site where Hawker 2 answers some humorous questions from other parts of the world about Canada.
I know about Irish Gaelic for several reasons (my surname is Irish in origin, my parents were readers, I was a huge Maureen O’Hara fan as a kid and her bios mentioned that she grew up in an Irish speaking home, etc.), but I can’t recall it ever being mentioned in schools.
For that matter I don’t believe I ever had a high school history course that got remotely into the modern era- U.S. History petered out somewhere around the Depression/WW2 era, World History never made WW1- only Alabama History ever got near the Civil Rights movements and they were skipped over quickly and superficially (this was about 1980 so the memories were fresh, and the teacher was old and close to retirement and I think just didn’t want to get into an argument). While I always assumed that this was the case in my sub-par public schools only, I’ve come to learn from most people I know who grew up in and out of Alabama that generally speaking, social studies in U.S. public schools sucks dingos, which is ironic since they can’t tell you where the dingo came from.
For younger Dopers, do they teach Canadian & Mexican politics/culture at all in schools now? With illegal immigration and Can/Mex being our biggest trade partners et al, it’s amazing how superficial the coverage was in my school and most others, but I’m hoping that with NAFTA and immigration going from trickle to flood and what-not, they’ve beefed it up substantially.
Unfortunately, that list is stolen from one about Australia, they just replaced the country and changed the animals and such. The joke especially falls apart when one of the questions confuses the names of Canada and Austria :dubious:
California had a decent curriculum, where I took it, although they are 49th in the nation in education or something (Thanks for the buffer, Mississippi). In 4th grade, the focus was on California history, and learned about the state when it was a part of Mexico. I am still surprised how thoroughly we studied history in 6th grade, we did the Mesopotamian culture, which nobody seems to know much about.
I do remember what other people here have said above: we tended to spend too much time on the early stuff, and run out of time sometime in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Along the way, I did pick up a decent command of geography, I at least could locate all the countries in the BBC article and such.
And I of course know plenty of facts about Ireland, having an excessively Irish name. I was taught early on that Cromwell = bad and England = not the best neighbor.
That’s the one with Da U.P., ya?