If you were to question random American passers-by on a street in Dallas or Buffalo and ask them, “What’s the capital of Honduras?”, chances are near-zero that they would be able to answer.
But given how much more tightly interconnected Europeans are, do they generally all have substantial knowledge about pretty much every country? If you were to ask the average Spaniard, “What’s the capital of Croatia,” would they say Zagreb right away, and would the average Romanian be able to name the 4 countries of the UK?
Is it approximate to the level of knowledge that, say, Americans have about the 50 states, to the extent of what a Floridan would know about Oregon and vice versa?
I don’t believe there is an average European, but I know all the capitals in Europe and can draw the countries in a map by heart and it would look pretty close, know how many inhabitants there are +/- 10%, know the language(s) spoken there, an who they fought wars against and when. Know about half the presidents or heads of state by name and the relevant football teams. Of course I know Tegucigalpa, Wales, Scotland, N. Ireland and England, Zagreb.
I know a lot less about the USA.
I only speak for myself.
I think it’s fair to say that an average European is just better educated than an average American on all disciplines including math, science, politics and geography. Europeans (for the most part) don’t really have the kind of debates on whether to teach basic evolutionary science because it contradicts fundamentalist Christian beliefs, or not to teach history because it upsets white racists.
Because the US is so large and only bordered by two countries (for all practical senses), there really isn’t much to know about our local geography past the states. Any test would need to factor for that difference, to properly say whether Americans or Europeans are better at geography.
So, comparing how well Europeans did identifying Kentucky vs Americans identifying the Czech Republic, I’d say that Europeans are definitively more knowledgeable of geography, on average:
And given that they’re also better on nations that are, socially, just as distant to Europe as to the US (e.g. Venezuela), I think it would be hard to make any argument to the contrary.
But, in both cases, the relative importance of the location to the person is the best indicator of whether they would know it. Most of everyone knows where China is. Most of everyone does NOT know where Vietnam nor Nigeria is. That’s independent of where the quiz-taker was from.
On average, though, it looks like the Europeans have about a 10% lead (at an eyeball), regardless of the target. Maybe if you threw in the Mexican states and the Canadian states the Americans would improve a bit but, at the moment, 10% is the number that I would go with.
In my experience knowledge of geography in the UK is pretty poor. My own is well above average because I have driven over a lot of it in my jobs driving trucks, but ask a random young person in London to put some major cities on an outline map and you would probably find many incapable of putting London in the right place, let alone Manchester, Edinburgh or Cardiff.
As for the rest, while those are true concerns in a few places, the vast majority of Americans think they are idiots who keep losing their battles to get their idiocy taught in schools.
I men there is lots of evidence that Europeans are better educated across a spectrum of disciplines, America usually finishes pretty low on those lists. And red state America has been very successful in suppressing knowledge being taught in their schools and has the third world development indicators to prove it. Alabama’s death rate is actually higher than its birth rate for the first time in history.
From what I’ve read, worldwide, American education is lighter in primary and secondary schools but heavier in tertiary schools. It has far more highly ranked universities than all of Europe combined. More than half the population now has some tertiary education, too.
If you want to compare the worst American public school system, say, Alabama, to Europe, then you have to compare it to the worst European nation. Which, according to this article, is Ukraine. Despite its high literacy rate, “the educational system has been criticised as being outdated and irrelevant to the needs of the changing labour market. The country seems to fall short primarily in the areas of Mathematics and Science. In a report carried out by Forbes Ukraine, it was noted that in the area of management training, ‘the World Economic Forum ranks Ukraine 116 out of 142 nations.’”
Just by bringing up creationism, you show that your argument is a flawed, oudtated generalization. The 2005 Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District decision crushed creationism in public schools and the movement has never recovered.
The recent swing by the far-right to institutionalize white supremacy is of course worrying. But it’s so new that nobody yet knows how teachers and schools will actually implement it or if it will continue beyond the current election cycle. And that means that nobody has yet gone through a school career with this racist policy so it literally has had no effect on students’ education.
If you’re trying to make a case why Europeans have a better understanding of the U.S., your posts are the best evidence to dismiss the argument out of hand.
I live in the UK and have travelled to France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Switzerland, Hungary, Croatia and Russia.
I’ve also visited Las Vegas several times.
Based on that (plus reading news reports), I believe that Europeans are generally better informed than Americans.
Also I think that Europe has more sporting contests between its countries than the US has inter-state ones (especially soccer.)
For example, European soccer supporters will know the names of many European capital cities (and their stadium names.)
Finally in 1987 I got approached by some Spanish students who were visiting England on an English language course. As part of the course they had to prepare a questionnaire and get responses from the public.
I got 100%
Some questions were:
who are these people? (at the time they were the Spanish Prime Minister; centre forward for Barcelona; )
what is the capital? (Madrid)
what is paella? (rice with meat and vegetables cooked in a pan)
For clarification, I’m not asking about a straight-up analysis of whether Americans are better at geography than Europeans. I’m just asking how well Europeans know other European nations.
I believe you are right when you look at Europe and the USA as two units, the average education and knowledge in Europe is higher. But I also believe the elites are better educated* in the USA, specially in Law (which is a problem, IMHO) and STEM (which is positive).
*for lack of a better word, could also try conditioned, trained, primed…
In general, I think that the US grad school system is the best in the world and that there are more quality universities open to a broader segment of society in America than in Europe. But because we have been actively dismantling or primary education system, especially in red states, the universities are beginning to wither on the vine. Mostly our excellent grad schools are good news for foreign exchange students.
I think that the analogy between an Ameican’s knowledge of States and a European’s knowledge of countries is probably a good one.
Ask the teenager on the Clapham omnibus to name some European countries and they will probably manage the big three - France, Germany and Spain. Possibly, they will add Belgium, Holland and Portugal, but anything beyond those will be pretty hazy. You would also get some strange answers like Paris, Majorca and Tenerife.
The U.S. actually has a lot of these, but it’s not between any sort of “official” state sports teams (which we don’t really have) – it’s between college athletic teams.
Most (if not all) U.S. states have some form of official state university system, and many of those universities field athletic teams. The rivalries between some of those teams (particularly in sports like football and basketball) can be quite intense (e.g., University of Michigan vs. Ohio State University, University of Texas vs. University of Oklahoma, University of Georgia vs. University of Florida, etc.)
This a profoundly silly thing to say. While citizens of one city or one country may on average be better educated than those in a given US state…certainly the regressive shitholes I think you have an issue with anyways. You cannot make that kind of blanket statement. Europe has a lot of countries that are a lot more diverse economically than the US. More than half are impoverished for all practical purposes. Talking about an “average European” like they are some homogeneous monolith is ignorant.
Obviously I disagree, deal with it. America almost re-elected a fascist game show host as president; one of the only two major parties is openly hostile to accepting the realities of climate change and the governor of Florida just berated some students for wearing masks during a pandemic. America is just a stupid culture, it’s hostile to education and learning. It’s why it is so obviously in a steep decline.
