Americans, particularly young Americans, are appallingly ignorant of geography.

Ask young people to pick out Iraq on a map of the Middle East, and only 13 percent can locate it ? despite a barrage of headlines and broadcast reports about a possible war against President Saddam Hussein.

Oh, well. Perhaps in a year or so no one will be able to pick out Iraq on a map. At least an up-to-date one...

This is news? Where have you and the people who commissioned this study been for the last decade or so? I was hearing about this when I was in high school, 14 years ago. As I recall, I even took one of those "find the obscure country" tests and aced it.

Hm. Those first couple sentences came out harsher than I intended.

Thus the comment in the article that "there has been little to no improvement in students' knowledge of geography since 1988." Presumably, that's the last time it was studied, which coincides perfectly with your claim that you aced this test 14 years ago. The article I read (on FoxNews, so it was arranged slightly differently than the Yahoo report) focused more on the fact that even with all of the media attention on international crises lately, including the prolific and frequent use of MAPS, people still had no idea what was going on in their world, or where it was happening. There was also a comment about the state of our society when referring to the fact that more people knew where Survivor took place than where our tax dollars were being used (when converted to explosives and encased in metal, of course).

Hmmm.

The quote refers to "young people". Rick C. notes that he was in high school, fourteen years ago, when a similar study was undertaken.

How many of those "young people" who couldn't find Iraq on a map are high schoolers opposed to war with it, just because that hunky social studies teacher told them that they should be?