Americans and their knowledge about Europe

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Never take anything those fools say seriously again. Ever. I mean it. If you do, I'll somehow reach through my monitor and smack you, though the chances of us being on at the same time are slim.

We can also add "Stereotypical" and "Racist" to the list for them, as well, concerning the German remark.

Well, I'm American....this discussion, however, does not offend me...its quite true

It almost made me cry yesterday when a fellow student tried to tell me that the slavic bosians who were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire wanted to join with the other balkan slavs and ally with SIBERIA...not serbia....this person was quite convinced...

About a year ago there was a poll on one of the major news networks, cnn i think, where they asked americans random geogrpahy questions. Around 30% could locate the last survivor show location on a world map, but only 12% could locate the U.S. This whole business makes me ill...to undertsnad history, news, or the weather you need to know geograhy. Personlly, i think U.S schools put too much emphasis on reading and math,; they neglect history, geography and langauge.

Tobodai, are you in Ethiopia? And btw, China includes both PRC and ROC. I agree with you that ROC is now trying to fill up the history with propaganda.

Then again, who's history isn't filled with propaganda? Its only when you go to college level history do you have the taste of the real thing. You are forced to do your own research. You get credit for using more than 10 sources and more if you can use sources of different languages etc.

Seriously, I think the people in the US need to take better geography courses. But then again, I went to school in Singapore where they forced us to take really hard Geography classes and the people still came out pretty ignorant. What do you think? I think it has more to do with interest. You tend to know more about geography and history if you're on this forum.

       come on what? you mean that china lies about everything it teaches to it's students and chinese textbooks are all made up? i'd admitt that a chinese text book on the mainland is very biased towards the CCP....for example it exagerates what little effort the CCP made in fighting the japanese invaders and say the the KMT are more like passive resisters. but hiding the truth aren't exactly lying is it? much like that politically correct computer game that u mentioned. banning it from comming into the market aren't really what i'd call lying...that's just the communist censorship doing it's work...and what did you mean by "we all know"?

       BTW this is way off topic....i won't reply you anymore on this matter

Interesting thread.

I just read an article in the Opinion section of the L.A. Times were the writer said something to the effect that Europeans refer to any American who does not kiss their behinds as "arrogant."

Actually in High School I took a pretty extensive geography course, where we had to do the exact same thing you did Mosquito, except we did learn africa. Of course, you could easily discredit the course since one time I did have to correct the teacher when he said the four main islands of japan were Shikoku, Kyushu, Honshu and Sapporo.

I would like to stress that i dont talk here about people who earn monay cleaning windows or floors, driving taxi or about people who are farmers and spent their life on harvests. They are all similar all over the world.

I talk here about educated Americans, people who are teachers, doctors, lawyers, engeeners, etc. etc.

How it is possible that so many of them, after investing so much monay in their education (at least in the USA education is pretty expensive) are so limited or even ignorant?

Iv heard one different theory, that education in the USA is so specialised, that people becomes great specialists only in 1 thing and complete ignorants in everything else (altough such explanation is beyound my understanding).

  Hi Mosquito:

  If you believe that the americans knowlegde about Europe is limited, then you have to make a poll between americans about Mexico.

  Most of the americans believes that the mexican independence day is May 05th, that we all mexicans eats burritos, and even once the brother of my former boss ( american BTW ) was amazed because Mexico had Federal States as the US. He was under the idea that Mexico was a single entity as a country. He�s a school teacher in California.

  I bet you that most of the americans can not list more than 5 Latin American countries different than Mexico, Colombia, Brazil , Argentina and Cuba ( probably Nicaragua or El Salvador ).

   I want to point out by the other hand that the iliteracy is universal. Our good US friends on the forums ( Catt, Cornelia, Vagabond, Janus, Genghis, Tobodei, Battle Glory and many others ) are a probe that there are informed and educated people in the US.

   In the case of the USA, I believe that is part of their cultural isolation.

   It is true that the USA was born by the inmigrants , but it was not multicultural or tolerant at the very first beginning.  

    It is not that they don�t have a quality education, seems to me that the average american just don�t care about what happens in the world. The only contact that they have is CNN.

    Just a thought.

   Regards

It's not so much that American's know so little about Europe.

It's that they know less about the US, it's politics and history than Europeans. Now that's worrying...