J was explaining to me yesterday that the average North American today knows a lot less about basic geography than we realize. Apparently, students are not being taught geography, and they are failing to learn it on their own. It's shocking.
As an example, every year a professor assigns students an easy exercise: to correctly label the continents on a blank world map. They can't do it. Each year's results are worse than the one before. In addition to incorrectly labeled continents, they confuse oceans, and as you might imagine, countries.
This article is old, but I cannot imagine that the results have improved.