• peeonyou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      I’m not sure… In 8th grade our social studies teacher was trying to get a feel for where everyone was in geography and picked on students to go up and point out various geographical locations on the giant map on the chalkboard.

      He started with really simple ones like “Where is North America? Where is South America?” and barely got through that point because he picked a rich white kid on the basketball team to go point out where “Asia” is on the map and the kid pointed to everywhere BUT asia… North America, South America, Australia, Africa.

      The kid was getting really mortified as the rest of the class was laughing harder and harder with each try.

      I will never forget that as long as I live because after class I asked him if he was just messing around and he confided he honestly never looked at maps so he didn’t know, but also he didn’t care because he would never need to know that.

      • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        2 days ago

        but also he didn’t care because he would never need to know that.

        I…this is so alien to me, I cannot understand this attitude. I see it everywhere, but it always baffles me. I don’t understand why so many people are so incurious. How can they know that they’ll “never need to know” something when they don’t know it or know how important that information could be?

    • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      One time my workplace did an informal fun lil test of identifying every state in the US. More than one person was surprised Mexico was so close. Most people got around 10 states correct and left the rest blank.

      Around ten people labeled states with the names of foreign countries, like I remember one person identified Hawaii as Japan, and one wrote “British” on Virginia. These were people with college degrees too. Americans are simply not great at geography.

    • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      2 days ago

      Eyeballing it, at least a third of these are misclicks. Virtually no one, even in America, believes that Iran is in the western hemisphere or in the ocean (not even on an island), and several more of the popular locations are similarly improbable.