“Do you know where Dubrovnik is? Lviv? Do you think most Brits do?”

Straw poll in the office - Croatia and Poland, respectively. Admittedly Lviv was a toughy and only 2 out of 5 knew it.

The difference with UK geo education is that as well as studying Europe, we do silly things like learn about Africa, Asia and the US. Using the size of the US is *possibly* valid, there is not really an excuse for at least spending a little/any time on the rest of the world.

Actually, Lviv is in western Ukraine (although it was Polish in the interwar years).

As a matter of fact, most Swedish kids are taught all the countries of the world and at least all the capitals of Europe, as well as Swedish geography.

I belive it’s a matter of scale. Sweden is divided into 25 shires, each which have a capital, then there are other subdivisions for which I don’t know the english equivalent, and even though we don’t have as large rivers, nor as high mountains, they are still our rivers and mountains, so we learn their names and where they are. I doubt that americans are taught more cities, states, landmarks, etc. than our school children are taught about the same in Sweden.

Then we also learn about Europe, and the rest of the world. I would say that most Swedish children know at least fifteen US states by name and location.

And using Liviv as an example isn’t close to fair, do the average american know all US cities with 800K inhabitants? Not likely, I would be surprised if you knew more than the names of the 50 state capitals.

At least part of the United States geography dumbdown can be attributed to Harvard President James Conant who declared in 1948 that, “Geography is not a University subject.” Like lemmings, others thought, “if Harvard says so, it must be true.” Science triumphed and Conant went on to develop an even bigger bomb, this one atomic in nature. Since then Harvard has had no Geogrpahy Department - until now. A flashy brochure last year announced, “Harvard returns to Geography on May 5th, 2006.” On that date they opened the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis.
We lesser mortals can rejoice that maps and geography have once again regained acceptance from on high. No one from Harvard has admitted they were wrong but the damage done within the US teaching community was enormous. Geography and maps became irrelevant in US public teaching circles, much less important than developing self esteem. Geography was left up to parents and private schools where the value of knowing your way around was still apparent. The advent of GIS systems and mobile GPS receivers may change that. Our children are trained to accept short bites of visual information, anything that doesn’t require reading or thinking too hard is OK. But we do know how to flip hanburgers.

Know how to flip them yes, but not how to spell the word.

Speculation about the level of U.S. knowledge of geography is one of the last socially acceptable forms of bigotry. I suppose it ranks with notions of drunken Poles, effeminate Brits, or sex-crazed Italians.

Seriously, if one wants to know something about Dubrovnik or Lviv (once Lvov) an easy way to go about it is to query, on the U.S.-invented internet, any search engine or the GNIS databases.

As long as geography amounted to vugarities like memorizing points in polygons, it had no place in a university. But for many years, even at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, geographers in the U.S. and abroad, collaborated in turning geography into a scientific discipline.

I think the single most important U.S. contribution has been its open data environment. There is no charge for the Census, and nothing like a Crown Copyright on it.

Open access to data for scientific purposes exists in the remote-sensing realm as well — at least for U.S. territory. But some countries, I’ll not point fingers, treat all but small-scale roadmaps as state secrets — for sale, of course.

Tools of geospatial science from the U.S., too, are commonly used throughout the world, and I know of no barriers to the import of competing tools from abroad. This includes GIS, which we recognize as a Canadian invention.

Finally, the international community has to give Americans some credit for not taking themselves too seriously. One song instantly recognized here is “Do You Know The Way to San Jose?” But my personal favorite is Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere, Man.”