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Are Europeans more well versed with world geography than Americans? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 month ago by LtDan@lemmy.zip to c/europe@feddit.org
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I've seen multiple videos equivalent of Americans pointing where (country) is on the map, and there was an instance where the host asked the woman where the continent Africa is located (points to Asia) like WTF? That's not even close at all.

I know there's bias towards those types of videos since there are accusations of the host "handpicking" select strangers framing them as if they are representative of the US. But the truth is that their education system isn't good as it lacks funding.

When you put it into perspective: how many Europeans can correctly locate & name countries adjacent to them within their own continent and globally? Is the education system within the EU that good or effective at teaching kids that subject?

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[โ€“] KoboldCoterie@pawb.social 2 points 1 month ago

We simply define "us" and "others" differently. You can kind of think of the US like the EU, and the states as the individual member countries; they're not too dissimilar, except that the federal government has more power than the EU as a whole does. Our state divisions are (to us) equivalent to the country divisions in the EU. Each has its own population, its own laws, its own governing body, its own culture. States don't have particularly much in common with each other in many cases. Even very close by states - take Maine and Massachusetts for example (two states I've lived in, and can therefore comment on). Very different vibe between the two; very distinctly different accents, different mannerisms, different customs. They each have stereotypes about the other.

Europeans (broadly speaking, based on the comments in this thread specifically) seem to think state lines are fairly arbitrary but it's definitely not the case. I'm not sure why you (seem to) feel that learning about other states is somehow "lesser" than learning about other countries in the EU or Europe as a whole. The US covers a land area more than twice as large as the EU, and has just under twice as many states as the EU has countries. Somehow, though, learning about that is treated (in this thread) like Germans learning about Germany to the exclusion of all else.