So 1 in 4 US 4th graders ranked "below basic" in a national geography exam. 1 in 4 ranked "proficient", half ranked "basic" and 1 in 100 ranked "advanced".

If you travel around the world and talk to people you discover that everyone else in the world believes that Americans don't know geography. That is true, at least as compared to other countries. An average educated European knows somewhat more about world geography than an average educated American.

So some secretary of education or other got up and talked about what a tragedy this was, and how this was unacceptable. Then some diplomat talked about how 9/11 tell us how we need to know more about geography. I am pretty sure I disagree. This is a lot of BS. I am very much not convinced that American school children need to waste their time knowing which mountain reigon is in which country, or learn to locate Sri Lanka on a map.

Now, I really am a big believer in this being worldly, and knowing about different places. But that is an interest one may or may not cultivate as they feel like it. In school we ought to obsess over skills. Today with the internet, information is cheap. Everyone on this planet with a few clicks of a mouse can look of the driving time from Jalalabad to Islamabad. Few people care, and it makes little difference.

We need to focus on skills, and ways of thinking. Children need to learn about how to think critically about the world and the news. Children need to learn mathematics, and theory of programing languages, so they can better use the technology they have, and improve on it. Children need to learn what it is to be in a power relationship, and how governments work in general, not where some particular government is located. Children need to be trained to look at all the conditions that make up a political situation, otherwise we end up with a country full of people who can't vote or make public policy decisions with any solid thinking behind it. Children need to learn game theory, and how interactions work. Facts are for Europeans who are obsessed with being able to drop names from history or literature. Americans should learn what it is to read and comprehend. Americans should learn languages. Who cares about a detail that anyone can just look up?

When the US went in to Beirut, for example, not one of the marines could have located Beirut on a map. But the minute it became important, they all learned really fast. What the US never caught on to was the power dynamics that made up the people of Lebanon, and Americans have little framework within which we can understand different kinds of governments that do not involve republicans and democrats and presidents. That is what we need to focus on. Learning about cultures, not to celebrate them, but to understand them should be the goals of our educations system.

We waste too much damned time on useless stuff that we can look up, and impacts us little. We need to learn about relationships and frameworks. We need skills, not information.