Sunday, October 19, 2003
You mean Michael Moore is misleading?
From a Calstuff comment thread about football:
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That's so creepy. I know the prime minister of canada, and I know the countries bordering iraq and afghanistan. but Michael Moore has this simple party trick that is so reliable that it works at every event that he does on tour. He finds the canadian in the audience with the lowest GPA, and the american with the highest GPA, and the canadian will win in a geography contest.
Since it has nothing to do with football, I'm going to respond here.
If you're a Michael Moore fan you probably haven't, but for the rest of you, have you ever wondered why many of these tests to prove Americans are stupider than people from other countries almost always focus on geography? Not math. Not science. Not writing skills. Not reasoning. Geography.
In my high school, the role of the "geography class" was filler. It wasn't a requirement to graduate. It wasn't a requirement for any other courses. No universities recommended it. It was taken by those students who really just wanted to get their diploma and move on. The motivated students looking towards universities and careers, who had higher GPAs, never took the class, because there was always something more important. I've heard similar situations from other people's high school experiences.
American schools usually don't place an emphasis on geography, and with good reason. How many times have you been in a situation where not knowing the location of Bahrain, or what the capital of Madagascar is, would really have cost you? Schools in other countries place a much higher emphasis on geography because foreign countries like trying to prove how much smarter their citizens are than ours. (actually, I don't know why they focus on it in other countries. I know more about the English system of government than any of my English friends, though, so maybe there's a tradeoff) In any case, focusing on geography is a cheap way to stack the statistical deck against the U.S. Would Michael Moore engage in bad statistics? No way!
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