Please, please, please tell me that you can answer the questions in the quiz above. The National Post ran a story stating in which sociology prof Judith Adler at Memorial University reports:
“A sizeable proportion of the class would reliably have no idea where the Mediterranean is. Some students would circle Africa and indicate that it’s Europe, and if asked to locate England and Ireland, they would put them in Africa. I have had students that aren’t able to correctly label the Atlantic Ocean, even though we are on it.”
For those of you not familiar with Memorial University, it’s in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and 6 kilometres (3.8 miles) away from Signal Hill, which provides a commanding view of the ocean that some of Adler’s students could not identify.
As with most news organizations’ sites, half the fun is in reading the comments, which are typically a cesspool of trolling, misinformation, conspiracy theories and racism. My favourite comes from this somewhat unhinged character (the emphasis is mine):
How deep the rot goes is shown right above on Judith Adler’s own map of coloured continents. Apparently, according to Adler, Europe now includes a whole bunch of Asia, ie. India, the Arabian Peninsula, the Himalayas and a lot more.
And then he gets into wearing-a-pillowcase0on-your-head territory:
Adler is like a fireman who starts fires in order to prove his heroism in putting them down. In this case, it is exactly Adler and her cronies from academia who are responsible for dumbing down the population in order to satisfy their neo-Marxist sick fantasies of equality between races and cultures (with the little twist of eliminating Europeans in the process). If we are all the same, what difference does it really make where Europe is, or what’s the capital city of Poland. Since Adler & co. already profess that it should not matter if the Germans look Teutonic or Negroid, why should it matter if they are in Europe or somewhere below Timbuktu? As they force multiracialism and multiculturalism down our throats, geographical positions of a given country are just irrelevant details. And the UK already looks half-asian/african anyway, so what’s the big deal?
Here’s a close-up of the map about which he’s complaining:
He blames the miscolouring of Europe and Africa on Adler, when the credits on the right clearly state that it’s a stock image. My only response is: “Master race, my ass.”
4 replies on “University Students Fail Basic Geography”
http://xkcd.com/386/
Chipolte Maximus: Heh heh heh.
Didn’t you know, dude. It’s cool to be stupid.
The article doesn’t sit very well with me, though. The line “(remember when it was Peking?)” is what set me off. I know it’s a dog-whistle to the NP’s readership, but it’s suggesting an uncomfortable level of racism when the older Western way of saying a foreign word is “right” — like those Chinamen don’t *really* know how to spell their own names.
Then there’s the fact that the authorities on the subject didn’t talk to the reporter. While the reporter did, responsibly, attempt to contact them, the story remains a report on one professor. Is Ms Adler right, or does she have a chip on her shoulder?
If she is so confident that her pop quiz says something about the students’ abilities, why is the pop quiz not shown in the article? The stock images used are the reporter’s interpretation of the test, but since the entire article hinges on the result of the pop quiz, not representing it accurately or fully makes the interpretation of it suspect.
I do imagine that students’ geographical knowledge is lacking, but I have no way of knowing, from this article, whether I’m right or wrong in thinking that.