We had a conversation the other day about the state of the world and knowledge, and an old chestnut was dug up: "Why is it that every time I talk to a person from (insert foreign country here - the most popular variant of this anecdote usually uses the more vague "European") they know so much about my country, and I'm embarrassed to say that I can't even tell them what kind of government they have." When it's flung into a conversation, most people nod their head in a display of earnest concern and then tell a similar anecdote, and as a result the whole conversation has been derailed and we all feel smug about how stupid our country is, and that we are so much smarter (than everyone) for having realized that. Does realizing our deficiencies count as knowledge? Isn't this missing a very important step - the step of fixing those deficiencies?

Is this even true? Now I realize how dangerous it is to ask this quesion - "oh, most assuredly, people in other countries know more about us than we about them," people will say. But is that information important? If its important for us to know who the leaders in Tanzania are, why don't we just pick up a book and learn? I guess the thing that irks me most about this is that there seems to be some idea that there is a failure of society - american leadership, education, and media, that leads us to our global deficiencies. Not only a failure, but a near conspiracy to keep that information out of our hands. This explanation just seems lazy to me, and absolves us of the responsibility to go out and learn these things on our own. There is no reason, in the age of the internet, why we can't exhaustively learn about the intricacies of other governments.

The truth is, Americans are very good at learning everything they need to know. We live lives almost completely isolated from the outside world, and as a result we are well educated in the things that impact our daily lives. This is an incredibly wide spectrum of knowledge that just happens to exclude the workings of (and location of!) foreign countries. The rest of the world is no different. They know exactly what they need to know, and often times this includes the ins and outs of other influential countries.... I am not an apologist here. It's sad that we aren't able to know where on this planet our neighbors come from, but from a practical standpoint it makes sense. It is another matter altogether, of course, if our leaders and those who influence policy don't know. And, I suppose, if you vote.... Ha. It's a precipitous slope. I suppose then, that in order to vote you should be able to pass a simple knowledge test about the subject matter.
This isn't going anywhere, I know, so I'll kill it now.