I should probably point out these were not just recent grads who were polled. The details (few that we have) down toward the bottom said it was weighted for gender and age to try to represent all adults over age 18.
Of course, it would be interesting to those of us who like stats (I’m in that group) to see the age/gender breakdown, but at this point, no, one can’t make the claim that it’s today’s generation of grads that don’t know this info vs older grads.
ETA: When we teach about this we mention the numbers actually come from India (most of them - shape - etc) via Arab traders, so no new info there.
When someone has the cheek to say most Americans are stupid and racist is he ever including himself? Or his family? It’s really pretty sad.
Agree this is just another way to poke fun and feel superior.
Yes, the survey is silly and perhaps a little mean. However there is a real trend of fear and distrust of education and facts that has been growing, and I do think that is a bad thing for everyone.
A significant percentage of people think college is a bad thing overall for the country. A significant percentage of people think the news media is a bad thing for the country. A lot of people will hear facts and flatly deny that they are true. I do think these are frightening trends for a representative democracy.
Someone upthread said that back when hardly anybody went to college that the US did just fine. But back then people didn’t think college was bad and facts were bad, and they didn’t have deep-rooted suspicions of highly educated people.
“Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government…”
-Thomas Jefferson
I get that this kind of stuff is easy to manipulate, but when I taught social studies ages ago, I gave an identical quiz at the beginning of every school year to my students (junior high). The vast majority could not label the USA on a world map, much less any other countries. It was astounding to me.
The map clip was astounding, but I wonder if people were a little disoriented by the map itself. Most world maps show North and South America on the left side of the map and Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia on the right.
The funny thing is that the numerals used in actual modern standard Arabic writing are fairly different from the symbols that we use, and that we call Arabic numerals!
Purpose of the study? I suspect it was the same as the H2O one mentioned earlier in the thread. It can show folks their bias against Arabic in general akin to how many are biased against anything “chemical.” Along the way they can learn some trivia they didn’t know and learn not to generalize overall.
All good things in my mind.
The H2O one always goes around school. Hopefully this one will too. It’s very good for teens to learn to look below the surface of what they see.
If someone didn’t know before the question, they are unlikely to forget after. No harm done at all.
Exactly. And, per post #32, the, so-called, “Arabic numerals” originated in India. So this is a kind of meta-level joke on most of us here that didn’t know that, and who felt superior to the ones who told pollsters (correctly?) that teaching (actual) Arabic numerals in the school system was misguided. Anyone who wants to point fingers at the ignorant can always start with themselves.