News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills. Parent comment

Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills by majewsky on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @06:05AM (#14496054)
Reminds me about a segment on Last Week Tonight where they showed a map of South America, with one country highlighted as Peru. And John Oliver said, "Peru! A country you care so little about you didn't even realize this isn't Peru... [Highlight changes to another country] THIS is Peru."

And he's got a point. There's not much advantage to knowing the precise locations of all countries on earth, unless you're working in foreign policy etc.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills by emodendroket on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @09:58AM (#14497226)
In fact one reason so many people have such confused ideas about foreign politics is a lack of understanding of geography.

Consider: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/05/14/upshot/if-ame...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills by majewsky on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @01:06PM (#14498875)
I think they got their causation backwards. A working understanding of how foreign policy works is correlated with a higher education level is correlated with being able to find countries on a map.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Many Colleges Fail to Improve Critical-Thinking Skills by emodendroket on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @01:21PM (#14499025)
How is someone supposed to understand foreign policy if they think North Korea is in Australia?
[ Parent | on HN ]