I've just started reading Beyond The Age of Innocence, by Kishore Mahbubani, and hope to post a review when I'm done. From the introduction a not unfamiliar notion caught my eye:
The curious paradox here is that America is by far the best educated society on the globe. The percentage of its citizens who have had a tertiary education and who have access to all the modern sources of knowledge, from cable TV to the Internet, is among the highest in the world. Yet the American population also appears to be among the least well-informed on global affairs. . . .One hope of this book is to make American society aware that daily, billions of pairs of eyes are watching, studying, and judging America.It's a common enough line of thought: America runs the world, Americans don't know enough about foreign policy, Americans need to realize that people are watching us, etc.. That Americans know shockingly little in sort of fuzzy absolute terms is a common enough notion: see this set of "red flags," about the American lack of knowledge. I.e., to put it starkly, all other considerations aside, you'd hope that more than half of Americans would have known who Yasser Arafat was back when it was relevant. It's usualy framed as a negative comparison to somewhat poorly specified data about other countires (so who is that has the best foreign policy knowledge to tertiary education rate ratio, anyway?). But at some level it begs the question: so what? Would a more informed populace really be able to change anything? Clearly, the rest of the world isn't interested in how our scores at National Geographic Trivial Pursuit improve. What would be an appropriate response to the gain of some more knowledge?
