>>17061592Ignorant and stupid aren't synonyms. Everyone is ignorant about something, as much of a platitude as that sounds. I think your sentiment underlies a totalizing world view where, because some people are more intelligent than others, they must have impeccable skills.
Firstly, you conflate the terms "ignorant" and "stupid". These are not true synonyms. Just because Europeans and East Asians may be, on average, more intelligent than other races, it does not mean they must be particularly knowledgeable. IQ reflects general intelligence, which is a measure of aptitude for certain subjects. This means, for the most part, that if all other things are equal, higher IQ people will perform better in certain fields.
The important thing to understand is that average intelligence is rather insufficient for most intellectual pursuits. Even in intelligent countries, people are unlikely to retain knowledge from their basic geography classes. Furthermore, geography classes in different countries prioritize different things. It's rather unfair to expect people to retain information they were never even taught, like U.S. states for Europeans or Japanese prefectures for Americans.
The important things to understand is that, even though one country may out perform another in geographic knowledge, on the whole the citizenry of any nation tend to lack general knowledge of geography, such as the subdivisions of their own country, or, especially, the borders of a foreign region, which aligns with my original post.
