Kyrgyzstan: Near Kansas, right?

Kyrgyzstan. Or is it Kansas? Some Americans couldn't tell the difference. Photo / Reuters

When it comes to geography, Americans can't tell Kyrgyzstan from Kansas.

That's the conventional wisdom when it comes to the state of Americans' knowledge about the states and their limited worldview of the world.

But now several groups of educators and at least one entrepreneur are trying to do something about it.

The National Geographic Society is in the midst of a five-year multimedia campaign called My Wonderful World, aimed at improving the geographic knowledge of students aged 8 to 17.

A national group of geography educators is lobbying Congress to provide funding for geography instruction to correct what they see as a decline in the subject's teaching.

And then there's Roger Andresen, a former fibre-optics engineer who five years ago founded an Atlanta company called A Broader View to make puzzles and other products that make geography accessible to the general public.

"Geography is a wonderful discipline to help us understand a wide variety of issues, such as international security, international resources, and international business," said Andresen, 34, whose company has five full-time employees and has notched up sales of 800,000 items, including its signature product, the 600-piece Geography Puzzle.

In addition his company also runs an online geography contest that challenges visitors to identify 10 random countries in two minutes.

Since starting the contest in 2003, the website has registered more than 2.1 million contestants from 192 countries.

Andresen was inspired to quit his engineering job and start his own company in 2002, when he read the results of a multinational survey of 18 to 24-year-olds that found that American young adults placed next to last in geographic knowledge. Mexico came in last of the nine nations in the survey; Sweden first.

A follow-up survey in 2006 was hardly more encouraging. The study, by the National Geographic Society and Roper Public Affairs, found that six in 10 of the young adults surveyed could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East, and although the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians had been in the headlines their entire lives, 75 per cent could not locate Israel.

"We were surprised in the 2006 survey to see that, notwithstanding the fact that there have been these cataclysmic events in the world, there was still this lack of awareness of where these places were," said Terry Garcia, the National Geographic executive in charge of the organisation's My Wonderful World campaign.

Educators attribute the problem they call "geographic illiteracy" to a combination of factors. As a large country separated from the rest of the world by two oceans, the United States has not had to concern itself as much with such fine points as knowing that Guinea is a country in Africa and that New Guinea is an island north of Australia.