Did you like or dislike Social Studies in school when you were growing up? Did countries, and dynasties and eras, and the history of this and the history of that, and the location of the Volga River (or was it the Danube?), and the Monroe Doctrine excite your imagination with visions of a far-off time and place, or did they stay in your brain long enough to be answers on a test, and then mercifully were deleted the moment the test was over? Did the thought ever cross your mind, "When in my entire life am I ever going to need to use any of this?"  I had the same thoughts when I was forced to learn the Elemental Tables in Science against my will. Don't worry–you're certainly not alone if you see yourself here.  In my own family, despite my love for history, geography, and political science, the entire set of subjects elicit a yawn and a groan from all but my son.  My wife would admit that she still gets Austria and Australia confused, and has to think really hard about whether World War I came before or after the Civil War.  While this might seem laughable to some, I suspect that in some form or permutation, in this country it is more common than not.  The fact is we as a nation are not very educated about the world that we inhabit, the history of it, the geography of it, and the people who live in it.  This has huge ramifications in how we perceive the events we hear about happening "over there somewhere," and more tragically, how we react to the news of disasters taking in place in areas of which we are only dimly aware.
          Author Tariq Ali makes the point that the way many Americans learn geography is by bombing countries. "You don't know where Afghanistan is? It's here, look, we're bombing it.  You don't know where Iraq is?  It's here. We're going to bomb it, and then you'll know where it is."  Or as the curmudgeonly journalist Ambrose Bierce said a hundred years before that, "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography." Nobody had any idea where Vietnam was until we started to bomb it.  We only found out where Laos and Cambodia were because it was discovered that we were secretly bombing them, too.  Not many people know the locations of most of the countries in Africa because we've never militarily intervened there.  This is a very unusual way to learn geography.
          One of the critical factors in the dearth of our knowledge in that bundled group known as Social Studies is the way that they are taught in school.  This is true of any subject; a great teacher doesn't just race through a series of facts for the sole reason that they will be on an end-of-the-week test.  The first mark of a such a teacher is that they are genuinely in love with the subject that they are teaching, and they do everything they can to transfer the love of that subject to their students.  A great teacher will try and explain why a certain thing is important to know, and how knowing about this thing might be important in the student's post-educational life.  Such a teacher as this might have explained the Table of Elements to me in a way that fired my imagination in science and all of the wonders of the building blocks of nature.  Instead, it was just a list of symbols that I needed to memorize long enough to try and pass the science test.  In today's teach-to-the-test, No Child Left Behind, school-achievement-scores-are-everything, gotta-beat-the-Japanese mode of educating, it is the rare teacher who can pause long enough in the blitz of facts in any subject to give their students a why.  
          In my first semester in college many a moon ago, I had an incredible teacher in American History.  I can't even remember his name, or I would give him his props here.  The class was mainly concerned with the American Revolution and the years immediately before and after.  This fellow wove such a great story, and made all of the characters come so alive, that I couldn't wait until the next class to find out what happened next.  This is history at its best–the finest writers and teachers tell stories like the great novelists; only for me, the added bonus is that these things actually happened.  My love of history really took off from that one class, and it's no coincidence that my son's love of this subject is directly the result of having fantastic history teachers in each of his last two years of high school.
          I think the first non-fiction history book I read for enjoyment was The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. The Guns of August is a fascinating description of the events and personalities that led to the awful culmination of World War I.  Her narrative of these events concerning the crumbling monarchies and empires at the turn of the twentieth century, their dynasties intertwined by marriage, bristles with the energy of a great novel.  I immediately read through her collected works.  Other historians who captured my attention during this time were Robert Massie, Stephen Ambrose, David McCullough, and Alison Weir.  Each of these writers shares the gift of making history jump off the page with the same flair of a great novelist.  
          For most students, though, Social Studies is taught as another list of facts that need to be memorized to take the unit test.  There is no context to the information, no why.  Unless we take it upon ourselves to get educated about these things, this deficit follows us around for the rest of our lives.  This is one of the main reasons for the disconnect that Americans display concerning the actions of our government towards the rest of the world.  Our lack of knowledge about the world we live in is what can lead us to a general lack of compassion about the dire predicament that so many billions of people now find themselves in. It is in large part what compels us to expect condolences from around the world when we lose 3000 civilians to a terrorist attack, while we hardly blink an eye at numbers much higher than that caused either by a natural disaster, or by our own military in what is unemotionally termed "collateral damage."           
         During the Vietnam War, how many Americans were aware that a young Ho Chi Minh, an admirer of the American Revolution, had sought Woodrow Wilson's help in 1919 at the Versailles Conference to end French rule in Indochina and help establish an independent Vietnam?  He was rebuffed, even though President Wilson had staked his claim on self-determination for all peoples, and Ho soon found open arms in the French Communist Party.  He returned to Vietnam in 1941 to lead the Viet Minh independence movement, and fought the Japanese and then the French before eventually taking on the Americans in what we know of as the Vietnam War, but what most Vietnamese call their Thirty Year War of Independence.  Seen in this context, as a war of independence, with Ho Chi Minh as the Vietnamese George Washington, it becomes all too easy to see why the South Vietnamese never had their heart in the fight.  The point here is not whether Ho was a good guy or not, but rather the way he was viewed by the majority of the Vietnamese people.  This information would have been valuable for Americans to understand as they tried to grasp the complexities of the situation in Vietnam.
          In the same vein, the Islamist Revolution in Iran in 1979 following the overthrow of the Shah is much more easily understood if it is seen as the blowback, or unintended consequence, of the CIA engineered coup in 1953 that overthrew the elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossedegh and installed the Shah in the first place.  It's the knowledge of the latter that puts the former into a more rounded perspective.  Once again, it’s not passing judgment on the Ayatollah Khomeini or his revolution to simply be in possession of the knowledge of the circumstances that preceded such an important event.
          Similarly, understanding how the countries of Yugoslavia and Iraq were cobbled together by British diplomats in a room in Versailles in 1919 makes the ethnic and religious tensions in both nations much easier to comprehend.  In the case of Yugoslavia, the diplomats somehow figured that the dominant Serbs, and their long time rivals the Croats, along with rivals of both, the Slovenians, and the Bosnian Muslims, and the Kosovan Albanians, and the Montenegrins, along with the Greek Macedonians and Albanian Macedonians, would all suddenly come together as a national entity.  During the Cold War, the authoritarian hand of the communist Josef Tito held these disparate groups together.  Tito was a World War II war hero and a strong enough leader to keep the tenuous bonds together.  Following his death in 1980, the various ethnic factions fell upon each other in a vicious internecine struggle that tore the artificial structure apart.
          In Iraq, British Imperialists made one country where three would have probably been better, and this at a time when the emerging country of Turkey would have been in less of a position to argue about losing another chunk of their land in their east to the Kurds.  The three would have been an independent Kurdistan in the north, with a capital in Kirkuk; a Sunni entity in the center, with Baghdad as its capital, and a Shia nation in the south, with Basra the main city.  It has taken authoritarian rule, either civilian or military, to keep the three factions from fighting each other. When one takes away the authoritarian rule, the gates open to sectarian violence.  The idea that these three groups are going to live in democratic harmony is fanciful, at best.  There's no history of it.  Of course the Shias like the idea in theory, because they are the majority faction who has been ruled by minority Sunnis for a long time.  The Kurds like it as well, because they get to have a voice in a government of which they have been virtually shut out. They are also, in the main, still fighting for as much autonomy in their region that they can possibly get away with, and will most certainly in the future become an independent state.  It is the Sunnis, however, that are going to fight this democracy idea to the bitter end.  They find themselves suddenly on the bottom looking up, after many years of privilege as the ruling elite.  
          This is all crucial knowledge if we hope to fully understand the mess that we find ourselves in Iraq.  It is also important to understand that the government plays upon, in fact counts on, our lack of knowledge about Islam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and before that Vietnam, Latin America, and Iran, because that is how they can do what they do with such little dissent from their citizens.  How can you argue or protest something that you know so little about?  The problem in Vietnam was that those pesky pinko journalists started nosing around there, and started writing about what they actually saw, instead of what the government was telling we, the people.  It was this knowledge, along with the photographs and film shot by courageous photographers that turned the nation against the war.  The American government and its military have since gotten wise to this, and now restricts access to the battlefield in the interest of... whatever excuse they've cooked up.  In Iraq, this led to the sad irony that al-Jazeera, the Arabian CNN, was providing the only real pictures of what was going on there before they were kicked out of the country by the Americans for being too partisan.
          The advent of the Internet has provided an amazing amount of information at our fingertips.  There are historical documents sitting out there in cyberspace that one would, at the very least, have had to travel to some far-flung university library and go through all sorts of procedures to view.  There are political speeches, biographies on obscure but important players in the story of history, any kind of international, national, state, or local law or statute you can think of, and facts, figures, and opinions pertaining to people and places that only the most miniscule public information was ever before available.  The great search engines like Google are treasure troves.  The importance of the Internet cannot be overstated, because as traditional media outlets have been consolidated and corporatized, journalistic standards have taken a back seat to corporate profits.  There is a kind of one-size-fits-all mentality in mainstream American media today, which makes it almost impossible to get in-depth information on anything except celebrity relationships and scandals.  The Internet is filled with billions of bytes of mindless blather (and worse), but you don't have to go there.  I can't speak for the other academic disciplines, but in my opinion, the Internet is the best thing that's happened to the learning of history and political science since the invention of the printing press.  It's now remarkably easy to call bull-headed politicians on their lies.  It's also much easier to give those same politicians your opinion.
          It is fascinating to take a subject like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and browse around a search engine. You will find a staggeringly vast array of insights, opinions, facts, interviews, official documents, and maps from every conceivable angle.  It becomes all too clear that two peoples are looking at the same picture and one sees black and the other sees white.  Mixed into the kaleidoscope are Israelis who attempt to understand the Palestinian cause, and Palestinians who are attempting to see the Israeli's point of view.
          I suppose at the bottom of this has to be a desire to want to learn about these things.  I'm not inherently curious to try and understand how strontium helps or hinders the world that I live in.  When my brother wrote his dissertation on quantum physics, I couldn't make it past the title.  My wife, whom I have already embarrassed about her lack of knowledge in Social Studies, is extremely knowledgeable in Child Psychology, and while I have more than a passing interest in the major points of this discipline due to the fact that we have four children, if she attempts to explain anything to me past the USA Today version my eyes begin to glaze and my mind begins to wander.  While all educational subjects are important in the interconnectedness of living things and their relationships with one another, there is this crucial difference: it is only through the study of history, political science, and current events that we can equip ourselves with the knowledge to make sensible and thoughtful choices about the events and people that shape the fate of our planet.
          The majority of people in this country cast their ballots for national leaders based on domestic issues because it is domestic issues that are going to have a greater short-term impact on their lives.  Because Americans, by and large, have such an incomplete picture of the rest of the world, it becomes relatively easy for politicians to speak in broad terms about foreign policy; all Americans want to know is that they're going to be safe and secure.  Look at 9/11, for example.  After the initial shock wore off, many Americans had their sporting instincts kick in.  They just wanted the American military to go "kick some ass," and it didn't really matter whose ass it was.  It seems incomprehensible to think that a majority of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon until our nation's history deficit is dropped into the equation. Once it is realized that most Americans have no idea that Saddam's regime was 1) secular, and 2), Osama bin-Laden is fighting just as much or more against secular Arab governments as he is against America, then we can see how easy it is for the Bush administration to put this story over on their citizens.  To most people, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sudan, the UAE, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan all melt together into a great big Muslim soup and therefore an unintentional monolithic haze develops when any of them are mentioned.  
Most people in those countries probably don't know that much about the obscure places in the rest of the world, either. Why in the world do I need to know anything about Turkmenistan, or any other "stan?" Are we getting ready to bomb them? 
           The guy does have a sense of humor.  The answer is we are the only country in the world that is trying to run the rest of the world.  We have all but stopped denying that we are a full-fledged empire, and our country answers to no one, not even the UN.  As such, we have a vested interest in the affairs of almost all of the countries in the world.  They either represent emerging markets for our products, or they have commodities (oil) that we need to keep the great engine of capitalism humming, or they might make a good geographical location for an Army or Air Force base so that we can protect the flow of our products into and the flow of commodities (oil) out of these countries.  That is why it behooves us as citizens and voters to have at least a rudimentary knowledge of these places because they are not a monolithic entity, and they figure to play an increasingly important role in the unending War on Terror (Pre-emptive Struggle for Control of Commodities©).  For starters, while all of these countries are majority Muslim, some are Arab, some are not; some are predominately Shia, but most are mainly Sunnis.  Some are secular, others bow more or less to Muslim faith and the influence of the imams and mullahs.  Some are family-run kingdoms and sheikdoms, and some are run overtly or covertly by their military.
          Conversely, the less we know about the people of Turkmenistan, or anybody else that isn't European or doesn't speak English as a first language, the less we have to humanize them in our minds and the easier it is to psychologically deal with whatever we have to do to them to get what we need from them.  Or in the case of Africa, the easier it is to put them out of our minds because we don't need anything from them.  Over five hundred pro-democracy demonstrators killed by government troops in our new buddy nation of Uzbekistan?  Don't even know where it is.  Hey, the Uzbeks just kicked the US military out of their country!  Still don't have the slightest idea where it is.  2.5 million people on the verge of starvation in Niger?  Rings a bell, but maybe I'm thinking of Nigeria.  They aren't the same thing, are they? And where, exactly, is Darfur?  
          A big part of being able to make informed, independent judgments on whether or not the government that we voted for is doing what they said they were going to do is getting informed and then thinking independently.  I feel so much better about actually having an opinion on the government and its policies because I have taken the time to start getting informed.  I no longer feel like a drunk brawler in a bar, swinging wildly at my opponent while he swings wildly at me.  It's like self-defense, really.  I feel like I can sit in a room with a half-dozen people whom I disagree with and more than hold my own.  And this, in turn, has led me to start to get involved in political solutions to the problems I might have heretofore just griped about.  Knowledge is indeed empowering.  I also feel like I can make independent decisions on the issues of the day because by being informed on my own, I don't have to rely on the spin or the party line of the day from either political party or their mouthpieces to tell me what is going on in the world.  When you get your information from Fox, or Air America, or the EIB Network, you are not getting news.  You are getting spin.