Where’s Tannu Tuva?

IT’S DEPRESSING but not surprising that young American adults often are clueless to the world around them.

A recent survey found that more than half of 510 people polled, ages 18 to 24, could not find Saudi Arabia or Iraq on a map. Nine out of 10 failed to locate Afghanistan. On the domestic front, 67% were able to pick out Louisiana and half got Mississippi right. But that means that more than a third of those surveyed couldn’t identify either state in spite of all the attention focused on the region by last year’s hurricanes.

These are the results from the 2006 geographic literacy study conducted by the National Geographic Education Foundation and Roper Public Affairs and released earlier this month.

Many of the questions concerned areas that were the subject of dramatic events, including the war in Iraq, the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan. In other words, these were major events that attracted worldwide attention, accompanied by locator maps in newspapers, on the Internet and in magazines.

But even with all the attention on the tsunami, three-quarters of the young Americans polled could not find Indonesia on a map. And half or fewer could pick out New York or Ohio on a map of the United States.

So how many of them could find Tannu Tuva? I could when I was in grade school in the 1950s. That’s a trick question, of course. I had the good fortune of having Estelle Miles as my fifth- and sixth-grade teacher in Big Horn, Wyo. Mrs. Miles was a stamp collector and got some of us interested in it. Was this a trick to lure us into world geography? No one can say, but I got hooked.

I don’t remember many of the stamps and their countries. But a few small nations stand out because they produced large or colorful stamps, often as a means of raising revenue. San Marino and Monaco come to mind. Others with particularly striking stamps were from Africa and the Caribbean.

I especially remember the stamps from Tannu Tuva because of their unique triangular design. They often depicted dramatic events of nomadic life, such as archers shooting their arrows or racing their ponies. I probably couldn’t have put my finger directly on Tuva on a map. But I did know it existed and that it was somewhere near Mongolia.

I gave up collecting a few years later, but I was delighted to stumble across Tannu Tuva in the 1990s in a charming book, “Tuva or Bust!” by Ralph Leighton, a high school teacher who had been a close friend of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

Leighton took pride in knowing every country in the world. Feynman once challenged him: “OK, whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?” Leighton had to confess that he had never heard of Tannu Tuva. Feynman, it turned out, knew of the region from his own stampcollecting experience. This exchange launched them on a years-long quest to actually visit Tuva. Alas, Feynman died before he could reach the remote region, but Leighton ultimately did.

Tuvans have become familiar to some Americans because of their unique “throat singing” that enables them to carry two notes simultaneously.

Does it matter whether a young American knows where Tuva is? Probably not, except as a stumper in a trivia game. Is it important to be able to find Afghanistan or Iraq on a map? Without question. Maybe there’s some encouragement that only one in five of the 510 young adults surveyed thought “it’s not too important” to be able to locate countries that are prominent in the news. Still, that is 100 too many who think geography doesn’t matter.