Where's Iowa?

I read an article in "Reuters Oddly Enough." It was supposed to be one of those "things that make you go hmmmm" articles.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=583&e=5&u=/nm/20050223/od_nm/odd_japan_korea_north_dc
Oddly Enough - Reuters Hint: It's Above South KoreaWed Feb 23, 9:50 AM ET Oddly Enough - Reuters
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea has menaced Japan with missiles, kidnapped its citizens and stands between it and a place in the soccer World Cup finals, but one in four Japanese high-school students can't place the country on a map.
Only 76 percent of high school pupils in a survey by an academic body could locate the reclusive communist state, despite a daily bombardment of news about it in the Japanese media.
As for Iraq, where Japan has some 550 soldiers in one of the country's most controversial overseas deployments and where a Japanese was beheaded by kidnappers, over 40 percent of university students and high-school pupils couldn't find it.
"While students are interested in the news, they don't see it as important to know where the countries are," said Yumiko Takizawa, a geography professor at Teikyo University who ran the survey for the Association of Japanese Geographers.
"Inter-dependence and links between countries are ever more important," Takizawa said. "It's clear that an education system that teaches a proper knowledge of the world is needed."
The survey polled 3,773 students at 25 top universities and 1,027 high-school pupils at nine schools across Japan.
They were handed a world map with 30 numbered countries and asked to write the number corresponding to 10 countries that have recently featured regularly in the news.
It wasn't only small countries that didn't register, however.
Takizawa said that some students couldn't find the United States and located it in China, Brazil or the central African state of Congo.

But I thought about it a bit more. Now I wonder how these same students would have compared had they been tested on knowledge of current events. Or an understanding of the relationships and connections between nations.

My first instinct is to chide these students for not being able to geographicly locate the nations affecting their everyday lives. But maybe we've finally reached that place where physical location just isn't as important. Sure, neighboring countries have more potential for friction. But distance isn't a safety barrier.

Nations can easily reach out across the globe and wreak economic, social or military havoc with little or no regard to the distance.

I think that it would be more important to know what nations pull the strings on another nations economy (who's pulling our economic strings?) or how far reaching it's military is, rather than where it is on the globe.

Is that really where we are at? Is that really the world we live in now?