A conversation the other day had me thinking about what it means - or may not mean - to be educated. Two of my friends visited a local school on their homestay, spending the day with the students, teachers, and the headmaster. The headmaster ran an academy of about 600 kids, spoke excellent English, and knew a fair amount about US politics (especially events in the fall of 2008). By obvious measures, he was well-learned and well-informed, and a perfectly capable instructor and leader. It was an impressive education, even, for someone from an under-resourced, rural region.

Except, as I found out, the headmaster had never heard of the continent we call Antarctica. He had no idea it existed. To think that there is a gigantic sub-zero desert island, with penguins and houses made of ice?? And that it is just a few thousand kilometers south of the very continent we're on (one, what's more, whose poor will suffer most from rising temperatures in as few as ten years from now)? It blew his mind.

And it blew my mind too, initially, to think that someone otherwise so articulate and so intellectually curious would not know this basic fact about the world. But who was I, really, to call this fact basic? Or even true?

If you look at a map of the world inside the headmaster's notebook, you'd find that Antarctica indeed doesn't exist. On an otherwise familiar sketch of the oceans, continents, and yes, the North Pole, at the bottom of his map there is a great big void where I would've expected to see the glacial mass. It was just water, though not of the frozen kind.

If this were the only map you owned, wouldn't you take it as truth? What reason would you have to otherwise? In his understanding, too, Obama ruled not just the US, but Canada and South and Central America too. The president of a United American States, or whatever. Imagine that.

But, is he really any worse off for not knowing?