"Miss US American"
The objective was simple--to dumb down the future electorate so that they would have little knowledge of the real world, and be more dependent on left-wing politicians to tell them what to think.
The fact is, if one peruses a map of the world intelligently, all sorts of otherwise baffling things fall into place--like the geopolitics of foreign policy and national security.
When I was a kid we studied geography per se from at least the fourth grade on up. Every classroom had a set of large maps to pull down in front of the blackboards, and we used them--political maps, topographical maps, maps of natural resources, rainfall, you name it. Anyone who knows the geography of the Middle east will not have been surprised by the events of the last oh, hundred years or so.