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Comment by flohofwoe | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but does the Indian education system actually use Mercator projection on their wall maps and geography learning material? E.g. how much is the average Indian citizen actually confronted with highly distorted map projections in their daily life (unless their professional job is involved with navigating ships of course where Mercator projections makes sense).

From my side of the world (Europe), this whole "Mercator projection is associated with colonialism" drama seems to have originated a couple of years ago in the US and was mostly amplified by artificial social media outrage.

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At least from my own experience, the map used the most throughout school was the Mercator projection.

When I first discovered that Greenland and Canada were not really that big during one of my many wikipedia tours as a kid, I was incredibly disappointed.

Are you saying that as a kid, you never had a globe in your geography classroom?

Seriously?

I mean, of course we were shown a globe "once". My father had one at home too, though tucked away under a mountain of files and other things in his gigantic cabinet.

But 99% of the time, a kid would see the world via maps in books, notebooks, projected onto the board, etc.

And we didn't have a "geography classroom". We had one classroom for a set number of kids - like 8A, 8B, etc. (where "8" is the class/grade). The teachers would come in and go as per the period. The kids stayed right where they were.

Good Lord! I can only suggest that your education system was in a state of failure.

I mean, most nations aren't as rich as the "West" + East Asia.

I come from a small town, but I still managed to do fine for myself.

not sure if this was sarcastic, but it's pretty common like this in austria, and if there are problems with the education system then this isn't one of them

It's from longer ago than that. There was a West Wing "big block of cheese" episode that made it out to be a white supremacy issue, when the map is really just a useful map for navigation.

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