A Bungled Beauty Pageant and Our Reason for Being

By now, mil­lions of web users have watched Miss Teen South Car­oli­na explain in mor­ti­fy­ing fash­ion (see below) why many Amer­i­cans can’t find the Unit­ed States on a map. And, in their own unin­tend­ed way, her com­ments effec­tive­ly answered the ques­tion posed to her. Edu­ca­tion sim­ply isn’t what it should be in Amer­i­ca. And that holds true for many oth­er nations.

All of this sets the stage for explain­ing Open Cul­ture’s rea­son for being. Put sim­ply, we try to put peo­ple, no mat­ter what their age or where they live, in a posi­tion to con­tin­ue learn­ing and improv­ing them­selves. With the help of our pod­cast col­lec­tions, you can now start learn­ing over 25 for­eign lan­guages, lis­ten to over 100 audio­books, includ­ing clas­sic works in lit­er­a­ture, poet­ry and phi­los­o­phy, and take over 75 com­plete cours­es from some of the world’s lead­ing uni­ver­si­ties (MIT, Stan­ford, UC Berke­ley, Oxford, etc.). Our pod­cast library includes many more edu­ca­tion­al resources as well, and the best part is that they’re com­plete­ly free. Hours of free edu­ca­tion are at your dis­pos­al when­ev­er you want it. To ben­e­fit, you sim­ply need the desire and the will, and the abil­i­ty to use pod­casts. (If you don’t know how, sim­ply read our Pod­cast Primer. We’ll get you up to speed.) We hope that you prof­it from these pod­cast col­lec­tions and our dai­ly posts (sub­scribe to our feed), and, if they can ben­e­fit a friend, please let them know about us at www.oculture.com.

P.S. For those who want to bone up on geog­ra­phy, check out Geog­ra­phy of World Cul­tures on iTunes. This infor­ma­tive course was taught by Mar­tin Lewis at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty.