Some people just aren't interested. When I worked at sea for Royal Caribbean one of my co-workers admitted they didn't know what ocean Hawaii was in, even though they'd been working on the ship when it visited Hawaii. (That person was South African.)
Another one said they didn't know where Los Angeles was when they first joined the company. They'd been assigned a ship that sailed out of Los Angeles when they were hired, and assumed that since Royal Caribbean was a Miami-based company, Los Angeles must be the name of the port in Miami, or was the name of the area the port was in. It was only later they realized they were on the other side of the continent and sailing out of California. (I think that person was British, but I don't remember. Some first-world northern hemisphere place that wasn't North America, anyway.)
Neither of these people seemed particularly bothered about any of this. Both of them had had a standard first-world high school education, and both of them held skilled jobs which required a certain amount of knowledge and responsibility; they just didn't really give that much of a $hit about where on Earth they were, or had been. It was weird to me, but I'm sure there were things they were expert in that I'd have been baffled by.
