> it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom Try to buy a world map for a classroom. Search things like "world map for classroom", "large world

> it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom Try to buy a world map for a classroom. Search things like "world map for classroom", "large world map", "world map poster" in Amazon. Probably 95% of the maps returned for these search terms are Mercator, but there are a few that aren't. American elementary school teachers are generalists, they teach geography without having specialized knowledge of geography, much less map projections. If such a teacher is buying a world map for their classroom, they're very likely to pick a Mercator map simply because that's what most classroom sized maps use. (Despite this, American children are not raised to think that Canada is powerful...)