Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
turies because every generation has been surprised by the rising generation's even poorer
mastery of maps? In other words, what if we're continually getting worse?
It's not hard to find evidence to support that gloomy idea. In that 1942 Times interview,
Howard Wilson bemoaned the fact that the average American didn't “comprehend the
significance” of places such as Dakar and the Caucasus. Forget the “significance”—I
doubt that many Americans today could even tell you what continent they're on. Indiana
University'sRickBeinrecentlyperformeda fifteenth-anniversaryfollow-up tohismassive
1987 study on the geographic literacy of Indiana college freshmen. Indiana had put major
efforts into improving geography education in the interim, so Bein was anticipating a big
bounce in his results. Instead, scores declined by 2 percent. For the most part, the students
who knew their stuff were the ones who'd moved around a lot or traveled; those who had
taken high school geography classes did no better than those who hadn't. In other words,
the state's big initiatives hadn't done a lick of good. In recent National Geographic polls ,
one in ten American college students can't find California or Texas on a map, ten times
worse than the same numbers in Dr. Williams's 1950 study.
There are obvious ways to explain an ongoing drop in geographic literacy. Geographers
like to blame the curriculum revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the clear-cut his-
tory and geography classes of grade schools past were replaced by a wishy-washy amal-
gam called “social studies.” The adoption of social studies was the well-intentioned result
of academics in a wide variety of social sciences hoping to expose kids to their pet fields:
anthropology, economics, political science, and so on. But, as a side effect of the new cur-
riculum, classes specifically devoted to geography virtually disappeared from the nation's
schools. The United States is now the only country in the developed world where a student
can go from preschool to grad school without ever cracking a geography text.
So kids are spending less school time with maps than ever before. And that generation
gap becomes a huge part of the problem: in our cultural memory, geography becomes that
thing that your parents or grandparents studied. We associate it with dusty old pull-down
wall maps and Dick-and-Jane readers and “duck and cover” drills. On the TV series Mad
Men, set in the early 1960s, the protagonist, Don Draper, has a large world globe promin-
entlydisplayednotjustinhisdenathomebutattheofficeaswell.It'saneatbitofproduc-
tion design, immediately signaling to viewers under thirty: See how old-timey this show
is? People actually still owned globes! Convincing someone today that geography, of all
things, is a serious and important field sounds a little like pushing a typewriter or phono-
graph repair class on them.
Geography seems to be a struggle for Americans, specifically. In 2002, National Geo-
graphic conducted a survey of college-aged people in nine different countries , testing
place-name knowledge, current events geography, and map skills. No country aced the
test, butthetopscorers—Sweden, Germany,andItaly—answered around70percent ofthe
questions correctly. U.S. students, with a dreary 41 percent, were next to last. (Thank you,
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