FAULT - Maphead - page 31

Mexico!) These results are similar to what researchers see when they stack American stu-
dents up against the rest of the world in other subjects, like math and science, so maybe
they'rejustasymptomofourdumbed-downcurriculaingeneral.“Geographyisjustasub-
set of Americans not knowing anything, ” says David Helgren with a shrug. “I hate to say
that.”
But it isn't hard to imagine that there might be some peculiarly geographic reasons why
Americans lag in global knowledge. One is our isolation—drive east from France for ten
hours, and you might cross five different nations. Drive east from El Paso, Texas, and ten
hours later you won't even be in Houston yet. Americans don't know much about other
nations because we can so easily pretend that they don't even exist, the way Rosencrantz
says he doesn't believe in England in Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Are Dead .(“ Justaconspiracy ofcartographers,then?”askshisfriendGuildensternacidly.)
If Americans want to go to the mountains or the desert or the beach, we don't need to hop
on an international flight: everything's right here. Our isolation isn't just a geographic ac-
cident; it was practically a mission statement when America was founded. The first people
who settled here came to break connections with the rest of the world, so the American ap-
proach to geography has always been to expand our reach into new frontiers, not study up
on old ones. The global interconnectedness of the modern world hasn't come easily to us.
There are international factors for the decline as well. For much of the twentieth
century, the Communist threat of the Cold War era made geopolitics seem sexy and
urgent: university geography departments couldn't keep up with the flood of applicants,
and Kennedy's Peace Corps was staffed largely by geography students. Many U.S. em-
bassies even had “geographic attachés” on staff, whose job was to monitor local maps. *
The collapse of the Soviet Union killed that Risk-board view of the world with shocking
suddenness, and the post-2001 rise in world tension, interestingly, hasn't led to a corres-
pondingColdWar-styleboomingeographyinterest. ArthurJayKlinghoffer , aprofessorof
political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than
everinaworldwherenonstateactors—malleableentitieslikeethnicities,forexample—are
as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can
you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.
Another reason for sagging geographic knowledge may strike closer to home. Today's
kidsliveincreasinglyinaworldwithoutplace—withoutpersonalexplorationthroughreal-
life geographies of any kind. In one of the great ironies of the last century, many Americ-
ans moved from overcrowded cities out to the suburbs in order to “reconnect with nature,”
but those dreams of carefree country life didn't materialize; there's little that's carefree
or natural about the soulless sprawl of modern suburbia. We've chosen insulated life-
styles—insulated by car, by TV, by iPod or Internet or cell phone—that distance us from