FAULT - Maphead - page 37

American Civil War also sold countless maps in both north and south, and during FDR's
“fireside chats,” he often instructed his listeners to follow along with him at home on their
world maps, as he described events in both theaters of World War II. Not so with today's
far-off wars. Most of us could look at a map, but we probably won't. Instead, we'll just
make decisions that are less and less informed—at the ballot box, sure, but in other ways
too: investment decisions, consumer decisions, travel decisions. Some of us will take jobs
inpublicpolicyorbeelectedtonationaloffice,andliveswillstarttohingeonthedecisions
wemake.Inhisbook Why Geography Matters, thegeographerHarmdeBlijarguesthatthe
West's three great challenges of our time—Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise
of China—are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place,
notbecauseplaceismoreimportantthanotherkindsofknowledgebutbecauseitformsthe
foundation for so much other knowledge.
Second,Mr.PoolHunk'sanalysisoverlooksthefactthatmapsavvyisn'tjustanabstract
academic arena—it's also a critical survival skill in daily life. If schoolchildren can't find
Europe on a map, it's probably because they're not looking at maps much at all, and that's
goingtomakeadulthoodprettyhardonthem. In2008,asurvey designedbyNokiatohype
some new map offerings found that 93 percent of adults worldwide get lost regularly, los-
inganaverageofthirteenminutesoftheirdayeachtime.Morethanoneintenhavemissed
some crucial event—a job interview, a business meeting, a flight—because they got lost.
Sometimes theresults areevenmoredire:doasearchinanynewsarchive foraphraselike
“misread a map,” and you'll be introduced to hikers getting lost in snowy wilderness, mil-
itary commanders calling down air strikes on the wrong coordinates, city work crews acci-
dentally cutting down the town Christmas tree, and those poor kids from The Blair Witch
Project . Private First Class Jessica Lynch , the American soldier rescued from Iraq to much
fanfare in 2003, had been captured in the first place only because the exhausted officer
commandinghertruckconvoyhadmadeamaperrorandwounduponthewronghighway.
Finally, there's a growing body of research that shows that these map woes are just a
symptom of a larger problem. In 1966, the British geographers William Balchin and Alice
Coleman coined the word “ graphicacy ” to refer to the human capability to understand
charts anddiagrams andsymbols—the visual equivalent ofliteracy andnumeracy.Perhaps
“graphicacy” doesn't exactly trip off the tongue (and its opposite, “ingraphicacy,” is even
uglier),butthere'saconvincingcasetobemadethatwestrugglewithsubwaymapsforthe
same reason that we have a hard time with PowerPoint graphs and Ikea assembly instruc-
tions: no one ever spent much time teaching us to read them. “High schools shortchange
spatial thinking,” says Lynn Liben, a Penn State psychology professor who advised Ses-
ame Street on its geography curriculum, among many other accomplishments. “We focus
on language and mathematics, and we ought to be equally focused on spatial thinking and
representation.”Teachingmapshelpskidssharpenallthesevisualskills,whichareincreas-
ingly important today: the rise of computers means that we use spatial interfaces and visu-