FAULT - Maphead - page 40

geography facts and bundled with a copy of The World Almanac, became America's best-
selling educational game. A couple years later, PBS wanted to develop a geography pro-
gramforchildrenbutdidn'thavethebudgetforafull-fledgedgeoversionof Sesame Street .
SothenetworkadaptedCarmenintoasuccessfulgameshow,whichtaughtkidsgeography
basics for the next five years.
HelgrenalsoworkedwiththeNationalGeographicSociety,whichatthetimewasfacing
a bit of an identity crisis: professional geographers tended to sneer at the magazine for
being insufficiently academic, and the publication's core competency—delivering colorful
photos of exotic locales to curious lay readers—didn't seem quite as fresh in 1984 as it
had in 1924. (As a means of delivering pictures of topless women to curious young boys,
it was still unparalleled, but that market was probably shrinking too, thank you very much,
Sports Illustrated SwimsuitIssue.)TheHelgrennewscyclegalvanizedthesocietyintotak-
ing on the new mission of geographic education—lobbying Washington, developing new
curricula, and providing schools with millions of free maps. As of 2008, National Geo-
graphic's Education Foundation had spent more than $100 million to return geography to
the nation's schools. At the time of its founding, only five states required the teaching of
geography; today, all fifty states have geoliteracy standards. But still, more than half of
the young adults in National Geographic's last poll say they've never taken a single geo-
graphycourse.We'renotthereyet,but—thanksinlargeparttoDavidHelgren'saccidental
celebrity—some of the smartest people in the nation are working on the problem.
Being a geography buff, or even a one-eyed geography buff in a nation of the blind,
isn't easy. I was mystified as a child to read about adults—college-educated adults!—who
couldn't point out the United States on a world map. I was accustomed to the fact that not
all of my odd little obsessions were shared by the general public, but geography was the
only case where I had to read headline after headline about America's mass dismissal of
what I held so dear. But we try not to take it personally, we mapheads. Maybe it makes
some of us a little smug, to be so obviously superior to the unwashed masses who couldn't
tell Equatorial Guinea from Papua New Guinea if their lives depended on it. But in my ex-
perience, most of us just want to be helpful: we like to give directions to confused tourists,
and tell our Trivial Pursuit teammates that the Caspian Sea is the world's largest lake, and
explainwhereBangladeshiseverytimeCNNsaysit'sfloodingagain.We'renotasimport-
ant a public utility as we were in the days before Google and GPS, but we're not going to
change now. Deep down, we naively believe that everyone could fall in love with maps the
way we did. They just haven't given them a chance yet.