Don’t know much about geography

May 2, 2006

This is just sad.

Despite the wall-to-wall coverage of the damage from Hurricane Katrina, nearly one-third of young Americans recently polled couldn’t locate [tag]Louisiana[/tag] on a [tag]map[/tag] and nearly half were unable to identify Mississippi.

Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 fared even worse with foreign locations: six in 10 couldn’t find Iraq, according to a Roper [tag]poll[/tag] conducted for National Geographic.

“[tag]Geographic illiteracy[/tag] impacts our economic well-being, our relationships with other nations and the environment, and isolates us from the world,” National Geographic president John Fahey said in announcing a program to help remedy the problem. It’s hoping to enlist businesses, nonprofit groups and educators in a bid to improve geographic literacy.

I’m not entirely convinced that [tag]young adults[/tag]’ ignorance has such a negative effect, but it’s terribly embarrassing. Louisiana is not only geographically distinct, it has been on TV quite a bit.

Of course, the young adults weren’t much better identifying big foreign countries. Six in 10 could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East, 75% were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East, and half could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.

I suspect that I couldn’t find Israel on a map, and I once played as them in Civilization III (though I didn’t really play too long, as I found their disadvantages to be too overwhelming).

Frankly, I don’t understand the importance of geography. To me, it seems like yet another subject that the memorizers of the world like to flaunt, while failing to understand the important things.

  • Do they not sell globes anymore? Sheeesh …

    The reason this is important, IMHO, is because it highlights not just the immense failings of our education system (which, thanks to Many Children Left Behind, focuses on passing tests rather than actually teaching) but also the America-centric view many possess in this country — we have so little respect for other cultures that we can’t even bother to recognize where in the hell they are located.

    I don’t expect everyone to know every single state bird, a country’s national anthem, or their main export by heart. But c’mon … not being able to locate Louisianna or even India?

    That’s just plain pathetic.

  • I looked and didn’t find Iraq.

    I found Kurdistan, Sunniland, and Shiiteville, but no Iraq.

    I guess it’s gone.

  • I wonder if the poll was skewed by using a majority of children from Republican households.

  • I’m with Doctor Biobrain on this. I don’t think pointing to where a country/state is on a map makes you knowledgeable about it. Just like memorizing dates doesn’t mean you understand the significance of the flow of historical events and knowing the times tables doesn’t mean you have an understanding of mathematics. Perhaps I say this because I’m somewhat lazily geographically challenged yet have always kept myself pretty well versed on a broad range of issues happening in our country and the world.

  • While I completely understand Frak and the good Doctor’s points — after all, not knowing where something is doesn’t make one unknowledgeable — knowing where in the world a place is loacted does lead one to a better understanding, does it not?

    For example: Knowing where the Kurds are located explains a LOT about their views — they have been a doorstep/mat for centuries because of their location. And when you’ve been stepped on by those from Asia, the middle east, europe and North Africa for, oh, several hundred years, you have the tendency to be a bit pissed.

    My point is that while you don’t need to rattle off every single country (or even state) and it’s lattitude and longitude, knowing the locaiton is part of the overall understanding, is it not?

    Or am I way off base in this line of reasoning?

  • It might not seem like a big deal, but knowing where places are in reference to other places is extremely important. They call it “geo-politics” for a reason.

  • The problem isn’t not knowing stuff. The problem is that we learned it once and then were programmed to forget.

    Half the people don’t know where the Pacific Ocean is. They learned it once and then were programmed to forget.

    There is no point in building new schools if an even stronger effort is made to cancel what is taught in the schools.

    We can make some guesses about likely culprits for this problem. Until we do, we’re just batting our gums, because the people with the power to make us forget where the Pacific Ocean is, obviously have a great deal of power. And they’re plainly not using it for our benefit.

  • I dunno, I disagree with Dr Biobrain and Frak, it’s seems too much like saying you don’t need any education beyond how to flip burgers and push the buttons on the cash register at McDonalds. You don’t need those civics classes, history classes, or to know anything about government or the way the world around you works, none of that matters to you in your minimum wage job.

    There is just something very, very perverse and Unamerican in that attitude.

  • Well, the government is two-thirds of the way to having a fat, dumb, and happy population. They’ve got the obesity thing down pat now, with the placement of junk-food machines in the schools (but hey—wasn’t it “Bonzo Ron” who declared catsup to be a food-group?) and glitzed-up commercial targeting of kids and teenagers with super-mega-mondo gut-garbage. They’ve got the curriculum dumbed down now to the point that third-world nations outrank the US in every learning subject—well, at least “meaningful” learning subjects. (Somewhere, there’s probably someone who thinks that “Lie/Cheat/Steal/Kill/Plunder” is a pedagogical content area. Maybe Porter Goss will be Secretary of Education, too….)

    I cannot believe that there’s so many who don’t know where India is. Hell—how many jobs have we sent there?

  • Frak and Doc Biobrain,

    Geography is more than just knowing where countries or states are located. It is knowing something about the resources that state has access to, the political and economic conditions under which it exists, and all of those are influenced by where it is located. Look, we know Fidel Castro is a communist, the Cuban economy is state-run, there is no freedom of press, etc., but the fact that we give a rat’s ass about it is because Cuba is 90 miles off our coast. If they were an island south of the Falklands, why would we care?

    And, as a mathematician, I rarely sit around multiplying numbers, but the ability to do so – if I were so inclined – gives me intuition that is very useful when doing more advanced mathematics.

    Not meaning to be critical, here, but just felt the point needed to be made.

  • I’m with Unholy about this.

    Knowing Geography helps put issues into context. It’s important to know what countries are across the border, it’s important to know how the border was drawn, and it’s important to know who the border encloses.

    Yes, one can consult a encyclopedia and an atlas to find these things out if necessary, but one is cut off from conversation is that knowledge is not in someway internalized.

    For instance, the suggestion that attacking Iran will not create a third war, but turn two wars (Iraq and Afghanistan) into one regional war is possible only if you know Iran sits right between Iraq and Afghanistan and shares with them a number of ethnic groups (Arabs, Kurds and Azeri on one side of Iran, Baluchi on the other).

  • I’m with Serial Cat. I can tell you for sure that my 6th grader has learned and been tested on all the countries and capitals in Europe and Africa this year. They also incorporate art class with social studioes so they cover the culture at least on a superficial level. They have homework that discusses history and economics of the major countries and/or empires (Rome, Greece, Egype etc.). The kids are taught, at least in my district.

    On a side note, that whole end of the cold war thing really made geography much harder. The Balkans alone doubled the countries in Eastern Europe. I tried to explain that I knew the Wersten countries because 1) the Eastern countries were all painted Red and lumped together and 2) a lot of them didn’t exist period.

    As for US Geography, I would like to give a shout out to Mrs. Flom of Olson Jr High for drilling thoes into me about 22 years ago. “What do you mean? I thought Frankfort was in Germany!”

  • I don’t know what chance they have, to be honest – when my younger son was in 2nd grade the maps he brought home to colour still had China bordered by the USSR.

    This was in central Virginia. Last year.

  • Let’s not necessarily assume that the educational system is necessarily at fault here. My own knowledge of geography comes from having a passion about related subjects like history and politics. Geography provides me with an immediate reward because I get pleasure from being able to quickly grasp what is going on.

    As for most people, how does geography directly reward them apart from giving them something else to bore people with at parties? I suspect that that isn’t going to be enough for most. Ignorance only has a cost when one has an opportunity to usefully apply the knowledge that one could have had but chose not to obtain. With respect to governance, and being able to ask the right questions of our political leaders with our knowledge of geography–what does it matter? They don’t listen anyway. So yes ignorance is embarrassing, but no I don’t think that it is a fact of any consequence to our nation. Our political system ensures that.

  • I’ve found that my coworkers who are younger than 25 simply don’t watch the news and almost never watch the news. They say:

    1) It’s dumb.

    2) It gets most of the facts wrong (this is notoriously true during hurricane seasons here in South Florida)

    3) It lies to get people to watch (ditto)

    4) It never tells you anything useful.

    5) Even with all this, it’s boring.

    So I’m not entirely surprised to find out that younger people didn’t learn where Louisiana is from the news — it’s entirely possible that they just weren’t watching.

  • I take everybody’s points and appreciate them. But I must clarify my semantics, when I say “geography”–I mean literally pointing to a place on a map and nothing more. I realize, geography encompasses more than that (though not history, politics or civics). But I was responding to the statement heard time and again that laments “not being able to find something on a map”, per se, as being equivalent to knowing nothing about the country and its geo-political issues.
    My simple point is you can be well informed about, yes, regional issues, a people, natural resources, history, current alliances and viewpoints and impact of policies without knowing a country’s specific longitude and latitude. For example, you can know of the Kurds and their history and place in the world; you can know of the regional consequences of a war in Iran and the countries and factions involved, even if you fail a test of finding them on an unmarked globe. Not to make too much of this (perhaps I already have 🙂 ) but I would just stop waving the map and get to what I believe is the real issue–there’s a pervasive ignorance and apathy in our country about geo-politics, civics and history. A good education in geography couldn’t hurt, but I don’t know how much it would help solve that problem.

  • Addendum to my last post:

    I should clarify, specifically in response to Frak, I don’t at all think that geography is just memorizing locations of places. That is the basis and the context for all the rest of geography, which is learning everything else about those places. Like how Dunkin Donuts is huge in New England but damned if you’ll find one out here in the Pacific Northwest. Or how soccer is the national sport for almost every country except the United States. Sure, those are little factoids, as I’m hard-pressed to come up with a bunch of little relevant facts and something to relate them to on the spot. I guess for beginners, an understanding of geography would help understand why the US doesn’t want the Iraqi Kurds to break off, or, say, why the US is even interested in this part of the world in the first place. Why does Iran hate us? Things like that. Geography covers those things.

    And yes, other fields do overlap, but geography is central to those, such as politics, economics, history. All these fields of study overlap, and geography is an essential element among them.

  • Not knowing where something is on the map makes you susceptible to believing things like Sandinistas are going to be coming over our border or that islamists from Middle East are going to force our women to dress in burkas.

  • I think we can get right down to it by observing that most people are far more concerned with the lives of Jen and Brad or Nick and Jessica than they are about the possibility of a military confrontation with Iran. If you know what I mean just when I say “Jen and Brad” or “Nick and Jessica” it’s not even something you have to feel ashamed about. Sadly, I learn about their lives on the covers of the magazines while waiting in line at the grocery checkout stand. It’s right there. (Although I’m usually far more interested in the “US Special Forces capture Satan” kind of story from Weekly World News, the Nation’s Only Reliable Newspaper!) I don’t even have to actively search this stuff out, nor would I. Why are these peoples’ personal lives important to us? How does knowing about their latest goings-on enrich us as a country? I do not understand this, and I think it is fucking embarassing, that we seem to be so obsessed with these celebrities’ personal lives when we could just as easily be passively absorbing much more important stuff, such as news about the violence and all the threats of violence in the region where we get most of our oil, things which actually affect our lives and affect the world.

    I don’t know what can be done about it, sadly, so I’m going to leave it at that, in case I left any thoughts incomplete.

  • Geography and History are the space- and time-coordinates of human society, the framework within which everything worth caring about occurs. You can get by without them, just as a blind or deaf man can “get by” without those senses, but your understanding would be far richer if you had them. Having them doesn’t mean you’ve got them all memorized (people like that belong only on quiz shows), but you ought to have been exposed to them enough to know, when the need arises, what to look for, what to expect.

    Mike (#13) had it right. If you’ve never been exposed to the framework, you don’t even know what questions to ask, or where the answers might probably lie. I find it astounding that students in the Alexandrian Library (150 BC) could easily calculate the circumference of the Earth — 7.5° is to 360° as the distance from modern Aswan to Alexandria [500 mi.] is to Earth’s circumference — while a majority of Americans know virtually nothing of the Earth or anything else (except, e.g., what Brad Pitt is up to or what the latest iPod costs). Incidentally, I routinely asked my introductory soc students (500 each quarter) if any of them had an inkling of how to compute Earth’s circumference; not once, in 32 years of university teaching, did anyone volunteer the answer (though many of them expressed delight when it was shown to them).

    I don’t happen to think much of public opinion, especially when it comes to policy matters – note the ease with which Bush shifted our response to the attacks on 9/11 by invading Iraq. But back in 1958 the NY Times conducted an interesting poll regarding tensions arising between East and West Germany. The USSR said it was closing our access to Berlin, and Eisenhower responded that if one Russian soldier placed one foot in West Berlin the US would respond with total nuclear war. The Times wanted to know how much public support there was for Eisenhower’s bold position. I no longer remember the amount, but support for Eisenhower’s position was overwhelmingly strong. Then the Times asked those who supported the President whether Berlin lay (a) in East Germany, (b) in West Germany, or (c) on the border between the two. 85% percent of those who supported total nuclear war were unaware that Berlin lay 300 miles inside East Germany.

  • You’ve heard it said: Those that don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. Geography is ALL about history. A country wants the natural resources of its neighbor, or another country wants “lebensraum”.

  • Just curious how many of those who can’t locate anything on a map could turn around and rattle off all sorts of verses from the bible from memory. I am always amazed at the number of Amercian citizens how spend hours each week, each month, each year throughout their lifetimes learning all about the ins and outs of an Asian civilization over two thousand years ago but are unbelievably ignorant about the world that they live in today.

  • Doc and Frak have it right on. As long as them young’uns can tell the little pictures of hamburgers, french fries, and apple pies apart, all’s well. Have a nice day.

  • I can never remember which one is on the right and which on the left, Mississippi or Alabama.

    Sheesh, it ain’t the genocide of the jews, man.

  • Nancy, don’t worry, they are both “on the right” although I do hope that the poor showing of the GOP in assistance and aid post-Katrina might help turn Mississippi a little left.

    (and don’t forget, for geography purposes, mississippi is the one next to the mississippi river)

  • I wonder how W would perform on these same tests (without any of his handlers in the room)!

  • When I was teaching school in Dallas some years ago, the district came up with a set of curriculum standards called “essential elements.” These were the things students were expected to know by the time they completed their courses of study.

    In the World Geography curriculum, it stated that the student was expected to be able to “name and locate on a map or globe the four major world oceans.”

    In the Earth Science curriculum, it stated that the student was expected to be able to “name and locate on a map or globe the five major world oceans.”

    Is it any wonder schoolkids don’t know what they are supposed to know?

  • Not knowing geography and history is to understanding the world like not knowing the names of the programs, when they’re aired, or on which channel they’re shown is to understanding TV.

    Unless of course, TV IS your world.

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