Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [18]
What’s remarkable about these stories is the surprise that journalists and educators always express about the kids’ ineptitude. This tired dog-bites-man story is still capable of grabbing the front page, even after a century of wear. Why? At some point, isn’t this news only if the kids suddenly start doing well on map quizzes?
Part of the blame can be chalked up to the tendency, in both academia and the media, to attract readers to unsurprising developments by breathlessly overhyping them. Besides, reporters tend to be just as much “in the tank” on map knowledge as academic geographers are, since journalism is one of the few careers in which detailed global knowledge is still expected and rewarded.* And because journalism and academia are somewhat insular private worlds, these stories get written by people who are genuinely surprised that college students couldn’t find Kenya or Chile on a map; in their odd bubble worlds of geographic expertise, everyone would ace that test! Some people with odd obsessions become acutely aware of how their expertise makes them different (cf. my childhood love of maps). But others blithely assume that everyone shares their fanaticism, as you probably know if you ever had a college roommate whose favorite band was Rush.
It’s easy to see why these stories are popular with readers as well—they make us feel better about ourselves. Reporters always cherry-pick the studies for items that make the subjects look as dumb as possible. Three-quarters of David Helgren’s students knew where the Falklands were, but that’s not shockingly bad. In fact, it seems pretty reasonable. So the half of the students who couldn’t find London provided the headline instead. Such studies usually come with at least one easy-sounding task, like locating Canada or the Pacific Ocean, that a small minority will still fail. Even if only 10 percent answer incorrectly, it’ll be a big part of the story, enabling us to marvel that these dumb kids could botch a question we certainly would have aced—no matter that the vast majority of respondents actually got it right. In a culture where geographic illiteracy is used as comic shorthand for stupidity, nobody’s willing to own up to a little map vagueness of their own.
But there’s another possible way to explain the viruslike persistence of the geographic illiteracy meme, and it’s a little more sobering. What if this story has stuck around for centuries 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’s Rick Bein recently performed a fifteenth-anniversary follow-up to his massive 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