Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [19]
There are obvious ways to explain an ongoing drop in geographic literacy. Geographers like to blame the curriculum revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the clear-cut history and geography classes of grade schools past were replaced by a wishy-washy amalgam called “social studies.” The adoption of social studies was the well-intentioned result of academics in a wide variety of social sciences hoping to expose kids to their pet fields: anthropology, economics, political science, and so on. But, as a side effect of the new curriculum, classes specifically devoted to geography virtually disappeared from the nation’s schools. The United States is now the only country in the developed world where a student can go from preschool to grad school without ever cracking a geography text.
So kids are spending less school time with maps than ever before. And that generation gap becomes a huge part of the problem: in our cultural memory, geography becomes that thing that your parents or grandparents studied. We associate it with dusty old pull-down wall maps and Dick-and-Jane readers and “duck and cover” drills. On the TV series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, the protagonist, Don Draper, has a large world globe prominently displayed not just in his den at home but at the office as well. It’s a neat bit of production design, immediately signaling to viewers under thirty: See how old-timey this show is? People actually still owned globes! Convincing someone today that geography, of all things, is a serious and important field sounds a little like pushing a typewriter or phonograph repair class on them.
Geography seems to be a struggle for Americans, specifically. In 2002, National Geographic conducted a survey of college-aged people in nine different countries, testing place-name knowledge, current events geography, and map skills. No country aced the test, but the top scorers—Sweden, Germany, and Italy—answered around 70 percent of the questions correctly. U.S. students, with a dreary 41 percent, were next to last. (Thank you, Mexico!) These results are similar to what researchers see when they stack American students up against the rest of the world in other subjects, like math and science, so maybe they’re just a symptom of our dumbed-down curricula in general. “Geography is just a subset 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. (“Just a conspiracy of cartographers, then?” asks his friend Guildenstern acidly.) 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 accident; 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 approach 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