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By Root 919 0

applicants, and Kennedy’s Peace Corps was staffed largely by geography students. Many U.S. embassies even had “geographic attachés” on staff, whose job was to monitor local maps.* The collapse of the Soviet Union killed that Risk-board view of the world with shocking suddenness, and the post-2001 rise in world tension, interestingly, hasn’t led to a corresponding Cold War–style boom in geography interest. Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a professor of political science at Rutgers University, has argued that geography seems less relevant than ever in a world where nonstate actors—malleable entities like ethnicities, for example—are as powerful and important as the ones with governments and borders. Where on a map can you point to al-Qaeda? Or Google, or Wal-Mart? Everywhere and nowhere.

Another reason for sagging geographic knowledge may strike closer to home. Today’s kids live increasingly in a world without place—without personal exploration through real-life geographies of any kind. In one of the great ironies of the last century, many Americans moved from overcrowded cities out to the suburbs in order to “reconnect with nature,” but those dreams of carefree country life didn’t materialize; there’s little that’s carefree or natural about the soulless sprawl of modern suburbia. We’ve chosen insulated lifestyles—insulated by car, by TV, by iPod or Internet or cell phone—that distance us from our surroundings, that treat any kind of navigation through or interaction with our environment as a necessary evil.

And children have it worst of all. It’s not just technology holding them back—it’s us, their well-meaning parents. Seventy-one percent of us walked or rode a bike to school as children, but only 22 percent of our kids today do. The radius around home where kids are allowed to play has shrunk to a ninth of what it was in 1970. Not that we leave them time to explore in their overscheduled lives anyway; between 1981 and 2003, kids’ free time dropped by nine hours per week. And why don’t we let them wander? American parents often cite “stranger danger,” without seeming aware that only 115 U.S. children are abducted by strangers every year—almost a one-in-a-million occurrence, not something to base a lifestyle on. Yet 82 percent of U.S. moms cite safety concerns as a reason to bar their kids from even leaving the house. Dear Abby recently urged parents to take a picture of their kids every morning before they head to school, so they’ll always have an up-to-the-minute photo in case of abduction. That’s not just helicopter parenting. That’s, like, Airwolf parenting.

I’m part of the problem myself—this particular paragraph is getting written only because I plopped my young daughter down in front of the TV to watch Yo Gabba Gabba!, whereas thirty years ago my mom probably would have told me, “Go play outside.” But I worry about what my two children are missing, living in this unbrave new world where kids can’t spend a summer day out building forts and climbing trees. A mom in Columbus, Mississippi, made headlines in 2009 when cops threatened her with child endangerment charges just for letting her ten-year-old son walk a third of a mile to soccer practice. If letting your kids walk alone for fifteen minutes is a criminal act, I wonder how many concurrent life sentences my parents would be serving. My siblings and I ran around pretty freely even in Seoul, kings of the city at eight or nine years old. We knew the back-alley shortcuts, the bus and subway routes, the local shops that sold the weirdest hand-lotion-tasting chewing gums and squid-based snack foods, the best places to hail cabs in a downpour. I credit my Seoul upbringing with the proud, Batman-like sense of ownership and mastery I’ve felt in the many cities where I’ve lived since then.

Today, we’re starting to see the effects on society as the first generation of acutely overparented children reaches adulthood. We know that their sedentary lifestyle has led to spikes in obesity and other health problems. We know they’re technology addicts, spending every free waking hour—nine