Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [23]
This was of course intentional; geographers don’t like to see their field of study reduced to a list of facts that children can master. “If I told you I was a professor of literature, you wouldn’t ask me if I knew how to spell,” says Doug Oetter, a geography professor at Georgia College & State University. “But people find out I teach geography, and they ask, ‘What’s the capital of Texas?’ “
It’s an understandable concern, and one motivated by, frankly, a century of pretty crappy geography instruction. For many years, when schoolkids were made to study geography, they were just memorizing long lists of names: all fifty states in alphabetical order, the world’s tallest mountains. “You think you are teaching him what the world is like; he is only learning the map,” wrote the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his novel Émile. “He is taught the names of towns, countries, rivers, which have no existence for him except on the paper before him. I remember seeing a geography somewhere which began with: ‘What is the world?’—‘A sphere of cardboard.’ That is the child’s geography.” Who wouldn’t want to rebel against that, to insist that geography should be something more? Even as recently as 2002, Rick Bein’s Indiana study showed that students were actually better at identifying place-names than they were at basic map skills. In linguistic terms, we’re still teaching them the words but not the grammar and then being surprised that they can’t speak the language.
But I wonder if geographers haven’t brought some of their marginalization on themselves by shunning maps—the only thing that laypeople know about their discipline—so thoroughly. You’d never be able to attract respect (or students or funding) to a college literature program if the prevailing attitude there to books was “Oh, those old things? We never look at them anymore.” Peirce Lewis warned in 1985 that geographers were pooh-poohing the public’s love for maps and landscapes at their own peril: “I know of no other science worth the name that denigrates its basic data by calling them ‘mere description,’” he said. Many academic geographers entered the field because of a childhood love of maps; now they should embrace them again, as a gateway drug if nothing else. Once a student is looking at a map, you can dive into how geography explains the map: why this city is on this river, why this canyon is deeper than that one, why the language spoken here is related to the one spoken there—even, perhaps, why this nation is rich and that one is poor.
Media coverage of geographic illiteracy tends to take it as a self-evident article of faith that schoolchildren not being able to find Canada is a biblical sign of the Apocalypse. Amid all the hand-wringing, one question is never asked: could the Miami pool hunk be right? Does it really matter if someone who will probably never go to Siberia can’t find it on a map? After all, if you really need to know, you can always just look it up, right?
Well, one problem with that is the obvious one: people can look it up, but that doesn’t mean they will. We live in an increasingly interlinked world where developments an ocean away affect our daily lives in countless ways. A collapsing Greek economy might affect my 401(k) and delay my retirement. A Taliban cell in Pakistan might affect my personal safety as I walk through Times Square. A volcano in Iceland might affect my plan to fly to Paris during spring break. These aren’t hand-waving hypotheticals used in chaos theory classes, like that damn butterfly in China that’s always flapping one wing and thereby causing a Gulf Coast hurricane. They are concrete and direct. On any given day, we might hear about a dozen of these events, each tied to a place-name. If I know where