Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [24]
In the past, people would have known. During the brief Crimean War, the British public had an insatiable appetite for maps of that region, buying them up “until every hamlet and foot-road in that half-desert and very unimportant corner of the world became as well-known to us as if it had been an English county,” remembered one writer in 1863. The American Civil War also sold countless maps in both north and south, and during FDR’s “fireside chats,” he often instructed his listeners to follow along with him at home on their world maps, as he described events in both theaters of World War II. Not so with today’s far-off wars. Most of us could look at a map, but we probably won’t. Instead, we’ll just make decisions that are less and less informed—at the ballot box, sure, but in other ways too: investment decisions, consumer decisions, travel decisions. Some of us will take jobs in public policy or be elected to national office, and lives will start to hinge on the decisions we make. In his book Why Geography Matters, the geographer Harm de Blij argues that the West’s three great challenges of our time—Islamist terrorism, global warming, and the rise of China—are all problems of geography. An informed citizenry has to understand place, not because place is more important than other kinds of knowledge but because it forms the foundation for so much other knowledge.
Second, Mr. Pool Hunk’s analysis overlooks the fact that map savvy isn’t just an abstract academic arena—it’s also a critical survival skill in daily life. If schoolchildren can’t find Europe on a map, it’s probably because they’re not looking at maps much at all, and that’s going to make adulthood pretty hard on them. In 2008, a survey designed by Nokia to hype some new map offerings found that 93 percent of adults worldwide get lost regularly, losing an average of thirteen minutes of their day each time. More than one in ten have missed some crucial event—a job interview, a business meeting, a flight—because they got lost. Sometimes the results are even more dire: do a search in any news archive for a phrase like “misread a map,” and you’ll be introduced to hikers getting lost in snowy wilderness, military commanders calling down air strikes on the wrong coordinates, city work crews accidentally cutting down the town Christmas tree, and those poor kids from The Blair Witch Project. Private First Class Jessica Lynch, the American soldier rescued from Iraq to much fanfare in 2003, had been captured in the first place only because the exhausted officer commanding her truck convoy had made a map error and wound up on the wrong highway.
Finally, there’s a growing body of research that shows that these map woes are just a symptom of a larger problem. In 1966, the British geographers William Balchin and Alice Coleman coined the word “graphicacy” to refer to the human capability to understand charts and diagrams and symbols—the visual equivalent of literacy and numeracy. Perhaps “graphicacy” doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue (and its opposite, “ingraphicacy,” is even uglier), but there’s a convincing case to be made that we struggle with subway maps for the same reason that we have a hard time with PowerPoint graphs and Ikea assembly instructions: no one ever spent much time teaching us to read them. “High schools shortchange spatial thinking,” says Lynn Liben, a Penn State psychology professor who advised Sesame Street on its geography curriculum, among many other accomplishments. “We focus on language and mathematics, and we ought to be equally focused on spatial thinking and representation.” Teaching maps helps kids sharpen all these visual skills, which are increasingly important today: the rise of computers means that we use spatial interfaces and visualization tools for