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Maybe that’s why old-school geography failed: it was just lists of names and places. It was better than nothing, we found when we lost it, but it wasn’t what kids really needed. If I grew up a maphead just because of some innate knack for spatial thinking, maybe that’s the magic bullet for our map-impaired society. Imagine the rallying cry: “Spatial ed now!” Or maybe “We are all spatial-needs children!” There are plenty of ways to teach maps without making them into a litany of “mere description,” as Peirce Lewis put it. In 1959, the cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner complained, as Rousseau had, that geography was too often taught passively, without any thought or exploration on the students’ part. He hit upon the idea of dividing a group of children into two classes. One would learn an entirely descriptive geography: “that there were arbitrary cities at arbitrary places by arbitrary bodies of water and arbitrary sources of supply.” The other class was, like David Helgren’s, given a blank map. They were asked to predict where roads, railroads, and cities might be placed and were forbidden to consult books and maps. A surprisingly lively, heated discussion on transportation theory emerged, and an hour later, Bruner finally acceded to their pleas to check their guesses on a map of the Midwest. “I will never forget one young student,” wrote Bruner, “as he pointed his finger at the foot of Lake Michigan, shouting, ‘Yippee, Chicago is at the end of the pointing-down lake!’” Some students celebrated their correct prediction of St. Louis; others mourned that Michigan was missing the large city at the Straits of Mackinac that they themselves would have founded.

Bruner had succeeded in taking the thing we take most for granted—the map of our home—and making it new, making it into an adventure. You can do the same thing just by turning a map upside down, as the writer Robert Harbison observed when he inverted a map of Great Britain. “Its meanings have shifted and the whole as an integer easily graspable has disappeared,” he wrote. “Now features have explanations, so the portentous interruptions in the coast of Britain are caused by rivers, self-justifying and uncaused no longer.” In a map shop recently, I came across an Australian-made wall map that inverts the entire world, so that Australia sits proudly atop the other, lesser continents, while the Northern Hemisphere superpowers sink away into the abyss below it.* Southern Hemisphere residents will no doubt be happy to hear that I felt a moment of gripping existential nausea as I considered this Aussie-centric view of our planet, no doubt ruled by Yahoo Serious from his cavernous throne room within the Sydney Opera House. But it was thrilling as well to see familiar annotations like “Japan” and “Mediterranean Sea” printed over strange new contours, as if the whole planet had been redecorated overnight. At its best, this is what geography education can do: give maps back their sense of wonder and discovery.

The first south-up world map, published by Stuart McArthur in 1979.

Hey, Australia: if south is so great, where’s Antarctica?

In 1984, David Helgren found himself out of a job, but he was also surprised to find himself being consulted as an expert in geographic education, thanks to his brief splash of media fame. “It was an area where I never would have gone,” he tells me as we polish off some tacos at a little family-run Mexican place near his home. He started doing in-service training for teachers and then founded a center for geographic education at San Jose State, where he taught for the next two decades. “I wrote some textbooks, and it turned out I was good at it. That’s a world where academic geographers are not supposed to go, because it’s financially successful. Academic geographers are supposed to be poor, and most of them are. But I wound up with a nice royalty check for thirty years.” Three years ago, his textbook royalties allowed him to retire early from teaching.

Helgren’s