Americans and Geography

Americans learn more about geography in later life than they do in school. We travel, we work abroad, we learn the hard way on military missions. At least that's the conclusion I draw from a study conducted by RoperASW. According to their results, young Americans know very little about maps and, more importantly, lack knowledge or interest in the world beyond our borders.

Americans 18-24 came out with a grade of D:

87 per cent did not find Iraq on a map.

83% did not find Afghanistan.

11% did not find the United States!

I didn't have a great geography teacher when I was in fifth grade. In fact, she did us the favor of just letting us look at the pictures and read. I spent nearly five hours a week imagining those people who wore different clothes, worked out in the hot sun or tracked across frozen wastes. Unfortunately, two years later, another teacher undid the first one's good work. Her idea of geography class was to quiz us on capitals and such. You'd never know real people lived in those countries.

I'm more sophisticated now. I know that the exotic names on maps don't necessarily mean that people in those places lead more interesting lives than I do. I also know that geography is more than maps and photos. Geography when well taught can be a way of understanding important general principles, give us a tool for understanding our world. There are reasons people grow wheat in both Pakistan and eastern Washington state. Knowing how to think like a geographer helps us understand why. Also that some big cities are arrangedbetter than others to deal with traffic and that the same plants grow on both sides of the US-Mexican border. If I ask a friend who came to my adopted Mexican City from Southern California the name of a plant, she can almost always tell me.

Many Americans just don't dig geography. Before airplanes were used in war, we were a long way from any foreign invaders. We lived in a vast English-speaking expanse and hardly thought about the territories we'd gained in the Spanish-American War. Unlike schoolchildren in England, we didn't think much about our empire. I found out quickly when I lived in England that British people my age knew names and locations of places on all the continents.

Even though television brings places in crisis to our living rooms, many of us lack a systematic way of thinking about what we see. Do geographic facts matter? I think so, especially during the last half century, now more than ever when our government and our citizens have been involved in foreign wars.

John H. Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society, has repeated that "War is God's way of teaching geography." He also said that this isn't completely true anymore. A recent survey showed that more young Americans can tell you where the island in "Survivor" is located than can identify Afghanistan or Iraq on a map.

The use of maps is only one part of understanding our world. It's possible to imagine a classroom where all the children could point out Iraq, Afghanistan, and Nigeria and still not know much about those countries. For that reason, I didn't get all worked up when an American politician couldn't point out Yugoslavia on a map.

But having a real idea about distances, neighboring countries, population density, resources, terrain, and yes, the location of our military bases, all these are part of geographic knowledge. Remember back when America had an interest in that little island of Grenada in the Caribbean and few of us knew why?

Or take my ignorance when I was about to live in Papua New Guinea. If I had kept up my interest in the basics of geography (I studied it for a whle in college too), I would have known I was going to an island almost as large as Britain and near Australia, not somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. Fortunately, I did look at a map before I arrived. What I still didn't know was enough history, how many Americans, Australians, Papua New Guineans and Japanese lost their lives there during the war and why.

A knowledge of geography doesn't tell us everything. It doesn't explain why countries have the borders they do. India and Pakistan were ruled together by the British, but they are separate countries now. Geographic knowledge by itself doesn't explain the heavy migration of young Mexicans to the United States or Turks to Germany. Geography isn't enough to explain why governments involve their citizens in war.

Geographic knowledge isn't everything but it's important. Try your World Almanac for bedside reading, you may find yourself making it a habit.