Curriculum and Instruction: Young Americans Geographically Illiterate, Survey Suggests

Young Americans Geographically Illiterate, Survey Suggests:

According to the National Geographic web site:

Young adults in the United States fail to understand the world and their place in it, according to a survey-based report on geographic literacy released today. Take Iraq, for example. Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel. Nine in ten couldn't find Afghanistan on a map of Asia. And 54 percent were unaware that Sudan is a country in Africa.

I am not surprised. I suspect that several factors help create this mismatch between geopolitical reality and the lack of information that US students seem to have. Below are some of my own speculations:

Social studies and history especially are neglected in schools. This has traditionally been the case however since the advent of No Child Left Behind, where literacy and mathematics take a front seat, social studies and history along with the sciences have been placed in the trunk, barely to see the light of day. Some studies reveal that for all subjects outside of literacy and math, many schools spend less than one hour per week inclusively.

Within the social studies, geography seems to draw the short straw. While it is nearly impossible to understand history, economics, political science and the like without a strong knowledge of geography and its effects on civilization, it is often taught as merely points on a map.

Much has to do with the current geopolitical climate in the United States as well. Because of our status as the last superpower, there is a tendency to lean toward a hegemonic view of the world. There is no room for any other geopolitical dominion so long as the arrogance that accompanies the grand scheme for spreading democracy to the world is running full force.

I could go on and point to the messianic fervor of the religious right where, since we are near the end days according to this uncreative, and certainly not new, dogma, there is no need to know anything about the world because it soon won't be the world we know. I could point to the almost maniacal drive to standards based education with its accompanying focus on testing that actually minimizes learning, reducing it to a bunch-of-facts model of teaching and learning. We all know that what is memorized for testing purposes is forgotten within a few days. But I won't do that. Let it suffice to say that I am underwhelmed by the pointing fingers without offering creative solutions.

Here is mine--I believe, as teachers, we must invite students into the study of geography, not because it is going to appear on a test, or that one should know where one is going off to war, but because it is interesting and contributes to the critical decision making needed by citizens of a true democracy (or better, a republic). If students fail to find interest they will fail to learn. And fail to learn they do and not just in geography.

Zoundry

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Diamond provides a geopolitical analysis of the rise of civilization. Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel Jared Diamond presents the biologist's answer: geography, demography, and ecological happenstance. Diamond evenhandedly reviews human history on every continent since the Ice Age at a rate that emphasizes only the broadest movements of peoples and ideas. Here is some interesting geography!!!!