Amid all the fuss and controversy about Overland High School student Sean Allen and geography teacher Jay Bennish, no one seems to have brought up the most important question: Do Bennish’s students learn geography?
In 2003, Americans aged 18 to 24 were surveyed about their geographic knowledge. Five out of six could not find Afghanistan on a map, even though American forces were prominently deployed there, suppressing the Taliban and searching for Osama bin Laden.
Fewer than half of those young people could find France, Great Britain or Japan. Just half could find the state of New York.
For further proof of this widespread ignorance, catch “The Tonight Show” when it has a “Jay Walking” segment. Jay Leno stops people on the street and asks simple questions. At first, I shared in the levity; it was almost as funny as his regular “Headlines” segment that delights in the mishaps of my trade. But lately, if I can manage to stay up for the show, I pick up a book for “Jay Walking.” It’s depressing. There are Americans who can’t tell the Grand Canyon from the Grand Tetons, and they are able to vote and serve on juries.
Granted, the show must be selective about the interviews that get broadcast. People exhibiting even rudimentary geographic knowledge wouldn’t fit the format – this isn’t “Jeopardy,” after all. But still, there are a lot of people who don’t know the geography they should have learned in sixth grade.
When our kids were in school, Martha and I joked that they had a lot harder time of geography than we did. While we did have to learn about two Germanys and Vietnams, and our children needed to cope with only one of each, kids today must contend with a host of new nations: Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Croatia, Slovenia, Nauru, etc.
Such fluctuation in national boundaries probably indicates that rote memory is not a good way to learn geography, or at least the branch known as “political geography.” But there are other kinds of geography.
For instance, there’s cultural geography. Colorado’s settlement was dominated by Midwesterners, who brought a culture with them. Part of it was political – our state constitution is based on that of Illinois. Nomenclature was affected – we have a 14,172-foot peak named for the lieutenant governor of Illinois, surely one of the more obscure positions known to political science. Horticulture had a role – they liked lawns and trees, so they built irrigation works to provide those amenities.
Even with the same physical landscape, Colorado would be a different place if the dominant immigrant culture of the formative 1860s and ’70s had come from Texas or New Mexico, rather than Iowa and Illinois. And it would be very different if the Utes, Cheyenne and Arapaho had been able to repel the immigrants.
Or we could look at urban geography. Our current mode of development does wonders for the national economy. We build so that people are distant from schools, work and shopping. So they must drive. Thus they get fat and out-of-shape, which leads to health problems and immense spending in that sector. We keep car-makers and road-builders in business, and the consequent need for more petroleum than this country can produce leads to an immense military establishment to secure oil supplies to preserve this constructed “American way of life.”
It’s informative to ponder the interior geography of supermarkets. The two things we most often go to the store for are bread and milk – always on the opposite sides of the store, and often in back, so that you’ll spend more time in the store and thus be likely to spend more money.
The subversive delights of geography could continue for pages. But despite all the hoopla about Bennish, I have no idea whether his students know Iceland from Ireland, or can find the Bering Strait and Persian Gulf. If they can, their teacher is doing a fine job, no matter what he says about George Bush or capitalism. If not, he should be fired.
But competence has no role in modern education controversies, which may explain why so many Americans can’t find New Delhi or New York on a map.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
