‘U.S. students are really bad at geography” – that was the headline on a U.S. News and World Report story back in October. It was a blunt assessment, but it wasn’t far off. As the story went on to say, a National Assessment of Educational Progress report on the previous school year found that just a quarter of the nation’s eighth-graders were proficient in geography.
The world is still as big as ever and open-road adventures, real and imagined, still beckon, so where have all the George Baileys gone? While the protagonist of It’s a Wonderful Life was stuck in “crummy little” Bedford Falls, he could always look at a map of far away and dream. Just imagine what young George would have done with an iPad and Google Earth.
While the U.S. News headline has data to back it up, it does negate the existence of some rather impressive exceptions to the generalization.
Earlier this month at Keene State College, for example, Shaker Road School student Abhinav Govindaraju won the New Hampshire National Geographic Bee. Next month he moves on to the national championship in Washington, D.C., where he will meet and compete against 53 similarly advanced students in grades four through eight. The winner gets a $50,000 scholarship, a trip to Alaska aboard the National Geographic Sea Lion and lifetime membership in the National Geographic Society.
But Abhinav is no George Bailey. The 11-year-old’s dreams are bigger than shaking off the small-town dust and crossing the ocean on a cattle boat. Geography is just another subject to master on the way to MIT. Abhinav is on the math team, and he’s one of the best chess players in the state, at any age. He also won his school’s spelling bee and competes in FIRST LEGO League tournaments. What he really wants to do, he told columnist Ray Duckler in Monday’s Monitor, is become a robotics engineer.
In short, Abhinav fits the description of the exceptional student, and it’s a good bet that the kids he will compete against next month are similarly gifted. So what’s the trick to getting more students interested in geography?
There’s no better teacher than a desire to travel the world – but you can’t mandate wanderlust. Nor does a curriculum overhaul with more mandatory classes seem reasonable. There are too many subjects competing for kids’ and teachers’ time, and more geography could mean less literature, math or science – or the elimination of art, music and recess.
But young people (and adults, for that matter) should be encouraged at every opportunity to think about geography as much more than capitals and river names to be memorized. To learn world geography is to gain a better understanding of border conflicts, the global economy and cultural disputes; it is to begin to understand the roots of corruption, starvation and subjugation. How can Americans truly assess the rise of ISIS, tensions with Russia and China, and the potential for widespread social upheaval related to changes in the Earth’s climate without grasping the influence of geography.
The world seems to be growing more complex by the day, and there aren’t enough hours to develop a full picture of it all. Knowledge of geography creates an invaluable foundation for understanding not only the planet’s landscape but also its nations and cultures. And in this political climate, that alone makes it the worthiest of pursuits.