I have already noted how ignorant I am of geography. But this morning, on a whim, I started staring at a map of Europe, really paying attention to it for the first time in a long time, and I am aghast at how completely screwed up I am.

I had this vague mental map of Europe that I’ve been carrying around in my head, probably since high school (where, not coincidentally, they didn’t teach geography). It’s not like I haven’t seen real maps many times since then, but I never paid attention. And the few times I have tried to impress on myself the geography of a region - the Middle East, the Mediterranean, Eastern Europe - because it was relevant to some issue there, I have gotten only a distorted and out-of-context view of things. I have even lectured students on political geography (in a by-the-way, parenthetical manner - I would never set myself up as an expert on the subject) - sometimes with embarrassing results. And now when I actually look at the map, I am amazed at how wrong I was, and so uncomprehendingly, for so long.

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Some observations:

  • I thought Holland was more or less where Denmark is.
  • I thought Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland were more or less “up there” without distinction.
  • Norway, Sweden, and Finland are big!
  • I thought Belgium was more or less where northern Germany is - it’s actually directly across the English Channel.
  • I knew Switzerland bordered Italy, but still thought it was more or less where Luxembourg is - it’s actually not far from the Mediterranean.
  • I also thought Austria was north of the Czech Republic.
  • I am always amazed at how big Sicily is, and yet never remember that the next time. Same with Sardinia and Corsica.
  • What the hell is Palma? Did it used to be there?
  • The former Yugoslav countries are north of Greece? How long has that been going on? (I literally thought Greece bordered Italy at the northern tip of the Adriatic. In fact, there’s about 600 miles of Slavs between them. Ouch.)
  • I always completely garble the eastern Mediterranean - there’s a lot of water east of Italy, and I can never remember that.
  • I thought Turkey extended a lot further south into the area of Syria.
  • I always think of the Arabian peninsula as a lot further west than it is - almost all of the southern Mediterranean is actually Africa. I thought Palestine was more or less due south of Italy, and Egypt much further to the west. As Bogart says about Casablanca: “I was . . . misinformed.”
  • That explains why I’m always surprised that “eastern Europe” is so far west.
  • France is a lot bigger than I can ever remember. Germany is also big, but I kind of knew that; I’m always surprised at how far south it extends, however.
  • Russia is really goddam big!

That’s pretty embarrassing. I don’t have much to say about it, other than I am teh dumbshit. But just to keep up appearances, I will offer a few comments with broader implications.

One is this: it seems very arrogant to say it out loud, and I wouldn’t normally, but I honestly think it’s no more than truth to say, whatever my many shortcomings, I know more about most things than most people. By “most people”, I don’t mean “most readers of this blog” or “most readers of blogs in general” or even “most readers of newspapers or other serious sources of information”. I mean “most Americans overall, a depressingly large number of whom are undeniably grossly ignorant, many to a pathological degree, as evidenced by the fact that more than half of them voted for George Bush at least once”. Compared to them, I know a lot, and probably even in the area of geography (a gross weak point on my part). But my level of knowledge, of geography in particular, and other things as well, is shamefully low - and most people in this country are evaluating the news, reading about the Middle East and wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and possibly Iran, listening to their blowhard shepherds rant about “surrender monkeys” or falling dominoes, and voting, while knowing even less than me. That’s scary enough as a general proposition, but when I pair it with the stark evidence of how little I actually know, it’s terrifying and depressing.

Another point: we really ought to teach this stuff. I say that as an ex-typical-teenager who would have died at the thought of memorizing boring names, dates, and places in high school, and whose lack of skill in many mental areas still today stems from his refusal to memorize things that can’t be learned in any other way: math formulas, foreign languages, chemical equations, and so on. That being said, it matters a great deal how we teach it, and we simply aren’t doing a very good job, even when we try. But whether we teach world knowledge at all is a question of priorities, and we ought to bump some of the old-fashioned boring stuff a bit further up the list.

For some bizarre reason, obscure principles of pedagogy somehow became political and even religious issues in the US; “phonics” instruction in reading is literally an article of faith for many conservative Protestants, especially homeschoolers, for reasons that I can’t fathom at all. I think the “critical thinking” movement in teaching, which is deeply threatening to conservatives, got conflated with the move to less rigid styles of pedagogy that arose at the same time (and, in their minds, with Satan worship, acid tripping, and “the 60s”). Now, to suggest that kids should learn words, dates, or place-names in context rather than by drilling from memorization lists is somehow equivalent to suggesting that they should tune in, turn on, and drop out. In typical fashion, conservatives turn a question of basic empirical fact - what teaching methods produce more knowledge in more students? - into a question of moral and religious values, while simultaneously getting the factual point wrong.

It’s interesting that Obama’s call for greater global awareness is actually a return to what used to be the conservative position on education. Knowing foreign languages was once a hallmark of an educated person (the more so, in fact, the less that person was actually expected to use their education to earn a living). Geography - an extraordinarily boring and unengaging subject at the basic level - was a staple of public education in the “3 Rs” period. And history of the names-’n-dates/great-dead-white-man school was the only history there was until not long ago. The decay of foreign-language instruction in the US accompanied the broadening of the curriculum into cultural studies and social history, with anguished cries from conservatives at the intrusion of women and non-whites into the previously pristine mental landscape. Re-injecting some names, numbers, and language competency into the curriculum, even with modern teaching methods, would actually be giving them what they used to say they wanted. But of course teaching Spanish, a language spoken by over 20% of our own population and virtually the entire population of our largest neighbor and fourth-largest trading partner, most of whom happen to have brown skin, is a scandal.