Could They Find Baffin Bay?

Why do particular memories stick so vividly? Usually they are associated with some strong emotion, I suppose, but that emotion is not always obvious in retrospect.

From the years and months and days I spent in elementary and high school, I vividly remember a textbook illustration from Stephen Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon"; the moment the light dawned (in my head) in geometry class as buzz saws cut down trees outside; and a second-grade pilgrimage to the roof of Upson School in Euclid, Ohio, to see silhouettes made by objects on our sun-sensitive paper.

Another vivid vignette comes from fourth-grade geography, the only geography course I ever had. I can't remember the name of the fictitious Inuit boy now, although I carried it around with me for decades. (Of course, he was an Eskimo then.) I can still visualize the geography book, the wall map showing Baffin Bay, and the classroom's wooden floor and desks and practically smell the chalk dust. I have no idea why I remember.

How important is geography? Apparently not all, if you look at statistics, such as how many geography majors our universities produce, how many geography courses high school students take, and how many ordinary people understand time zones or know whether Atlanta fronts the coast.

I will admit I'm a largely self-taught (and lectured by my expert husband) convert to geography. In high school I don't believe I fully appreciated that geography is more than the four points of the compass. But, of course, as we realize today, knowing where to locate the world's oil and coal reserves or which countries are largely Muslim IS important.

The hiliarious answers to Jay Leno's sidewalk quizzes do represent American ignorance on this topic. I'm reminded every day as I teach.

Last week a junior told me confidently that Jamaican natives speak French. In the past few months I have been treated to the ideas that Pakistan is mostly Buddhist and that Switzerland is a Scandinavian country. For several painful minutes another junior could not find Chicago on a map of the United States. Another student thought that Louisiana was in the Midwest.

Several years ago when I taught not five miles from the Hudson, my class of honors sophomores could not tell me what river separated New York and New Jersey. Another class of mixed-level honors students here in South Carolina surprised me by sneaking to the map of the United States to see whether Boston is north of New York City (at least they looked). Others have been shocked to find out that there's oil in Nigeria.

This generation has more information at its fingertips that imaginable even five years ago, and, yet, knows less than any preceding generation. Why?

Two obvious culprits are lack of reading, even the reading of newspapers and magazines, and lack of dinnertable conversation. Schools can do very little to change those dynamics.

But social studies killed geography. At least that's my theory. In most middle schools students do not (horrors!) memorize facts because memorization is boring and old-fashioned. Educators (notice I don't call them teachers) theorize that facts can always be looked up. Sometimes they can, but if students have no knowledge in their heads to build upon, they cannot make the creative connections needed "to think globally."

Those who worry about the ice caps' melting--could they find Baffin Bay?