Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks (7 page)

Snickering at the cartographically cloddish dates back centuries. You’d think that, in the more provincial 1600s,
everyone
would have been a little hazy on geography, but that didn’t prevent the French educator Denis Martineau du Plessis from filling the preface of his 1700 book
Nouvelle Géographie
with Joey Tribbiani–worthy stories of map woe. He recounts a (probably apocryphal) tale of the English ambassador to Rome in 1343, who caught wind of the fact that the pope had given away the “fortunate islands” (the Canary Islands were then called the “Islas Fortunatas”) to the Count de Clermont. Assuming that the world’s only
truly
fortunate islands were the British Isles, the outraged ambassador rushed back to London to tell the king that some French count was taking over England! Making fun of the English was a popular French pastime, then as now, but du Plessis takes some shots at his own countrymen as well, citing French authorities who wondered which river the Pont Euxine crossed (“Pont Euxine” was an ancient name for the Black Sea, not a bridge) and assumed that Moors came from Morea (another name for Peloponnesia, in Greece).
^*

Jokes like these never would have been comic tropes if there weren’t some truth behind them, of course. Real government officials, and not just apocryphal Renaissance-era ambassadors, make geographical gaffes all the time. In his autobiography,
Henry Kissinger told
the story of the prime minister of Mauritius’s goodwill visit to Washington in 1970. Somehow the confused State Department had briefed the president to meet not with the leader of Mauritius, a tiny tropical island in the Indian Ocean, but of Mauritania, a vast Saharan nation that had recently cut off diplomatic relations with the United States. This improbable
I Love Lucy
setup led to the comic hijinks you might expect: President Richard Nixon led off the discussion by suggesting that the prime minister
of a valued American ally
restore diplomatic relations with the United States! That way, he said, he could offer American expertise with dry farming. The flummoxed Mauritian, hailing as he did from a lush jungle nation, had little interest in desert farming, so he tried to change the subject, asking Nixon about a space tracking station the United States operated in his country. The bewildered Nixon scrawled something down on a yellow legal pad and handed it to Kissinger. The note read, “Why the hell do we have a space tracking station in a country with which we don’t have diplomatic relations?”

During the 2008 presidential race, both campaigns dealt with elementary school–level geography blunders that could have come from the pen of any sitcom hack. At a rally in Beaverton, Oregon, Barack Obama told the crowd, “
Over the last
fifteen months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in fifty-seven states. Just one left to go.” (He was apparently channeling the
Friends
episode in which Joey crowns himself the winner of Chandler’s name-all-the-states game, with a high score of fifty-six.) Then John McCain, when asked by a Spanish radio interviewer if he would invite Spain’s President José Zapatero to the White House, seemed amenable, stressing “
the importance of
our relationship with Latin America.” (Hey, just like that
Arrested Development
episode where Gob thinks his brother has fled to “Portugal, down South America way!”) And that’s not even counting Fox News’s report that Sarah Palin believed that
Africa was a country
, not a continent. See, she’s a real-life Ali G, only with—respek!—more stylish eyewear. On those
rare occasions when a politician does display a knack for geography, he’s treated as a sideshow freak.
Al Franken’s favorite
party stunt has long been his ability to draw a near-perfect map of the United States freehand, a skill he’s used to great effect doing electoral coverage for
Saturday Night Live
’s “Weekend Update” and on Comedy Central. In 1987, he amazed a Letterman audience by whipping off one of his Sharpie maps in less than two minutes. When the former comedian somehow got elected to the Senate in 2008, his onetime Stupid Human Trick got rebranded as a wonkishly patriotic bit of Americana and became a staple at campaign events and fund-raisers. But the audience result is still the same: shocked gasps that a U.S. senator
might actually know what the United States looks like
!
^*

You know that geographic ignorance is a serious societal problem when even Miss Teen USA candidates are grilled about it! In 2007, South Carolina’s Caite Upton was asked, “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?” Upton finished only fourth in the pageant, but her answer to that question made her an international celebrity overnight.

“
I personally believe
,” she answered with absolute confidence, “that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as in South Africa and, uh, the Iraq, everywhere like such as, and, I believe that they should, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future, for our children.”

In the much-watched YouTube video, even host Mario Lopez can’t quite swallow his grin at the gratuitous “for our children” tacked onto the end, as he mercifully pulls away the mike.

But educators are worried too, and have been for a while. In
1857, Andrew Dickson White, who would go on to cofound Cornell University, was put in charge of assessing the geography acumen of the University of Michigan’s sophomore class. Michigan took great pride in the geography curriculum in its public high schools, but White wrote that “
in the great majority
of my students there was not a trace of real knowledge of physical geography, and very little of political.” White told his students to throw away their rote lists of memorized place-names and browse atlases instead, with great success. During World War II, a Harvard professor named Howard Wilson was featured in
The New York Times,
insisting that German geographical expertise gave the Nazis a leg up on the United States. “
Geographic illiterates
cannot be counted on to create a public mind alert to the geographic factors of either war or peace,” he scolded. If you don’t study maps enough, in other words, you’re studying for Hitler! Paging through back issues of
The
Journal of Geography,
an education journal, I discover a regular stream of articles bemoaning the sad state of geographic knowledge. David Helgren wouldn’t have been surprised by his findings if he’d read a
1950 study
by an Oregon professor named Kenneth Williams, who’d sprung a blank-map test on his freshman class, with similar results: less than half his students could label Wisconsin on a U.S. map, and only a third could find New Hampshire. At one school, 15 percent misplaced their own state.

What’s remarkable about these stories is the surprise that journalists and educators always express about the kids’ ineptitude. This tired dog-bites-man story is still capable of grabbing the front page, even after a century of wear. Why? At some point, isn’t this news only if the kids suddenly start doing
well
on map quizzes?

Part of the blame can be chalked up to the tendency, in both academia and the media, to attract readers to unsurprising developments by breathlessly overhyping them. Besides, reporters tend to be just as much “in the tank” on map knowledge as academic geographers are, since journalism is one of the few careers in which detailed global knowledge is still expected and rewarded.
^*
And because journalism
and academia are somewhat insular private worlds, these stories get written by people who
are
genuinely surprised that college students couldn’t find Kenya or Chile on a map; in their odd bubble worlds of geographic expertise,
everyone
would ace that test! Some people with odd obsessions become acutely aware of how their expertise makes them different (cf. my childhood love of maps). But others blithely assume that everyone shares their fanaticism, as you probably know if you ever had a college roommate whose favorite band was Rush.

It’s easy to see why these stories are popular with readers as well—they make us feel better about ourselves. Reporters always cherry-pick the studies for items that make the subjects look as dumb as possible. Three-quarters of David Helgren’s students knew where the Falklands were, but that’s not shockingly bad. In fact, it seems pretty reasonable. So the half of the students who couldn’t find London provided the headline instead. Such studies usually come with at least one easy-sounding task, like locating Canada or the Pacific Ocean, that a small minority will still fail. Even if only 10 percent answer incorrectly, it’ll be a big part of the story, enabling us to marvel that these dumb kids could botch a question
we
certainly would have aced—no matter that the vast majority of respondents actually got it right. In a culture where geographic illiteracy is used as comic shorthand for stupidity, nobody’s willing to own up to a little map vagueness of their own.

But there’s another possible way to explain the viruslike persistence of the geographic illiteracy meme, and it’s a little more sobering. What if this story has stuck around for centuries because every generation has been surprised by the rising generation’s
even poorer
mastery of maps? In other words, what if we’re continually getting worse?

It’s not hard to find evidence to support that gloomy idea. In that 1942
Times
interview, Howard Wilson bemoaned the fact that the average American didn’t “comprehend the significance” of places such as Dakar and the Caucasus. Forget the “significance”—I doubt that many Americans today could even tell you what continent they’re on. Indiana University’s Rick Bein recently performed a
fifteenth-anniversary follow-up
to his massive 1987 study on the geographic literacy of Indiana college freshmen. Indiana had put major efforts into improving geography education in the interim, so Bein was anticipating a big bounce in his results. Instead, scores declined by 2 percent. For the most part, the students who knew their stuff were the ones who’d moved around a lot or traveled; those who had taken high school geography classes did no better than those who hadn’t. In other words, the state’s big initiatives hadn’t done a lick of good. In
recent National Geographic polls
, one in ten American college students can’t find California or Texas on a map, ten times worse than the same numbers in Dr. Williams’s 1950 study.

There are obvious ways to explain an ongoing drop in geographic literacy. Geographers like to blame the curriculum revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the clear-cut history and geography classes of grade schools past were replaced by a wishy-washy amalgam called “social studies.” The adoption of social studies was the well-intentioned result of academics in a wide variety of social sciences hoping to expose kids to their pet fields: anthropology, economics, political science, and so on. But, as a side effect of the new curriculum, classes specifically devoted to geography virtually disappeared from the nation’s schools. The United States is now the only country in the developed world where a student can go from preschool to grad school without ever cracking a geography text.

So kids are spending less school time with maps than ever before. And that generation gap becomes a huge part of the problem: in our cultural memory, geography becomes that thing that your parents or grandparents studied. We associate it with dusty old pull-down wall maps and Dick-and-Jane readers and “duck and cover” drills. On the TV series
Mad Men,
set in the early 1960s, the protagonist, Don Draper, has a large world globe prominently displayed not just in his
den at home but at the office as well. It’s a neat bit of production design, immediately signaling to viewers under thirty: See how old-timey this show is?
People actually still owned globes!
Convincing someone today that geography, of all things, is a serious and important field sounds a little like pushing a typewriter or phonograph repair class on them.

Geography seems to be a struggle for Americans, specifically. In 2002, National Geographic conducted a survey of college-aged people
in nine different countries
, testing place-name knowledge, current events geography, and map skills. No country aced the test, but the top scorers—Sweden, Germany, and Italy—answered around 70 percent of the questions correctly. U.S. students, with a dreary 41 percent, were next to last. (Thank you, Mexico!) These results are similar to what researchers see when they stack American students up against the rest of the world in other subjects, like math and science, so maybe they’re just a symptom of our dumbed-down curricula in general. “Geography is just a subset of Americans not knowing
anything,
” says David Helgren with a shrug. “I hate to say that.”

But it isn’t hard to imagine that there might be some peculiarly geographic reasons why Americans lag in global knowledge. One is our isolation—drive east from France for ten hours, and you might cross five different nations. Drive east from El Paso, Texas, and ten hours later you won’t even be in Houston yet. Americans don’t know much about other nations because we can so easily pretend that they don’t even exist, the way Rosencrantz says he doesn’t believe in England in Tom Stoppard’s play
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
. (“
Just a conspiracy
of cartographers, then?” asks his friend Guildenstern acidly.) If Americans want to go to the mountains or the desert or the beach, we don’t need to hop on an international flight: everything’s right here. Our isolation isn’t just a geographic accident; it was practically a mission statement when America was founded. The first people who settled here came to break connections with the rest of the world, so the American approach to geography has always been to expand our reach into new frontiers, not study up on old ones. The global interconnectedness of the modern world hasn’t come easily to us.