1/16/2006
Off the map: When it comes to global geography, Americans are lost.
By Lisa Ryckman, Rocky Mountain News - January 16, 2006
Where in the world are Americans when it comes to knowing where in the world everybody else is?
Nowhere - thatâs where.
âItâs isolationism of the mind,â says Phil Klein, associate geography professor at the University of Northern Colorado. âSometimes Americans donât think they can learn from other places.â
What Americans are learning from other places - places like Iraq, Iran and Israel - is how little they know about whatâs happening in the world, and how important it is to know more. More people can locate Iraq on a map these days, Klein says, but they donât know diddly about its people and culture.
Enter Roger Andresen, who ditched his job as a fiber-optic engineer three years ago to wage a one-man campaign against Americaâs geographical cluelessness.
âI went out and gave a simple geography quiz to 400 people on the streets of Atlanta, and they all realized they were pretty bad at it,â Andresen says.
âThen I asked them, âDo you care?â And I found out that a lot of people werenât happy about it.â
Andresenâs not happy about it, either. Greater global awareness has become his mission and his business, inspired by a study that showed - among other appalling statistics - that
11 percent of young Americans ages 18 to 24 couldnât locate the United States on a map and nearly 30 percent couldnât find the Pacific Ocean.
The National Geographicââ¬âRoper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey polled more than 3,000 18- to 24-year-olds in Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden and the United States. Sweden was tops, and Mexico was at the bottom. The U.S. was next to last.
American involvement in other countries made little difference.
Just 13 percent of young Americans could locate either Iraq or Iran. They were much more likely to know that the island featured in the reality show Survivor was in the South Pacific.
âWe as a country donât place as much value on it,â says Michal LeVasseur, executive director of the National Council for Geography Education. When the No Child Left Behind Act was expanded to include nine core disciplines, geography was the only one that wasnât funded for teacher training, she says.
âTo understand events in the world today is almost impossible unless you have a geographical perspective,â she says. âNo one was up there championing the cause.â
Surveys tend to focus on the ability to locate places on a map, as if thatâs what geography is, LeVasseur says. But geography, which straddles social and physical sciences, encompasses culture, environment, political issues, globalization, resource management and information systems.
Unfortunately, they all get lumped under the vague heading âsocial studies,â an area that loses out when forced to compete for precious class time with subjects measured by standardized tests.
Still, geography education might be experiencing a renaissance, says Klein, who also is co-coordinator of the Colorado Geographic Alliance, a 5,000-member group of geography and social studies educators.
âEvery 20 years or so, we rediscover that in order to become aware of the world, we have to learn about it and have some interest in it,â he says. âItâs really trying to get at the idea that learning about the world is important if youâre going to live in the world.â
In the 2002 survey, travel and language acquisition improved geographic knowledge: In the highest-scoring countries - Sweden, Germany and Italy - at least 70 percent of the young adults had traveled internationally in the previous three years, and at least 90 percent spoke more than one language.
In the U.S. and Mexico, only about 20 percent had traveled abroad during the same period, and the majority spoke only one language.
âWhen you travel from one side of Europe to the other, you go across 40 different countries with 40 different cultures and 40 different languages,â Klein says. âBut you can travel from San Francisco to New York, and itâs 3,000 miles of the same culture.â
Andresen has his own theory about why Americans often take an out-of-sight, out-of-mind approach to the world.
âWe get caught in a rut where weâre working so hard, we stop caring about the rest of the world,â he says. âWe just forget about it.â
To help change that, Andresen created a 600-piece global puzzle and the worldâs largest geography contest (
www.geographyzone.com), which challenges players to locate 10 randomly selected countries on a map of the world.
On the contestâs international leader board, players from the United States ranked 96th, behind places like Nauru, Togo, Comoros and Gabon. Our ranking might have something to do with having no idea where those countries are.
To be fair, the U.S. did occupy the top spot for two days in August.
At last count, itâs still three-tenths of a percent ahead of Canada.
The current worldwide leader - inexplicably - is Kyrgyzstan. In the U.S., Colorado comes in 22nd with just over 65 percent correct; if it were a country, it would rank 138th, between Sri Lanka and Cape Verde.
The key to moving the state - and the nation - out of the geographic wilderness is to get kids interested early, says Klein, who still has the treasured globe his parents gave him for his eighth birthday.
âI have maps all over the house, and weâre always tripping over atlases and globes,â he says. âThatâs probably excessive, but Iâm a geography nerd.â
Andresen might be helping create a new generation of geography nerds. His online challenge has attracted more than 1.5 million players from 192 countries, and he recently unveiled a feature that allows teachers to set up contests between students. The new section includes contests on world capitals, bodies of water, rivers and mountain ranges.
Itâs fun - and sometimes humiliating. But after a month of taking the test three times a day, Andresen now scores 100 percent every time.
âThe worst part for Americans is all the Pacific island countries,â he says. âAnd anything that ends in stan.â
