http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alisa_miller_shares_the_news_about_the_news.html

The interesting thing about geography, as opposed to pretty much any of the other standard subjects, is that the field really has shrunk in the last few decades – at least measured by number of faculty/departments. I don’t know what this has meant in terms of curricula, but it has to have had an effect. Whether it’s the kind of effect that can be captured on this kind of survey is another question.

In this case, I would argue that topographical knowledge of places you will never navigate to yourself is of limited importance. Map reading as a skill obviously is important, and (here I apparently disagree with our host) only more so in a GPS age where information is more likely to be cast in map form. But note that the US scores middle-of-the-roadish on those skills in the report, while the topography results are horrible.

It wouldn’t be too weird—it would simply be unpossible. Everybody knows that cultural studies is dead.

Kenny @ 55: It seems somewhat ahead-of-your-time to include a paragraph about the ubiquity of GPS in 2002. Where did people keep their GPS devices in 2002? On their landline?

2002 is more like the present than you think. I saw GPS in golf carts as early as 1998 (it enabled the clubhouse to keep track of slow players), and the cell phone was indeed ubiquitous by 2002. OK, the line about GPS in watches was a stretch.

2002 was also the year I first saw flat-screen TVs in NYC convenience stores (so that you could watch CNN while buying toothpaste) and elevators. Video feeds are now available in taxis and on refrigerators. The result, I think, will be that by 2016 no one in the US will be able to identify anything on any map anywhere.

I would conjecture that the rise of google-maps-with-GPS cell phones will make more people capable of using maps.

I had figured there wouldn’t be a whole lot of community good coming from Chris’ post, with commenters unsatisfied by somebody’s points referencing the list as an imputation, whether sardonically or with open hostility. But I hadn’t expected both within 48 hours, directed at me. I am sorry for having done what I did to provoke this. Forgiveness for those who attempt to be a type-10 commenter but fail would be… I don’t know. A nice thing, a good thing. Maybe give people at least a couple posts on a thread before lambasting them for hijacking or failure to uphold the new fifteen ten commandments of CT expectations, you know?

USA out of NYC!

Shane in Utah: Michael, I’m confused about what group you’re talking about. College graduates? Current college students? “College-age Americans”?

Check the National Geographic survey. 18-to-24 year-olds in nine countries, plus 25-34 year-olds in the US.

If it’s any consolation or reassurance, I spend a nontrivial amount of time every day questioning that idea, and I spend lots of time questioning other people about it, and ultimately the advocacy work I do is for substantially tamped-down and moderated approaches to the kinds of ideas that I share with quite radical emphasis on blogs.

But enough from me about mathematics, this was about geography. I’ll be radical blog-commenter me and assert that “geography” qua geography is nearly so appropriate a topic of study as, say, world cultural studies & world history & etc. It’s not just a trade-off: I would explicitly argue that any time spent explicitly on the acquisition of geographic facts is time that rather should have been spent learning to cook and sow. (This is meant to be literal, and is very much not a degradation of cooking and sowing, but rather the exact opposite: I assert that developing these particularly useful skills ought to be considered more important than the memorization of names of geographic entities and their locations. These skills ought to be valuated, and the kind of geographic knowledge discussed above ought to be correspondingly devaluated, and this ought to be reflected in curriculum decisions.)

Exhibit A: Fanny Price, who is a hero to me.

What else is he supposed to do with them? Most of them can’t find jobs anyway.

That has to be just about the funniest use of bold-face I’ve seen on the intertubes. I tried skimming your post, and if anything, the boldface just got in the way – it makes your comment more like the fold-up back cover that I recall from Mad Magazine when I was a wee tyke. It seems to me that your comment not only falls under at least one of the classifications in CB’s post the other day, (as does this comment BTW), but cries out for the development of several new ones not even mentioned in the comments to that post (e.g., here, or here).

You keep former graduate students in your file cabinets? You never cease to amaze, Michael.

This seems like a hijacking, sorry. Geography and even map reading aren’t much like mathematics (not at at the college level), and different models are appropriate to different subject matters. It truly is impressive how many randomly selected Italians can identify Cuba on an unmarked map, but I think most people will get by just fine even if they can’t tell which is Cuba and which Puerto Rico, or the latter from Hispaniola.