I was cleaning out the files the other day — not the files in my office file cabinets (I did that in August for the first time in years, and let me tell you, it was so much fun I kept it up for days), but the files in my trusty little laptop, the very device on which I write these words today. I have three five-drawer file cabinets in my office, full to bursting with the records of class preparations, former graduate students, essays assigned in faculty reading groups, tenure and promotion reviews, offprints and copies of old essays, book contracts, and so forth. Cleaning out files is, of course, the least rewarding kind of office- and life-maintenance, because when you’re done everything looks pretty much the way it did when you started — which is why you dumped all that extraneous crap in your file cabinets in the first place, to get it out of sight. The only interesting thing I learned, in the course of winnowing through (or wallowing in) all that paper was that my course records start to go paperless somewhere around 1995. I always kept my students’ grades (and my responses to their papers) on Ye Olde Computers, all the way back to 1986 when I was TAing the History of English Literature course at the University of Virginia and working on a Leading Edge knockoff with the floppy disks. But beginning in the mid-90s, almost <i>all</i> my course materials disappear from the file cabinets and appear instead on … well, a series of hard drives leading to the very device on which I write these words today. So I realized, diligent recordkeeper that I am, that I should have a look at those files as well, particularly the one called “miscellaneous,” which now holds something like five hundred documents.
(True story tangent: a few years ago I was riding Amtrak on my way to a Modern Language Association committee meeting. From a nearby seat, a man in his mid-thirties asked whether I might be Michael Bérubé of the University of Illinois. Startled, I said that I was indeed myself but had moved to Penn State in 2001. He told me he had been a student of mine in an American lit survey class in the spring of 1990, acknowledging that 1990 was quite some time ago and that I probably wouldn’t remember him. I admitted that I did not remember him by face, but could look up his name on this very device on the seatback tray in front of me, and promptly retrieved all the records from the class, including his. He was flabbergasted, mostly in a good way, even though on my end the feat was no more remarkable than, say, writing out the alphabet.)
Needless to say, one significant difference between my files and my e-files is that I don’t really have to throw away any of the latter. My first “professional” computer — purchased with the $2000 computer allowance I was given as a new assistant professor at Illinois — was an IBM PS/2 286, and it had an amazing <i>twenty megabytes</i> of storage on the hard drive. (I see that these items are <a href=”http://cgi.ebay.com/Vintage-IBM-PS-2-286-Computer_W0QQitemZ390112281020QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item5ad48101bc”>somewhat less expensive</a> today.) But after a couple of years, that wasn’t enough to hold all my course stuff, correspondence, miscellaneous detritus, <i>and</i> the manuscript of my first book, so when the book was published I deleted it from the hard drive. It might still be on some 3.5″ disks somewhere — I don’t know, because I haven’t seen a 3.5″ disk in many years. But that was probably the last time I deleted a manuscript. Today, I have hundreds of these manuscript and protomanuscripty things sitting around, and I could have thousands more without straining my one-quindecillion-byte storage capacity even a teeny bit. And so it is that I found an orphaned essay over the weekend, an essay I’m dragging out of the back of the e-closet and offering to you free of charge, just this once.
It was a whimsical piece of fluff for a major national magazine, and I wrote it about seven years ago. But it was an assignment, not an over-the-transom thing, and the occasion was the publication of National Geographic’s survey of “geographic literacy.” There were apparently some people who hoped that the events of 9/11 would have led Americans to learn a bit more about Othercountriestan, but they were deeply disappointed to find that in 2002, Americans were almost precisely as colossally ignorant of Othercountriestan as they had been in 1988. I decided, however, not to take the obvious “9/11 taught us nothing” bait, and offer instead what I thought was a cute little hook in the final paragraph. My editor liked it, but <i>his</i> editor considered it “evergreen” material, the kind of thing one cannot run even on the slowest news day when nothing is happening except for “Area Dog Bites Man Again.” I’d thought that the final-graf hook was a pre-emptive answer to that complaint (which is why I thought it up!), but alas, it wasn’t. I admit that most of the time, when an essay of mine gets rejected (and this happens with some frequency, you know), it’s because the essay sucks. But this was one of the very few times when the essay didn’t clearly suck (though you may disagree!), so I wound up getting an odd consolation prize out of the experience: my editor passed me along to a friend who worked for <i>Golf</i> magazine, where I wound up writing two 900-word pieces five or six years ago. (They didn’t like my second effort at all, really — I wanted to argue that the 1979 reformatting of the <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryder_Cup”>Ryder Cup</a>, which pitted the US against Europe instead of just UK/Ireland and led to Europe’s epochal victory in 1985 — the first US loss in almost thirty years — provided the impetus for the creation of the European Union. Not <i>really</i>, of course, but the point is that US postwar dominance of the Ryder Cup maps pretty well onto US postwar dominance of everything else, and maybe now the times they are a-changin’. <i>Golf</i> magazine wanted me to stick to predicting the outcome. So that didn’t work. But I loved writing about the Masters for them, and still hope someday to be sent to Augusta National on assignment.)
Anyway, here’s the poor orphaned thing. It was called “Where in the World,” and I do hope you don’t mind my dredging it out of its probably-deserved obscurity. I can’t help adding proudly that Jamie, then 11, did better on the geography test than 90+ percent of his American peers (preteen with Down syndrome pwns American public!). Nick, then 16, did better than 99.99 percent of ‘em, but then, Nick is a former Geography Bee star, having made it to the 1997 Illinois state finals at the tender age of eleven. I like it that my kids know stuff.
_______
In November, the National Geographic Education Foundation released the results of its “2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey.” 18-to-24-year-olds in nine countries were tested by the survey — Canada, Mexico, Germany, Italy, Sweden, France, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States — along with 25-to-34-year-olds in the US. And even for those of us who have long since grown accustomed to hearing that young Americans are four times more ignorant of everything than their peers elsewhere, the report is stupefying.
Where to start? Thirty percent of US respondents could not locate the Pacific Ocean. A meager thirteen percent recognized Iraq on a world map; one wonders whether there was any significant overlap between this group and the fourteen percent who could locate Israel. Fifty-eight percent knew that Afghanistan was the home base for the Taliban and al Qaeda, but only 17 percent could locate the actual home of that home base. Astonishingly, every other nation in the survey outperformed the US on this question; 63 percent of Mexicans got it right, 70 percent of the French, and so on, all the way up to 84 percent for Great Britain and Sweden. On a related front, 67 percent of French young adults, and 66 percent of Italians, knew that the disputed Kashmir region is disputed by India and Pakistan. Thirty-six percent of Americans got that one.
Reports like these are now a routine part of the American cultural landscape; it may even be possible to say that the American public is reasonably well-informed about the fact that it cannot even identify the countries whose ten-year-olds clean our clocks in geography quizzes. So, too, liberals’ and conservatives’ responses to such reports have become routine in turn.
The pattern is especially predictable when the issue is American history, and the pattern runs something like this: the Exasperated Educational Institute announces that 45 percent of American college students do not know in which century the American Civil War occurred, and another 23 percent do not know that there was a Civil War at all. The William Bennett Foundation for a Solid Foundation blames the results on watered-down, “feelgood” college curricula and academic leftists’ disdain for objective knowledge. The Association of Earnest Liberal Academics replies that students shouldn’t simply memorize names and dates; it’s more important for them to understand the origins of the Federal Reserve System and its relations to emerging global markets than to identify Andrew Jackson and Nicholas Biddle on multiple-choice tests.
This is a plausible enough answer on its face. Its only flaw is that earnest liberal academics like myself actually aren’t all that sure that most American college students understand the Federal Reserve System and its relations to anything. So we sometimes fall back on our second line of argument, namely, that college students in 1964 or 1982 were every bit as ignorant as this year’s survey victims. We’re usually right about this, and the Bill Bennett people are usually wrong in thinking that everything went downhill right around the time the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. But rarely is it so depressing for an educator to be “right” about her students and fellow citizens.
What’s interesting about the National Geographic survey, however, is that there simply doesn’t seem to be a cogent strategy for explaining it away. It’s quite impossible to argue that college-age Americans don’t have to be able to identify foreign countries so long as they know about large-scale population dynamics, migration patterns, and other subjects relevant to “social geography.” The survey shows quite clearly that college-age Americans don’t know anything about those subjects, either.
Some of my colleagues would suggest that Americans’ ignorance of the world makes perfect sense: the country rallies behind wars in distant countries, surely, because so few Americans have any idea where those countries are or what US policy toward them has been. Americans are a singularly insular, self-absorbed bunch, and if they knew more about the world outside their borders, they’d be more receptive to internationalist analyses of the world outside their borders.
This argument has some merit, but the National Geographic survey is even more unsettling. It turns out, for instance, that Americans are not merely ignorant about the world; they’re also staggeringly ignorant about the United States. Only 25 percent of respondents knew that the U.S. population is between 150 and 350 million; 30 percent put it at 1-2 billion. Only 51 percent could point to New York on a U.S. map (and only 39 percent of the 25-34 group could do so); 30 percent managed to find New Jersey. Eleven percent of Americans could not find the US at all — though we can take cold comfort in the fact that in the last survey, in 1988, that figure was eighteen percent.
Two other things have happened since 1988: the number of Americans who think that reading maps is “absolutely necessary” has declined from 74 to 43 percent, and — although the National Geographic survey does not take stock of this — the number of global positioning systems available to ordinary Americans has increased by approximately infinity percent, from zero in 1988 to many, many now. Automobiles, recreational boats, golf carts, televisions and watches come equipped with GPS; the laptop on which I write this can tell me precisely where on Earth it is. Perhaps there is an inverse relation between our collective expertise and our collective knowledge: the more sophisticated our navigational systems become, the less we think we need to know. It is as if we Americans have surrounded ourselves with systems that can tell us precisely where we are — but not, unfortunately, where anyone else might be. Every last one of us knows that we are exactly where we are right now, and so we shall remain, until our nation’s geographers and educators provide us with the Global Decentering System we so desperately need.
{ 59 comments }
Barry 11.23.09 at 6:16 pm
“Cleaning out files is, of course, the least rewarding kind of office- and life-maintenance, because when you’re done everything looks pretty much the way it did when you started—which is why you dumped all that extraneous crap in your file cabinets in the first place, to get it out of sight. ”
Except for (a) stuff that you forgot about, and (b) being able to find stuff.
Barry 11.23.09 at 6:17 pm
Besides, it beats work, and frequently gives a cheaper ‘I was productive today!’ thrill.
Michael Bérubé 11.23.09 at 6:23 pm
(b) being able to find stuff is absolutely crucial, yes. Which is why all that work is worth the effort in the end, and why one has to be careful about the infinite expansion of those “miscellaneous” folders. I think my dedication to (b) being able to find stuff owes something to my household life: during the summer of 2008, when Janet was teaching in Ireland and I was managing Jamie and post-college Nick (and cleaning out the dark corners of the house), it seemed like there just wasn’t a single day when one of the offspring wasn’t asking me to find some wayward item. I finally informed Son 1 and Son 2 that for the remainder of the summer I would answer no question that began with “where” or “have you seen,” so they would have to begin keeping track of such things themselves.
mpowell 11.23.09 at 6:44 pm
The explanation that yesterday’s kids were just as ignorant does nothing to address the fact that other countries do better. There is definitely something there, but I’m not sure anybody can really explain what is going on. How can one of the world’s most productive workforces be full of such idiots?
kevincure 11.23.09 at 6:58 pm
How reliable are these surveys? I’ve seen them before, but frankly, they’re not believable. Only 39% of Americans 25-44 can find New York on a map, but 63% of Mexicans can find Afghanistan? As many French can locate Afghanistan as Americans can locate the Pacific Ocean?
There’s no question that the average European has a better sense of geography/language than the average American (though even this is overstated – Europeans tend to be well-informed about the rest of Europe, but it’s not as if there’s some mass of Chinese-speaking Danes, or Old Africa Hands in Italy that put the average American to shame here). But the magnitude of difference, and the absolute levels of knowledge, aren’t convincing.
Look, my family are postal workers and nurses and machinists. They all could tell you where New York is, and where the Pacific Ocean is, and I imagine a good number would spot Afghanistan without much trouble. I want to see the methodology here.
P O'Neill 11.23.09 at 6:59 pm
The wingers will say that you were destroying evidence of your role in the global warming conspiracy before they can get their freedom of information request in, which seems to have been the trigger for the Univ of East Anglia electronic document dump.
christian h. 11.23.09 at 7:00 pm
I always put this geography gap down to the fact that the US is just so… well… huge. And has only two neighbors. I think these surveys should be controlled for such circumstances. In other words, if Quebec should vote for independence, I confidently predict that US geographical knowledge will increase by 50%.
Michael Bérubé 11.23.09 at 7:00 pm
mpowell @ 4: Indeed. It’s especially tempting, for leftish snarkmeisters like me, to believe that the 11 percent who can’t find the US, the 30 percent who can’t find the Pacific Ocean, and the 16 percent who can’t find their own asses are all hard-core Palinistas (or their 2002 counterparts). But I fear that Americans’ map illiteracy doesn’t map so neatly onto the political spectrum as perceived by leftish snarkmeisters.
Anyway, I was curious to see what people would make of this, which is why I dragged the piece out of probably-deserved obscurity in the first place.
Michael Bérubé 11.23.09 at 7:07 pm
And kevincure @ 5: read the whole thing, as they say on blogs. Warning: 75-page .pdf. (And it’s 25-34 year-olds. My typo! No wonder the essay was rejected. Fixed in the post.)
cartesian 11.23.09 at 7:18 pm
mpowell – Isn’t the “most productive workforce” stuff largely an accounting illusion, like the illusion that derivatives traders make a great contribution to the economy? I mean, how hard is it to look more “productive” (in GDP terms) when an American gets paid $10/hour for sewing together essentially the same pair of jeans (sold at American Apparel) as a foreigner sews together (sold at WalMart) for $1/day? Or a policeman whose “productive activity” in the USA is $50,000, but in Kenya is $1,000, for doing essentially the same job.
Of course the USA has some very productive-in-a-real-sense people, but then most of those people probably know where stuff is on a map.
Colin Danby 11.23.09 at 7:20 pm
Speaking of evergreens, here’s the 2006 version.
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/roper2006/pdf/FINALReport2006GeogLitsurvey.pdf
From page 6: “Majorities overestimate the total size of the U.S. population and fail to understand how much larger the population of China is. Three-quarters (74%) believe English is the most commonly spoken native language in the world, rather than Mandarin Chinese. Although 73% know the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of oil, nearly as many (71%) do not know the U.S. is the
world’s largest exporter of goods and services — half think it’s China.”
John Quiggin 11.23.09 at 7:26 pm
It’s more accurate to say, “a workforce as productive as any in the world” – US output per hour is comparable to that of other developed countries, so maybe those who think it isn’t important to be able to read a map are right.
Michael Bérubé 11.23.09 at 7:31 pm
Speaking of evergreens, here’s the 2006 version.
Area Dog Bites Man Again … Again.
quebecker 11.23.09 at 7:36 pm
Wait, you still keep student records going back to the 80s? Doesn’t that breach some sort of data protection act? I’m not sure how it works in the States but at least here in Canada we’re not allowed (well supposed, really, it’s hardly policed) to keep personal copies of student grades etc for more than a year…
Colin Danby 11.23.09 at 7:42 pm
On the map-reading, pages 17 and 18 of the 2006 document report questions using a fictitious map. Something like a quarter of respondents seem to have basic difficulty interpreting *any* map — what do those lines and dots mean. It’s unlikely those folks will do well locating stuff on a real map. This suggests various cross-tabs and ways to refine the questions of international comparison.
mpowell 11.23.09 at 7:47 pm
10: I don’t think it’s any kind of illusion at all. The economic output of the US economy per worker is quite high. And as a consequence (without getting into the details of how they’re different from Europeans who are comparably productive) Americans live in big houses, drive nice cars and have lots of nice stuff. Maybe 90% of those folks are hangers-on or at least just taking advantage of generations worth of developed social and physical infrastructure, but the productivity is quite real.
cartesian 11.23.09 at 7:55 pm
This is good evidence for greater productivity-in-a-real sense? So we can conclude also that the bankers who drive nice yachts really are each a zillion times more productive than Joe Schmo?
Sorry, I might be just being naive, but I’d love to hear someone actually give a decent and comprehensible argument for this much bandied-about claim.
maht 11.23.09 at 8:06 pm
Whenever I see one of these surveys I imagine getting a grant to do a survey that asks the same questions but says “We’ll give you $5 for every right answer .” I bet people with an incentive besides “making the survey questioner happy” will have an easier time finding the Pacific Ocean.
Bloix 11.23.09 at 8:33 pm
“I was curious to see what people would make of this”
If the major national magazine was something like Newsweek, then the point of the piece was far too buried and snarky for a mass circulation publication. If you’d put that front and center – something like, how the hell are we going to beat the Terrists when we can’t even send them a mailgram? – they would have eaten it up. But it’s just perfect for a Crooked Timber post.
mpowell 11.23.09 at 9:00 pm
17: You are confusing the micro for the macro. The banker with a big yacht may not be that productive, but somehow the American economy as a whole generates the wealth that allows Americans as a whole to buy all the stuff that they own. The distribution of goods may or may not align with who is productive or not, but the idea that the American economy generates a lot of wealth is just not in doubt here. Even if you want to argue that all that wealth is stolen from abroad (which isn’t that credible of a story) the Americans are doing just as good a job as the Europeans despite the fact that they can’t even find the Pacific on a map.
Biba 11.23.09 at 10:10 pm
kevincure…
Only 39% of Americans 25-44 can find New York on a map, but 63% of Mexicans can find Afghanistan?…
There’s no question that the average European has a better sense of geography/language than the average American ..
…I want to see the methodology here.
I don’t know the methodology … but I know that there are literally MILLIONS of Mexicans who can find Houston, Atlanta, Raleigh, New York and Chicago without a map!
In 1980 I was on the campus of UGA having a chat with law and I think politics students. After the chat I invited a very nice law student for a drink. During our conversation she asked me where I was from … I said England and she asked me …. “And what language do you speak there?”
Michael Bérubé 11.23.09 at 10:14 pm
quebecker @ 14: here in Canada we’re not allowed (well supposed, really, it’s hardly policed) to keep personal copies of student grades etc for more than a year
Really? I need my records for writing recommendations, especially when the students who are asking for letters are people who took courses with me more than a year or two ago. FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) certainly prevents me from publicizing student work (which is why my course blogs are password-protected and covered in Internets cloaking devices), but I do believe I’m allowed to keep student info on my laptop, just so long as I don’t tell anyone at Crooked Timber that Melvin Furd of Kankakee, Illinois got a B+ in my American lit survey in the spring of 1992.
Bloix @ 19: If the major national magazine was something like Newsweek, then the point of the piece was far too buried and snarky for a mass circulation publication.
It wasn’t Newsweek, that I can assure you. It was for a publication, and for a specific slot, in which a certain amount of mild and/or buried snark is not merely tolerated but occasionally encouraged. Oh, all right, it was the NYT Magazine, where I believe I am officially five-for-seven over a seven-year span (they also turned down an over-the-transom piece on Jamie’s French lessons, which later found its way onto my own blog, where my acceptance rate continues to be 100 percent).
Brian Hillcoat 11.23.09 at 10:15 pm
In my cynical moments I often think it’s quite possible that a deliberate plot by the U.S. Establishment exists to ensure that the populace remains as ignorant of the rest of the world as it appears to be at present. U.S. politics entirely depends on voters believing that their country is the best in the world, hence they cannot be allowed to learn too much about how far more advanced social conditions (job security, health services, education, paid vacations, usw, usf) are the norm elsewhere. The system demands that everyone should continue to regard Europe, Canada, etc. as atheistic socialist hell-holes so that the notion that conditions pertaining there might be worth importing can never arise.
Jeffrey Daniel Rubard 11.23.09 at 11:06 pm
Michael, John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. is a hell of a book. The Adventures of Augie March, more of a “fave-rave”.
Orange 11.23.09 at 11:07 pm
Geography! It’s hot. We’re a pro-geography household here. My fourth-grader would be lost on the global geography quizzes at Sporcle.com, but he likes the one where you have to label all 50 states. And he ws quizzing his folks on state capitals over dinner yesterday.
My eighth-grade niece was dumbfounded when a classmate of hers thought New York was a country. “No…think about it. What else could New York be?” she asked. She blew the girl’s mind when she informed her that it’s both a city and a state. What’s crazy is that there are kids’ TV shows based in NYC, so how the hell do you not pick this up?
kth 11.24.09 at 12:04 am
You should have re-submitted an updated version of the article in 2007, when the following question:
sent poor Caitlin Upton, Miss Teen South Carolina, into her video-viral tailspin.. Even the upscale New York Times Magazine might not have been above a timely, “ripped from today’s headlines” tie-in.
bianca steele 11.24.09 at 12:35 am
kevincure@5: I also wonder how reliable these studies are, but in their favor, they highlight the fact that education about geography isn’t what it should be, spur kids to try harder, and provide a chance for controversy, debate over which can result in improved policies.
bianca steele 11.24.09 at 12:37 am
I wonder what percentage of the population knows how to produce an accented e in a Firefox comment box on Windows.
Dave Maier 11.24.09 at 12:46 am
my own blog, where my acceptance rate continues to be 100 percent
Well that explains a few things.
Bill Benzon 11.24.09 at 12:46 am
Global Decentering System
Post-structuralist geography, no?
Donald A. Coffin 11.24.09 at 1:50 am
Just 500 documents? Piker.
Heidi 11.24.09 at 5:04 am
Slight tangent: This also reminds me of the claims, whenever the U.S. places badly in those international math and science competency exams, that other countries put their best students to those tests while the U.S. virtuously does random draw. True story nontangent (to this, anyway): when I was in 11th grade, my high school was selected to be in one of those exams. The day of, the entire AP Physics class and everyone of the appropriate age in Honors Physics were randomly pulled.
Jim Harrison 11.24.09 at 7:52 am
Which is why Dan Quayle’s favorite game was “Where in the world is San Diego?”
Sorry about that, but I’ve waited 20 years to use this bit.
Zamfir 11.24.09 at 11:51 am
I am going ahead and say it: how bad is it really when you can’t locate Afghanistan on a map? Is there really any action in your life that is affected by that? Not to mention that if you really need to know where it is, maps usually have the names of the countries written on them.
alex 11.24.09 at 12:26 pm
@33 – well, as is always the case, in your private life it doesn’t matter a damn. If, however, you are a citizen of the USA or the UK, and the government that your vote helps determine sends troops to fight and die there, then it really ought to be part of your public life to know where it is, and a whole lot more. But maybe that is just a pointlessly old-fashioned definition of citizenship, responsibility, ‘public’… who knows?
Z 11.24.09 at 12:32 pm
“I am going ahead and say it: how bad is it really when you can’t locate Afghanistan on a map?”
Well, an obvious answer would be that apparently (I have not been a direct witness) some Americans think that the war in Afghanistan is waged in some place contiguous to California. Kind of changes your general policy approach to the problem.
I would be surprised if things were really as bad as they appear through these tests, but then again, at the age of 18, one of my classmate who had just succeeded in a very competitive political science exam and was top of her class in History could not identify the political affiliations of the then President and Prime Minister of her country (even in basic left/right term). She knew something, evidently, for instance the political affiliations of the various governments which had struggled with the end of colonization in Algeria, including the labels of many now defunct political formations, but not this.
chris y 11.24.09 at 12:44 pm
34, 35. There was a poll quoted in the 80s which suggested that the majority of Americans who thought the US should be intervening in Nicaragua also claimed to think that Nicaragua was a state of the Union. Which raises the subsidiary question about how many of these people really thought it was such a great idea for the federal government to seek to overthrow a state government by proxy force.
But the point remains. If a significant number of people had realised that Nicaragua was in fact several hundred miles the far side of Mexico, support for the whole Contra adventure might have been considerably less.
davek 11.24.09 at 2:02 pm
The banker with a big yacht may not be that productive, but somehow the
American economyFederal Reserve as a whole generates the wealth that allows Americans as a whole to buy all the stuff that they own.Fized for great economics.
ajay 11.24.09 at 2:03 pm
apparently (I have not been a direct witness) some Americans think that the war in Afghanistan is waged in some place contiguous to California.
Reminds me of the (possibly apocryphal) stories of the terror inspired by news of the invasion of the Falklands; terror that was alleviated slightly when it became more widely known that the Falklands were in the south Atlantic, rather than just off the coast of Scotland.
Salient 11.24.09 at 3:03 pm
You know, I’ve never looked at any map in a class for any reason (that is, I’ve never been assigned to look at a map, ever). Yet I can read maps, topographical and geographical, well enough to get by. I’ll try to extrapolate from this while avoiding patently silly extrapolations…
[Phrases below are bolded to help halfway-interested readers to skim; apologies if this is a bother.]
It doesn’t bother me that most Americans can’t locate Afghanistan on a contrived blank map. It bothers the hell out of me to think that any number of people who have lived through years of education would be given a reasonably intuitive visual information source and find the thing alien, incomprehensible, and frustrating to interact with.
I think Colin Danby’s observation has the right angle to it: I’d extend into normative to say, too many of our students cannot competently interact with maps, or more generally, with informative visuals, or even more generally, with information sources. I doubt that same group of struggling map-readers are substantially more competent with a wide variety of other information sources.
Lots of students don’t understand, on a deep meaningful level, that information sources contain information. Perhaps it’s better said as: lots of students don’t intuitively understand what information is.
I don’t mean anything mystical by this; every semester I ask my students (1) what information is, (2) what an ‘object’ of study in mathematics is, (3) what ‘relationships’ in mathematics are, and they struggle with the questions. The location of their current work within a context is purely institutional — I do this stuff so that I can take calculus, or take topology — there is not much of a conceptual context in their mind, an information map with gaps. Every semester my calc students are mystified that, having learned to differentiate, we might want to do the opposite thing. It doesn’t take proficiency in mathematics to appreciate that if you can perform a procedure and get a result, it is interesting to discover whether you can take information in the form of that result and apply a reverse procedure. Either way it’s expanding the information available to you. But this kind of anticipatory mapping of concepts and gaps, of information known and unknown, is as opaque to most students as the tao of Go.
I don’t think it’s silly for me to argue that we should concentrate our efforts for improvement here on providing students with the opportunity and incentive to figure out what information is presented by, and analyze the presentation style of, diagrams and figures that are relentlessly new to them, as well as figure out the meaning, the content, and investigate why the information is presented in some particular way. What alternative presentations exist? Does this particular format influence our interpretation? This is a category of learning experience worth substantial time investment in the elementary school years, even if there aren’t concretely reportable results.
(And really, should anyone want concretely reportable results, we could easily get them. Frankly this is, in a limited sense, the skill assessed by several ACT “science” questions. But why just science? We could create better tests that assess individuals’ ability to interact with novel information sources. Just design a new information source with its own conventions each testing year, and have students interact with it and answer questions about the information it provides and how it provides that information, i.e. about the conventions themselves. Such a test can’t be that much harder than DLAB to design and design well.)
In this state I am currently advocating for (among other things) more regular class time in the elementary and middle school years devoted to receiving new information sources and figuring out what they are for and how to engage them, individually and collaboratively in peer groups. In the US, some districts & states have incorporated time for these explorations quite admirably (Wisconsin, where I’m from) and others less so (my current state of residence). Having seen how much those explorations benefited myself and students in my school, intellectually and socially, it’s amazing to me how little time is spent on this here, and even more amazing what broad a discrepancy exists between time spent on this in urban vs. suburban vs. rural schools (in rural schools this gets the shortest shrift).
This sort of activity can be a fun puzzle, it rewards ingenuity and rewards an exploratory spirit, all while more densely associating learning with playful tinkering. There’s plenty of research supporting the idea that a greater amount of time spent on loosely structured interaction with novel sources of information helps students improve their critical thinking skills (in the specific input-oriented sense of developing an inclination to ask “what exactly is this telling me?” and competence with formulating hypotheses to answer that question and checking the hypotheses for reasonableness). This is anecdotal, but students also seem to enjoy it, and especially enjoy making their own versions (maps of their living quarters, encyclopedia articles on family members, histograms of data they have collected themselves). I worry to see how much of this activity has been lost, in this state, over the past two years of urban curriculum adjustment.
What’s also fun for the students, and probably quite beneficial to them — purely anecdotal but if I was less cavalier about it I’d make this a formal research project — is providing students with information sources that contain a variety of errors and problems and asking them to determine the problems and discuss ways to fix them. They have to find and fix the errors, and rank the problems they identify from trivial to severe. What kind of error is most likely to completely confuse or mis-inform, and what kind of error is less big a deal? If among three sources, one disagrees with the other two, how do we evaluate what’s accurate? If something is not technically speaking an error, but might impede someone’s ability to read the information source, is there a way to rework the information source to improve ease of use?
I agree that a greater focus on memorization is not ‘the answer’ in any meaningful sense. In general, memorization should be allowed to accrue more naturally as a consequence of very frequent interaction with the information to be memorized.
veblen 11.24.09 at 3:03 pm
You keep former graduate students in a file cabinet in your office? Do the campus police know about this? Is this why Horowitz named you one of America’s most dangerous professors? …and to so casually admit it.
Michael Bérubé 11.24.09 at 3:36 pm
Chris Y @ 36: the majority of Americans who thought the US should be intervening in Nicaragua also claimed to think that Nicaragua was a state of the Union.
Well? Isn’t that what “Remember the Alamo” was all about? Davy Crockett holding off the Nicaraguans with nothing more than a shotgun and a rental car? See, this is why the tired leftist slogan “U.S. out of Nicaragua” makes no sense.
Veblen @ 39: You keep former graduate students in a file cabinet in your office? Do the campus police know about this? Is this why Horowitz named you one of America’s most dangerous professors? …and to so casually admit it.
I need to keep them there for writing recommendations, especially when the students who are asking for letters are people who took courses with me more than a year or two ago. FERPA (The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) certainly prevents me from publicizing which students are in which cabinets, but I do believe I’m allowed to keep students in a file cabinet in my office. Besides, it’s a terrible job market out there, and at least the file cabinets are warm.
Zamfir 11.24.09 at 3:58 pm
Well, an obvious answer would be that apparently (I have not been a direct witness) some Americans think that the war in Afghanistan is waged in some place contiguous to California. Kind of changes your general policy approach to the problem.
I am really skeptical about such claims that American (or other’s) wars are supported mostly by stupid people, while the knowledgeable are opposed but not in a position to resist the masses. For all I can tell, American wars see broad support (and opposition) through all layers of society, for reasons that have little to do with geography or geographical knowledge.
I mean, people who do not care enough about Afghanistan to know where it is are hardly the swing group of people you really need to have behind you before you can start a war there.
Shane in Utah 11.24.09 at 4:47 pm
Michael, I’m confused about what group you’re talking about. College graduates? Current college students? “College-age Americans”?
If we’re talking about college freshmen, or all college-age people including those who don’t go to college and/or drop out of high school, then I’m not sure why we’re even talking about the college curriculum (e.g., William Bennett etc.), since this is clearly a problem that begins with primary and secondary education.
If we’re talking about college graduates, surely we should acknowledge that hundreds of thousands of people manage to get college degrees without ever taking any kind of liberal arts class worth the name? They major in business, or interior design, or “family science,” and take their distribution requirements pass/fail in classes of several hundred students with multiple-choice exams of the sort they’ve been taking their whole lives. In other words, I blame the whole pragmatic, vocationally oriented, corporate-model approach to education in our society, which is achieved at the expense of any real engagement with history, or geography, or art.
bianca steele 11.24.09 at 5:19 pm
@38: Well put. But I think it’s important that the proportion of any population that is really good at mathematics–doing manipulations, remembering and understanding the application of new notations, simply understanding abstraction itself (what an abstraction is) as well as commutation, etc., etc.–is pretty small. Those are the students who are able to answer your introductory questions. I agree that increasing real understanding is important. I do question the idea that the way you seem to be going about rebuilding the curriculum from the ground up is the best way to gradually broaden the distribution of knowledge about math.
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.
J. Fisher 11.24.09 at 5:24 pm
I have three five-drawer file cabinets in my office, full to bursting with the records of class preparations, former graduate students, essays assigned in faculty reading groups, tenure and promotion reviews, offprints and copies of old essays, book contracts, and so forth.
You keep former graduate students in your file cabinets? You never cease to amaze, Michael.
marcel 11.24.09 at 5:45 pm
Salient:
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).
blah 11.24.09 at 5:51 pm
You keep former graduate students in your file cabinets? You never cease to amaze, Michael.
What else is he supposed to do with them? Most of them can’t find jobs anyway.
Salient 11.24.09 at 6:55 pm
I do question the idea that the way you seem to be going about rebuilding the curriculum from the ground up is the best way to gradually broaden the distribution of knowledge about math.
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.
Michael Bérubé 11.24.09 at 7:06 pm
J. Fisher @ 44 and blah @ 46: didn’t I already address this important matter @ 40, in response to Veblen?
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.
dsquared 11.24.09 at 7:16 pm
See, this is why the tired leftist slogan “U.S. out of Nicaragua†makes no sense
USA out of NYC!
Colin Danby 11.24.09 at 8:30 pm
Re #33, I think you can argue that some of the map knowledge is not so much important in itself as a proxy for other kinds of knowledge and attention. Anyone who has thought through arguments about intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan has to have thought about location and borders. That does not mean, re #41, that there’s a correspondence between your understanding of the local situation and your policy views — you can just as easily make an anti-intervention argument on the basis of ideology, not knowledge of a situation. Didn’t some cultural studies perfesser just write a book that made that argument? Or would that be too weird?
bianca steele 11.24.09 at 9:14 pm
No consolation necessary, Salient. There are probably lots of readers of this blog who read your post and realized that their knowledge of mathematics is weak because they didn’t go to the kind of school that teaches the answer to “what is information?” (which fact they never even realized until today). Maybe they can devote the rest of their political lives to supporting your cause.
Salient 11.24.09 at 11:06 pm
Ok, ok, a note to stave off further piling on from other commenters infuriated or madly amused, this was not a general education thread, ok, got it. Honest, I was attempting to respond to Colin Danby, and to MB’s closing statement Every last one of us knows that we are exactly where we are right now, and so we shall remain, until our nation’s geographers and educators provide us with the Global Decentering System we so desperately need. It’s not like being able to read a map is all that fundamentally different a skill from reading a pie chart or a histogram or a set of visual instructions for putting together a cabinet. Apparently I did not successfully comment re: educators providing a possible Global Decentering System, so I apologize for having failed in my aim.
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
fifteenten commandments of CT expectations, you know?Kenny Easwaran 11.25.09 at 12:00 am
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?
I would conjecture that the rise of google-maps-with-GPS cell phones will make more people capable of using maps.
Michael Bérubé 11.25.09 at 4:28 am
Colin @ 52: That does not mean, re #41, that there’s a correspondence between your understanding of the local situation and your policy views—you can just as easily make an anti-intervention argument on the basis of ideology, not knowledge of a situation. Didn’t some cultural studies perfesser just write a book that made that argument? Or would that be too weird?
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.
Zamfir 11.25.09 at 8:40 am
I think you can argue that some of the map knowledge is not so much important in itself as a proxy for other kinds of knowledge and attention.
Sure, but there is a danger in using proxies when comparing different countries and their education systems. The correlation between topographical knowledge and other knowledge may be very different in different countries.
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.
andrew 11.25.09 at 9:38 am
So we sometimes fall back on our second line of argument, namely, that college students in 1964 or 1982 were every bit as ignorant as this year’s survey victims.
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.
Mordant Espier 11.27.09 at 8:49 pm
One other factor, besides formal education, that influences geographic understanding is media coverage. And on this front, mainstream media sources have done an abysmal job covering the world.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/alisa_miller_shares_the_news_about_the_news.html
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