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Global Geographic Literacy Survey

CFLarsen

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The National Geographic-Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey

IIRC (it's been a while, OK?), I had geography in grammar school from 4th to 10th grade, and 1 year in high school. To me, it's one of the starting points in understanding the world around us. It makes little sense to talk about environment issues, geopolitics, starvation, poverty, diseases, etc, without having a relatively firm grasp of the most basic geographics.

During your own education, how did you learn geography? How important is geography to you? If your own country is on the list, are you satisfied with the results?
 
Geography was taught a bit in elementary school, mostly historical- Greek/Roman, Mesopotamia. Modern was not really touched on.
Most of what I have learned, limited though it may be, was through my own curiousity. They did a survey of DC K-6 students a couple of years ago and almost half could not find DC on a map of the eastern United States.
Scary...
 
I guess this goes along with my other post and math performances in the US vs India.

I had someone tell me that they were going to DRIVE to europe recently!
 
Well, I remember Geography being part of the Middle School (6-8th Grade in the US) Social Studies and I took a course in Geography in High School (it was taught by one of the Assistant football coaches, as a teacher he was...a pretty decent football coach). Learned a lot from reading National Geographic and travelling

Still, I got 20/20 on the little quiz at the referenced website, so some of the learning must have rubbed off.

And no, I am not satisified with the results. We talk here of a global economy or about how foreign areas and customs touch us and too many people are bloody ingnorant of the basic facts. Not satisfactory at all.
 
In my schooling (I went to private Catholic school, including college, in NYC) we never had a proper geography class. It was always a component of our history or social studies classes. In grade school we had to memorize the locations and capitols of the 50 states and not much more.

I have poster-sized maps of the US and the world in my office and could study them for hours. When I have kids similar posters will be hanging in their bedrooms. What's wrong with parents? Buy your kid a globe and check it out with your kids. They will be fascinated!

Survey results are sad. If a young person can't pick out the Pacific ocean on a map the parents and/or school are failing that child.
 
Leapfrog (used to ?) do an interactive quiz globe.

Mrs Don and I buy them for our friends' children, and then the grown ups play with the globes when drunk - very amusing
 
I aced the test. Being in the Navy for 20 years helped. :)

But I can tell you that there were several times when I found that some of my subordinates had no idea where we were on the planet. For real.

They knew what country we were off the coast of, but sometimes had no idea what body of water that was, or where on Earth that country was.

So I'd take them into CIC (Combat Information Center) and have the navigators show them.
 
I'm pretty bad at geography. By this I mean I generally know where things are - I can place a country within a continent or whatever, but I couldn't draw a map of the area. I don't mean a map that gets the shapes right, but one that gets the borders right. To my mind, that's what's important - understanding which countries border which explains a lot - geopolitical, environmental, etc.

It was taught in school, but always in a very abstract way. You just learned labels. I don't have the kind of mind that can retain disconnected facts, nor the inclination to remember them. I guess we did cover it in other ways; it's hard to study war manuvers, for example, without referring to maps, but somehow it never really seems to stick in my mind.

Oh yes, I had a globe as a child (by my request), collected all the National Geographic maps, and had a world map on my bedroom wall (again, my choice). I'm still bad at it.


I got 19/20 on the test - I failed the question on which religion has the most adherents. But when it got to the nitty gritty of identify the country by number, I used process of elimination. For example, for all the maps I have seen, I don't think I could have pointed to it on a blank map, though I know the general area. But with the multiple choice questions, one of the choices was South Africa. Um, no, I know it isn't on the tip of Africa. So while I passed, I still feel my knowledge is pretty shaky.

I don't feel too bad about that, though. Yes, it's important information. But I bet I have more knowledge than any other person on this forum about the poetry and life of Wallace Stevens, 19th century guitar design, and the other oddities I expend my intellectual capital on. It works for me, and I have made modest contributions to the world in these fields. Diversity and obscurity and important, too.

ETA: I covered a lot of geography while reading and rereading all of the Patrick O'Brian novels. His books would get me interested in an area, I'd pore over maps, but I think just about all that information has evaporated in my mind. I'd be hard pressed to identify most of the ports, islands, etc., that they visited.
 
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CFLarsen said:
The National Geographic-Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey

IIRC (it's been a while, OK?), I had geography in grammar school from 4th to 10th grade, and 1 year in high school. To me, it's one of the starting points in understanding the world around us. It makes little sense to talk about environment issues, geopolitics, starvation, poverty, diseases, etc, without having a relatively firm grasp of the most basic geographics.

During your own education, how did you learn geography? How important is geography to you? If your own country is on the list, are you satisfied with the results?
Click to expand...
Some in elementary school, plus 3 years in junior high. I am not satisfied with the results form my country, but am not surprised. They always pick poor Mexico for these surveys and we always suck, because the average Mexican only goes to school for 7.6 years. Hard to compete with the europeans like that.
 
What's really sad is only 89% of Americans could correctly identify America on a map.

survey4pj.png
 
The Don said:
Leapfrog (used to ?) do an interactive quiz globe.

Mrs Don and I buy them for our friends' children, and then the grown ups play with the globes when drunk - very amusing
Click to expand...
We've got one of those Leapfrog globes. [bragging] Our two-year-old already knows the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the names of all the continents. [/bragging]

Oh, and the country-by-country survey results from that quiz are frightening. We (the U.S.) take the drastic measure of invading a country (Afghanistan), and only 17% of Americans can find it on a map.
 
Vorticity said:
Oh, and the country-by-country survey results from that quiz are frightening. We (the U.S.) take the drastic measure of invading a country (Afghanistan), and only 17% of Americans can find it on a map.
Click to expand...

Based on my experience I mentioned above, I would bet money that some of the soldiers there couldn't find it on a map.
 
roger said:
But when it got to the nitty gritty of identify the country by number, I used process of elimination. For example, for all the maps I have seen, I don't think I could have pointed to it on a blank map, though I know the general area. But with the multiple choice questions, one of the choices was South Africa. Um, no, I know it isn't on the tip of Africa. So while I passed, I still feel my knowledge is pretty shaky.
Click to expand...

Well, that's rather what worries me. Is the test I just took (20/20, by the way) the same structure as the one that 'Merkins did so badly at? For instance -- they asked me where "Sweden" was. Now, I've been there, I know it's in the Scandanavian penninsula, but telling Norway and Sweden apart is more information than I usually need. Similarly, I'm not sure if I could tell you offhand whether the Netherlands are east or west of Belgium, or whether it's Paraguay or Uruguay that's the landlocked South American country, or the order of the Baltic states.

But the distractors were a joke. They didn't ask me to distinguish between Sweden and Norway (which could have been difficult). They asked me to distinguish between Sweden, Argentina, China, and Morocco. "Sweden -- dat's in Europe, innit?" for full marks.

Was the survey test really that easy?
 
Magyar said:
I had someone tell me that they were going to DRIVE to europe recently!
Click to expand...
Well, seeing as how we don't know where you are, or where your acquaintance was, it's hard to evaluate that statement. He could walk to Europe if he was in Istanbul...
 
I was an obsessive map-gazer as a kid (and still am), so I don't even know how much I was taught Geography in school. It couldn't have come close to what I taught myself.
 
20/20 (that was easy). I also find it really funny that 11% of the Americans surveyed couldn't find their own country on the map. I also noticed the French could find Italy on the map better than Italians, though I don't think that the 1% difference in this case is statistically significant.
 
wunky said:
They did a survey of DC K-6 students a couple of years ago and almost half could not find DC on a map of the eastern United States.
Click to expand...
Given the state of DC schools, it would be a miracle if half of DC's school kids could find their heads on their shoulders with their bare hands.
 
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