Posted on 09/02/2010 2:37:28 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
I confess--I had never heard the phrase "the Queen of the Sciences" until a few months ago. Even when I read it, it made no sense. They seemed to be talking about geography. What was all this???
Apparently, the wise and scholarly had much more respect for geography a thousand years ago than we do now. Once you start thinking about this decline--from Queen to corpse--you gain new insight into how radical (in the worst sense) our Education Establishment is.
These people never saw a fact they didn't want to drop overboard in a deep part of the ocean.
So I started thinking about WHY? What were all the reasons? I came up with four and wrote the linked article. I think you'll find it interesting. But the bigger picture is that we've got to reverse this whole destructive process. The brain wants information. Kids need facts.
Geography is a litmus test for schools. If a school is teaching a reasonable amount of geography, you know it's a good school. If not, then not. Geography is the point man (if a Queen can be so designated) for all foundational knowledge. That's what we need to start teaching again.
Facts are fun. Knowledge is power. With these two guiding principles, good schools result almost automatically.
Public schools have a hundred gimmicks to hide how ignorant their kids are. Critical thinking! Projects and portfolios! Common Core Standards! Constructivism! Creativity Curriculum! It's a long list. Sound and fury not signifying much. Tell you what. Let's put a bunch of ninth graders in front of a map. I submit we could measure their entire educational progress by just this simple request: Please point to Japan... Spain....Alaska...Panama.
If half the class couldn't do all four, then the principal would be reassigned to teaching first grade. We would see such a frenzy of improvement.
Article title: "Four Reason Why Educators Hate Geography"
http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/Four-Reasons-Why-Educators-Hate-Geography.aspx
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In 7th grade they spend eight weeks on mapreading (too long in my opinion). A lot of coloring etc. I am not sure how much it actually sticks. Geography needs to be relevant to the person for it to stay with them. Also you should go with the 80/20 rule (if should remember most of the important countries, but you can always look up Andorra or Togo).
Remember wars are how Americans learn geography.
RE: “Our son was talking with four girls, all of them smart, from good homes and attending well-respected colleges....”
Totally wonderful addition. I laughed so hard I almost forgot how sad all this is...
Your story reminds me of a generalization I think about a lot: if somebody doesn’t teach you, you don’t know. QED: schools have to teach and teach again. It’s clear in this case that these girls never saw a wall map of the world. Nobody ever pointed to this map, and said, “Note that Alaska is way up here....They call us the Lower 48...”
FYI: The last siege of Vienna was in 1683, less than a century before the Declaration of Independence (USofA) and a century after the Battle of Lepanto that save Christian Europe. Quick, can you name WHERE Lepanto and Vienna are?
Do you know that the Muslim Barbary Corsairs infested the English Channel into the late 1600s? Why, because there were rich pickings and easy travel home to North Africa with booty and Christian Slaves for the potentates of Islam!
RE: A LOT OF COLORING...Who could dream up this stuff?
During first few grades, coloring maps would be fun and productive. We would all enjoy it.
A few hours here, a few hours there, even in fifth and sixth grades, might be good. You could teach geography, history, current events, art.
For 7th graders, it’s clearly not meant to be fun or productive. Eight weeks? No, this is meant to be torture so you’ll always hate geography.
FWIW my kids love playing with Google Earth and just randomly going to different places on it.
These girls, and all of the "college" students like them, have way, way more problems than lack of a wall map. They are displaying a shocking level of rank stupidity. And their laughter in the face of the truth is even more disturbing.
We're looking at a lost generation. Not because of lack of facts, or even knowledge, but the destruction of the ability to think at all.
They threw it out because it gave a student a REALISTIC sense of his place in the world, that the world was bigger and less vulnerable than the new breed wanted it to be.
But it wasn't taught in any school I ever attended. I learned it myself, from National Geographic and reading maps. It was one of the few subjects I found stimulating at age six. :)
Yeah, it's when we learn where our family members fought totalitarian murderers and set free millions of people in other countries from concentration camps and death squads. Thanks for pointing that out, it's important to remember that children need a context to see the importance of geography.
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Thanks BruceDeitrickPrice. |
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They don’t want to empower kids with knowledge and want to collect the most money and doing the least to get it. When kids don’t have knowledge they use arbitrary EMOTIONS to decide or do as they are told.
That said, I took a college cultural geography course and really didn't get a lot out of it I didn't already know from other disciplines.
I agree with ALL this and make sure our kids KNOW their geography.
THE GLORY OF GEOGRAPHY
Geography is a foundation not just for history but for the study of geology, anthropology, archaeology, world trade, finance, government, environmental science, military history, surveying, early mathematics, and much else. Any school that skimps on geography is a phony.
Francis Parker is a famous educator who died in 1902. I want to close with a quote from his book “How To Teach Geography” (1885). Probably you never heard a teacher rhapsodize about ANYTHING the way Parker can carry on about a topic that many think is dull and dry:
“Geography explains and illuminates history...To know and love the whole world is to become subjectively an integral factor in all human life; the resulting emotion arouses the only true patriotism, the patriotism that makes the world and all its children one’s own land and nation. Geography is one essential means of bringing the individual soul an appreciation of the universal and eternal.”
We need more geography; more precision; more foundational knowledge; and more passion for learning. We need a lot less of the foolishness that undermines these four.
When we were in Egypt a bunch of schoolkids were coming down the street. When they saw us they started shouting “Where are you from?” We told them Idaho. They said “How can you not know where you’re from?” Now I know.
I'm glad you got a laugh at that story. Our family has regular fits every time it's brought up again. It was even funnier than I told it. My son was with his three friends and two of those friends were dating two of the four girls. All four girls were sooo adamant about Alaska's position that for just a second the four boys wondered if they were wrong. Thankfully, they concluded they were right and the girls were wrong.
And STILL the girls didn't back down. They were positive. Alaska is an island off the coast of southern California.
Our son tutored high school students. He has hundreds of these stories. One very rich young man in high school was being tutored in history and when asked who was the first president of the United States, he thought a moment and then answered "Lincoln."
Our patient, despairing son gave him the correct answer and then asked what war Washington fight in?
"The Civil War?" the student responded. Seriously.
What the heck are these schools doing with the billions funneled to "education???"
I learned most of what I know about geography AFTER I got out of school. Maps. Maps, for me, are an art form. The walls of my apartment were COVERED with maps. Topographical maps of all the rivers in Massachusetts that I canoed on. World maps. USA maps. Maps of Europe and Asia. Visitors would always ask me if I was a school teacher. I would gaze at those maps for so long that they could easily be recalled from memory even today. Old maps that my father got from gas stations back in the ‘40’s. Changes in roads, changes in country names in Africa and the Mideast. Maps are AWESOME!
Ask a kid today to name the capital of, say, Kentucky, and they are lost...
http://www.us.orienteering.org/
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