Walter mcdougall why geography matters

One Jimmy Sneed, a legendary caddie at the Pinehurst resort in North Carolina, was unschooled, but he knew his golf course and golfers so well that he invariably chose the right club to use for each shot The Polynesians who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean to populate the Pacific Islands, and the Native Americans who navigated the trackless Great Plains in search of game, likewise had no need of maps and instruments.

But that only meant that they were natural, intuitive geographers all the more keenly alive to the sun and stars, winds and currents, landscapes and weather about them. So whether we steer our way through the world by feel and folklore or by maps and instruments, geography is the context in which "we live and move and have our being" to paraphrase the apostle Paul. You cannot argue with geography, as Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupe liked to say, and geography in turn "does not argue, it simply is," as Hans Weigert put it.

Second, geography is fundamental to the process of true education in that it serves as a springboard to virtually every other subject in the sciences and humanities. Children, as a British government study observed, are like the mongoose in the Rudyard Kipling tale: "The motto of the mongoose family is 'run and find out' and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was a true mongoose. So, too, when faced with glimpses of Everest, the Victoria Falls, the lonely deserts of Arabia, Tibet and Antarctica, they often find food for their sense of wonder and feeling for beauty.

What happens next, usually in secondary school, is that the student who was originally enthralled just by the sheer variety of the world and its people, begins to ask, not only "what?

Why do Asians eat rice and Mexicans tortillas, instead of bread? Why did the Europeans discover routes to China instead of the Chinese discovering routes to Europe? Why did democracy emerge in Greece and not Egypt? How did the colonial powers manage to conquer the world, and how did today's odd countries emerge?

What is a "country," for that matter, and why are some big, rich, populous, and mighty, while others are small, poor, or weak? Asking such questions inspired by geography opens up a universe of intellectual inquiry, because to answer them the student must turn to geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy, anthropology, economics, comparative religion, sociology, and history.

Geography is the window on the world of the mind as well as the senses, and can be dispensed with no more than reading, writing, and arithmetic. To educate, after all, means to "lead out" educo , in Latin , and no subject leads the student out of the narrow, familiar, and "taken for granted" better than geography.

That is the second reason why it is indispensable in a sound curriculum. Yet a third reason why geography is fundamental to true education is that students without geographic knowledge are helpless when confronted by adult issues, whether in school or outside of it. Geography is vital to the examination of economic competition, poverty, environmental degradation, ethnic conflict, health care, global warming, literature and culture, and, of course, international relations.

But the universality of geography's relevance has perversely contributed to its demise as a subject in its own right. As Malcolm Douglass observes,. The strange fact of the matter is that the role of geography in the school curriculum is at once anomalous and ubiquitous.

Geography lacks a clear identity Nonetheless, by its very nature, geography is integral to all human inquiry. It is difficult, or even impossible, to separate what is geographic from what is not. In this sense, then, geography is everywhere in the school curriculum. The major problem, both for geographers and geographic educators, and for all curriculum planners and teachers, is to find ways to acknowledge and act on this reality.

Assuming a given state or school board is persuaded of the need to reintroduce geography into the K curriculum, what principles should guide its planning? First, teachers, textbook authors, and curriculum designers must restore an "old-fashioned" emphasis on basic topography, place names, and map reading.

For whatever your ideological preferences, the grammar of geography is conventional and grounded in reality. The Earth, as Galileo insisted under his breath, does revolve around the sun and rotate on its axis, and that was not just his "point of view. On some points we may argue, for instance whether Europe ought to have been considered a continent separate from Asia, or whether the term Middle East is a Eurocentric conceit.

But the geographical and cultural distinctions that first inspired people to invent those terms were real and are also worth understanding. Likewise, the Mississippi River exists. Its name, like all names, is a social convention, but the river is real, and no student can claim to "know" American history without understanding the river's importance.

How much factual knowledge is "enough"? One useful exercise that teachers, textbook authors, and curriculum designers might try is to recall the history surveys they took in college, or study some syllabi from current surveys, and ask themselves what geographical knowledge is needed to master that material.

Conversely, they might ask themselves what knowledge they would wish to assume their students possessed if they were teaching the course. Thus, in my modern history survey I do not expect students to know anything about the political map of Central Europe during the Renaissance, but I am crippled if they do not even know that Venice is an Italian port city, that the Alps divide Italy from the rest of Europe, that Germany lies north of the Alps, that the Austrians speak German, that the Turks were Muslim and militant, that all Europeans were still Catholic, and that Rome was the historic seat of the papacy.

If I must "go back to square one" to lay out such basics, then the best students will be bored and the poor will be paying Ivy League tuition for high school instruction. It is all very well to say that education should teach youngsters to think rather than to memorize. But unless their "memory banks" are filled with facts and categories in which to deposit new facts, then their "RAM" will have no "data to process.

Email required Address never made public. Name required. Geography Education is supported by The Pollination Project. Link to all Scoop It! Blog Stats 1,, hits. Twitter Updates RT typesfast : Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. In the next days I will make daily posts introducing Human Geography:… 1 month ago RT paragkhanna : A composite map of geographic layers: resources, borders, infrastructure, and demographics.

Great satellite imagery, charts, and… twitter. First this was a stronger performance by students than prev… twitter. Join us Tuesday nights for a Map-Along! This week, we'll map tog… 4 months ago Follow ProfessorDixon. Tags 2. Geography Matters! This helps players understand and visualize things about the setting that might not appear on the game board. Games often provide descriptions of the setting in which the game takes place.

Alexander von Humboldt, after whom … Create New Account. Struggling with distance learning? This can be used to create emotion, enhance the imagery, and strengthen the purpose of the plot. Related Pages. There were exciting descriptions of active volcanoes and of tropical storms, of maritime journeys to remote islands, of great, bustling cities, of powerful kingdoms and unfamiliar customs.

Reflection paper on why geography matters. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. This is a reflection paper on why geography matters. Geography matters today more than ever, but only if we are looking at the right things. If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer.

We can also examine how animals might move across or between regions during their migration journeys. If you have questions about licensing content on this page, please contact ngimagecollection natgeo. Examples of these processes are folding, faulting and Vulcanicity. What is GIS? I gave the book a try after seeing positive reviews here and on amazon This book fails to live up to its name--it didn't explain his definition of geography and it didn't convince me why it matters.

In "Geography Matters Furthermore, landscapes have different meanings to different people—including authors, characters, and readers. The highly successful first edition of Why Geography Matters helped establish the author as one of today's leading geographers; Updates de Blij's clarion call for the importance of geography in today's classrooms and policy discussions; Completely revised from the first edition to take into account new developments … Chapter 1 Summary 1.

Instead, I would characterize "Why Geography Matters" as "old man yells at clouds, geography edition. This lists the logos of programs or partners of NG Education which have provided or contributed the content on this page.

Check out our revolutionary side-by-side summary and analysis. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Log In. Geography is the subject which opens the door to this dynamic world and prepares each one of us for the role of global citizen in the 21st century.

This study guide includes the following sections: Plot Summary … Divide students into six groups and use the. Preliminary observations 3.

In both cases, there is a reciprocal relationship between the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters and the landscape they inhabit—although of course this relationship may be subverted, complicated, or rendered in an ironic way. Geography Matters P16 journal. These are the people which an individual usually chooses to be socially liable. It is really important that all students study Geography at school. Van Loon described worlds far away, where it was warm, where skies were blue and palm trees swayed in soft breezes, and where food could be plucked from trees.

Geography can develop a character, or the geography itself can become a character. What events during the past decade, , show that the pace of change has not slowed down? Some writers, such as William Faulkner and Thomas Hardy, are tied to a very particular location—in both these cases, a fictional version of the area in which the authors themselves lived.

Hip Homeschool Moms. An example of this would be a desert region, which includes all the places in the desert, even if they cross national boundaries or state lines.

Geography contributes greatly to themes, symbols, and plot, and most authors prefer to use setting as a general area with a detailed landscape rather than a specific city or landmark. It addresses a series of economic, political and cultural issues from a geographical angle that will put the social distinctiveness of place back on the agenda for all the social sciences. Because landscapes are expansive, complex environments within which we live our whole lives, they are often associated with a huge variety of different meanings.

Not Now. I suppose I am an old-fashioned teacher. Geography has the power to create particular atmospheres and to shape characters. Step 2: If students are not familiar with annotation techniques, you may want to teach them the following three annotation symbols: 1 identify important information with a check mark; 2 circle key vocabulary; 3 put a question mark next to words, phrases, or sections that are confusing. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.

You cannot download interactives. How did the field of geography originate. Who are some of its leading figures? It allows the critic to view a work of literature almost like a machine, with different components functioning together in order to create a single albeit highly complex effect. Students use their maps, setting descriptions, and card sets to create an original game that inspires players to care about animal migration and the protection of migratory routes.

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