Bring Back Geography!

Bring Back Geography is a fascinating article I read recently in ArcNews, a periodical focused on Geospatial Technology. Geospatial Tech. often deals with GIS (Geographic Information Systems) and GPS. But the focus here is on geography. If you have any interest at all in geography or even education itself, I encourage you to read it. But here I will summarize what impacted me.


Geography is to space what history is to time.


So often people think of geography and they think of the names of countless insignificant countries--and remebering the difference between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. But place-name geography is only the "tip of the iceberg" with geography. It includes many other fields most people don't even consider. Saying geography is about "where things are" is like saying history is just about "when things happened" and not the study of these events. Geography studies culture, spatial analysis, information technology--in the words of J. Illick quoted in the article, it is "why people do what they do where they do it".



Many schools do not teach geography anymore.



Another misconception about geography is that it is only an elementary school subject. They do not understand the vast amount of careers in this field. Colleges even eliminate geography from study--when it is included it is given a new name like "area studies". This is completely due to ignorance--the universities think geography is only about remembering where the Yangtze River is and ignore it place in cultural and spatial studies. But this removal is not limited to higher education. Most schools either do not teach geography or include it in "social studies" that eliminates spatial thinking. Even place-name geography is ignored--how often have you heard children (or even adults) call Hawaii and Africa countries? How many children (or adults) do you know that could point to Romania on a map? Or even India or Russia? This lack of study is responsible for the gross isolation of Americans from other cultures. There are so many Americans who don't know or care that Tigers do not live in Africa and that China has a distinct culture from Japan. They don't know that there are many types of English accents or that Brazil is not a Spanish nation. There's little wonder world opinion of America is so low--we don't know anything about other people and cultures and we don't care.



Geography is pointedly ignored.



With the recent surge in the use of the Global Positioning System, especially to make interactive, multi-layered maps (the primay application of GIS), Geospatial Technology is "in". Yet many refuse to call it what it is--an application of Geography. Harvard specifically stated they would teach GIS but not geography. They did not realize their mistake--without Geography as a field in which GIS can work, GIS will be reduced to an application used by other fields--not an industry of its own. What institution would dare remove history from its classes? And where would its applications, like anthropology, fit? Yet this is happening with geography--it is not recognized as a field, and its applications, like GIS and GPS, will have no place once their fad is over.

The conclusion? Geographers must fight for this field--increasing world awareness that it is not just a physical science and bringing it back to the schools.