There are only a few things I could criticize about the US and one of them is the knowledge of (or the lack of) geography – mostly the wold geography. When people have asked me in the past (especially during my college years) what ocean beaches the Czechs go to, what part of Russia is ‘Czechoslovakia’ located in, or whether we have traffic lights in the streets, I was speechless but I had grace with them because they were genuinely interested in my country. My feelings of grace have increased in volume over the years as I have come to an important conclusion: since the United States of America is so big (there are practically 50 different ‘countries), it is easy to ‘forget’ about the outside world.
Now that I am a teacher and get the inside scoop of things, I have noticed the first time students get a good look at the world map is in 7th grade when they start to study other cultures, starting with the birth of Roman Empire.
When I do a geography review with my students I make them draw a map of the world (simplified) and when we zoom in on Europe I never fail to start with the actual heart of Europe – the Czech Republic ;). We start adding all of the other European countries around the Czech Republic (yep, I may be a little biased here). When we get into the more remote countries like Romania I have to use cheap attention hooks such as “Dracula” and “Transylvania” (most kids think Transylvania AND Romania are made up lands of monsters by the way). They also never fail to be amazed at how enormous Russia and China are.
My oldest daughter is in 5th grade and I have kind of given up on the world geography curriculum at her school (she is actually learning it in Czech school now). Yet, I was still hoping the school will do a good job in teaching her about the US states – their capitals, locations, interesting facts etc….Well, she is almost at the end of her school year and still nothing! All they have been learning in her social studies classes was about Native Americans. I get it, we live in California therefore the Indian influence wasn’t small but c’mon! 5 years killed with mostly useless info about 50 different Indian tribes???!!!
I finally got fed up and contacted the teacher (yes, I should have done it earlier), asking her WHEN will they be learning the US geography. She said that it was taken out of the curriculum since people can now LOOK UP ALL OF THE INFORMATION ON GOOGLE!!!!!! Seriously? So when somebody asks you what the capital of Massachusetts is, my daughter is supposed to say:”Wait a minute, let me ask Siri”. I think there is still such a concept as a GENERAL KNOWLEDGE for which any educational system should still aim for, no matter how far with technology we are.
CZ: To, ze v americkych skolach tak trosku zanedbavaji zemepis sveta uz je celkem zname. Vite ale take, ze prvouka USA se uz take vytraci? Nase Hanicka je temer u konce pateho rocniku a v ‘social studies’ se venuji POUZE Indianum. Rozumim, zijeme v Kaliforni, tudiz vliv indianskych kmenu tu byl, ale snad se o tom nemusi deti ucit pet let??!!! S trpelivosti jsem cekala, az mi doma jeden den sdeli, ze se ma ucit staty a hlavni mesta Ameriky. Nic takoveho se nestalo. Proto jsem konecne zkontaktovala pani ucitelku a ona mi rekla, ze to uz s osnov davno vynechali, protoze takove informace se muzou deti dopatrat na internetu (!!!). No, neomdleli byste z toho??!! Napsala jsem znepokojeny email nazpet a vydupala jsem si tzv.’elective’, nebo-li ‘geography bee’, kam se deti muzou dobrovolne prihlasit a chodit jednou tydne do skoly driv, kde se uci jiz vyse zminene info. Nevim, jak zbytek studentu zalepi tuto diru ve vseobecnych znalostech………
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I learned all 50 states in the third grade and learned European geography because my parents were from Europe. Feel awful for students.
Right?! People are so against memorization of anything – like it is something evil. Well, I hate to say it but sometimes you just have to memorize certain things (like multiplication table??!!) in life….
Tanja, you are doing great job teaching the kids proper geography, like we do it in Europe. I think later on they will be very thankful. I got interested in the topic – US residents knowing very small about world geography and found interesting thread about it: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-some-Americans-so-bad-at-geography.
Ahoj Sarko!
Very nice article! Now I understand! Americans used to have geography now it is served as one of many branches of a larger subject – social studies. Social studies are turning more and more into training students about political correctness and diversity which, although important topics, push out other VERY important subjects such as geography and history.Sad.
Tanja, I think I’ve mentioned this on your blog before, but I don’t think Czech kids learn much about geography either. The way I found this out was that I gave 9th-graders an English test that required some knowledge of world geography, and they didn’t know where any of the famous places were. Finally, I told them to draw a little map of where they thought each place was, and then describe it in words. They were appallingly ignorant. And this wasn’t a high school for dumb kids! They didn’t even know the location of cities just a couple hours away, so their papers had statements like, “Munich is on the northern coast of Germany across the Danube from Hamburg.” And sure enough, the girl drew a little map showing Munich across a river from Hamburg, right south of what I knew to be Denmark. They were pathetic at European geography, but when it came to the Western Hemisphere, they were worse. They thought Miami was in Brazil, that LA was where New York is.
And it didn’t get any better with the seniors. A girl nearly ready to graduate handed in a paper claiming that the United States consisted of 13 independent countries and some number of colonies of Spain, the Netherlands, France and Great Britain.
And it wasn’t much better with the adults. I met a young Czech banker who was so frustrated at his failure to get a visa to emigrate the United States that he decided to apply for a visa to “South America”. Okay, so he just wants to travel, right? No, further discussion revealed that he thought “South America” was part of the United States.
As baby-boomers, in 4th grade, we learned geography. Part of this was “globe practice” involving searching out various cities and countries on the globe. We knew what a Mercator projection was, versus other kinds of maps, and by the time we went to 5th grade to study American history and geography seriously, we knew where most countries in Europe were, most of South America and a lot of Africa, and we’d studied the Netherlands in depth for half a year and Argentina for the other half year. In 6th grade, we got world history and geography again.
The beginning of the problem you’re talking about came when people my older brother’s age (born in the 1940s) got out of college and were hired to teach us, the big bulge of the baby boom born in the 1950s. The teachers born between 1900s and the 1930s always taught us to pack in any knowledge that presented itself to us. They said your brain has unlimited storage space. However, the baby-boomers from the 1940s arrived when I was in about 9th grade and told us we didn’t have to remember all the facts “as long as you understand the concepts.” In other words, we didn’t have to know anything, as long as we understood what someone told us to think.
Since then it has deteriorated to the point where the teachers say the kids don’t have to learn anything at all that they can look up. The result is that kids don’t know anything. More than half of teenagers in my area don’t know where the province of Ontario is, even though it’s only 2 miles from downtown and probably less than 30 minutes from their homes. It would be like a kid in San Diego knowing where Tijuana is but not knowing where Mexico is. The kids are liable to think South Dakota is in the South and North Carolina is in the North. They spend more days per year in school than we did, but they know next to nothing.