Helping Your Child Learn Geography

Helping Your Child Learn Geography


Foreword


Remember thumbing through an atlas or encyclopedia as a
child, imagining yourself as a world traveler on a safari in
Africa, or boating up the Mississippi River, climbing the peaks
of the Himalayas, visiting ancient cathedrals and castles of
Europe, the Great Wall of China? We do. The world seemed full
of faraway, exotic, and wonderful places that we wanted to know
more about.

Today, we would like to believe that youngsters are
growing up similarly inquisitive about the world. Perhaps they
are, but recent studies and reports indicate that, if such
imaginings are stirring in our youngsters, they're not being
translated into knowledge. Not that there ever was a "golden
age" when all our young and all our citizens were conversant
about the peoples and places of the globe. Still, there is
considerable evidence that such knowledge among young Americans
has dipped to an alarming low.

Last year, a nine-nation survey found that one in five
young Americans (18- to 24-year-olds) could not locate the
United States on an outline map of the world. Young Americans
knew measurably less geography than Americans 25 years of age
and over. Only in the United States did 18- to 24-year-olds
know less than people 55 years old and over; in all eight other
nations, young adults knew more than the older ones.

No less disturbing was the fact that our young adults,
when compared with young adults in other countries, came in
last place in a 1980 Gallup Poll. Our 18- to 24-year-olds knew
less about geography than their age-mates in every other
participating nation. But it shouldn't surprise us. Youngsters
in other countries study more geography. In England, Canada,
and the Soviet Union, geography is considered one of the basic
academic subjects and is required of most secondary students;
in the United States, only one in seven students takes a high
school geography course.

You'd think that our students learn at least some
geography, though, in their world history classes. Those who
take world history probably do. But that's only 44 percent of
our high school graduates. More than half of our high school
students are graduating without studying world history.

If youngsters are to acquire an appreciation of geography
and ultimately learn to think geographically, parents and
communities must insist that local schools restore it to
prominence in the curriculum. They should insist that geography
be studied and learned, in one form or another, through several
years of the primary and secondary curriculum.

Learning should not be restricted to the classroom.
Parents are a child's first teachers and can do much to advance
a youngster's geographic knowledge. This booklet suggests some
ways to do so.

It is based on a fundamental assumption: that children
generally learn what adults around them value. The significance
attached to geography at home or at school can be estimated in
a glance at the walls and bookshelves.

Simply put, youngsters who grow up around maps and atlases
are more likely to get the "map habit" than youngsters who do
not. Where there are maps, atlases, and globes, discussions of
world events (at whatever intellectual level) are more likely
to include at least a passing glance at their physical
location. Turning to maps and atlases frequently leads
youngsters to fashion, over time, their own "mental maps" of
the world--maps that serve not only to organize in their minds
the peoples, places, and things they see and hear about in the
news, but also to suggest why certain events unfold in
particular places.

Helping every child develop his or her ability to use maps
and to develop mental maps of the world ought to become a
priority in our homes and schools. For, as we all know, our
lives are becoming an ever tighter weave of interactions with
people around the world. If our businesses are to fare well in
tomorrow's world markets, if our national policies are to
achieve our aims in the future, and if our relationships with
other peoples are to grow resilient and mutually enriching, our
children must grow to know what in the world is where.

This booklet is designed to help parents stir children's
curiosity and steer that curiosity toward geographic questions
and knowledge. It is organized around the five themes recently
set forth by geographers and geography educators across the
Nation--the physical location of a place, the character of a
place, relationships between places, movement of people and
things, and phenomena that cause us to group places into
particular regions.

We encourage parents to get to the fun part--that is, the
activities. The games, maps, and suggested activities that
follow, while informal and easy to do, can help lay a solid
foundation in experience for children's later, more academic
forays into geography.

Bruno V. Manno
Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy and Planning

Kirk Winters
Research Associate

Office of Educational Research and Improvement
U.S. Department of Education