Geography--What You Don't Know Can Hurt You

Years ago when I was in graduate school, I opted for a survey course covering Chinese history. As the course went into its third week or so I became terribly confused. This baffled me—no history course of any kind had befuddled me since I was ten years old.
Why now? What was the problem? It struck me: I had no concept whatsoever of interior Chinese GEOGRAPHY. I spent several hours one afternoon poring over maps of China—and my confusion was gone. I enjoyed the course.
Americans are notoriously bad at history. Most can’t tell you within several decades when either the Civil War or the Revolution occurred. Most also have zero notion of geography, American or world.
Harvard University’s admissions office has sent applications back to residents of New Mexico, telling them they needed to apply on forms for foreign students. Credit card companies and ticket venders for the last American Olympics (1996) have made the same mistake.
Ask a kid on the East Coast to locate Idaho or Arkansas; ask a child on the West Coast to find Rhode Island or Delaware. Many will fail. Then there was the hotel clerk in Ottawa (Canada’s capital) who remembers American tourists asking her where the Polar Bears were.
The other day I subbed in a room where three of the World History classes were taking an open book test that involved knowing world geography. It was fun—and appalling; these were sixteen year old eleventh graders—to listen to their questions.
No one seemed to know where the Andes Mountains were. Very few could locate Russia on a world map and no one that I saw could tell which nation in Europe had the largest population. When asked which language is used in the most countries in Asia, a lot of them ventured that it might be English. None seemed to know that there are a raft of new nations in Asia that speak Russian.
They might have a cousin fighting there, but very few could locate Afghanistan—and the question of which national capital was located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers floored a majority. Again, some might even have relatives serving in Baghdad.
Bahrain may as well have been located on the moon—reading maps with latitude and longitude clearly demarcated was a forgotten art. Locating the arctic circle was beyond most, and the whereabouts of Australia was a complete mystery.
And so it went, around the globe in blithering befuddlement. This isn’t new. When Vietnam turned hot in the early 1960s, most Americans hadn’t the foggiest where it was. It was in World War II that our lack of geographic knowledge turned truly deadly.
The British kept trying to tell Eisenhower and the Americans to land NORTH of the Monte Casino pass in 1943. They had been taught in grade school that the pass there blocks the passage from northern to southern Italy. They wanted to bypass it by landing north.
Ike wouldn’t listen. South of Monte Casino seemed closer and safer. So he landed at Salerno. It took him until September, 1944, to fight his way up the peninsula. The Germans were able to hold out a year and kill thousands of allied troops.
We now know that the German commander was prepared to concede the entire peninsula to us if we had landed north of Casino. We’d have gotten to the Po River by September, 1943, not September, 1944, had we known our geography.
I still remember the day I spent mastering the rudiments of interior Chinese geography—and I recall vividly the confusion I felt BEFORE I mastered it. A tad more emphasis on geography—especially as it applies to politics, war and diplomacy wouldn’t hurt any of us—in school or in the Pentagon.