Where in the world is ... Greenland? Gaza? Ukraine? Iran?
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jan 28
- 3 min read
Reporter: "How did you find America?"
John Lennon: "Turn left at Greenland."
American students should learn geography, writes Rick Hess. Where's Greenland? Why would anyone want to control it? "It’s impossible to talk sensibly about immigration, border enforcement, foreign policy, or tariffs absent a clear sense of physical geography." Furthermore, "a failure to teach bedrock knowledge leaves students adrift in a world of deepfakes and misinformation."
When he taught a world geography class, his students started class by drilling on capitals, states, nations, continents, oceans and so on as a confidence-building warm-up before discussions, debates and projects. "We’d explore how the Rio Grande, English Channel, oil deposits, or access to fresh water helped to shape history and culture," he writes. "But this learning rested on a foundation of geographic mastery — of knowing where the Rio Grande or English Channel was and why that mattered."
The belief that "knowing stuff just isn’t that important" has gotten worse in recent years, says Hess. Some think knowledge prevents "critical thinking."
Ashley Berner, director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, agrees. Don't think students can "just Google" key information, Berners says. "They need to know "dates, events, and places to enable higher-order reflection about causes and consequences."
Include a globe and a timeline in every classroom. Refer to them every day. Run classroom quiz bowls for countries and capitals. Help students identify a few anchor events in every century! It matters.
Skipping "the hard work of memorizing countries and capitals is detrimental to our basic ability to think," Berner adds. It encourages brain rot.
“If you don’t know geography, you can’t know history," her father told her. "And if you don’t know history, you don’t know anything.”
Only 50 percent of young Americans can find New York on a map, according to a survey by National Geographic-Roper, writes Solomon D. Stevens in the Charleston (South Carolina) Post and Courier. Eleven percent couldn’t locate the United States.
A "knowledge of geography helps us understand ourselves," he writes. The U.S. character and history is shaped by the fact that we have the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Pacific on the other "with (until recently) friendly neighbors to the north and south."
"We are part of a larger world that deserves our respect," he concludes. "We cannot aspire to lead a world that we do not understand."
When I was a child, I'd close my eyes, spin the globe and point to a random spot. (Usually the Pacific Ocean, but I'd retry till I hit land.) My father would explain the geography and history to me. I remember Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, which was still ruled by Hailie Selassie, known as the "lion of Judah" because of his purported descent from Solomon and Sheba. He told me about the Italian invasion under Mussolini and Selassie's 1936 speech to the League of Nations, which exposed the uselessness of international guarantees. That led to a discussion of the United Nations. And so on.
I don't have the old globe, which has been horribly out of date for 60 years. (I remember French West Africa was purple and very large.) I have a newer globe that shows the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic republics, of course, and a divided Germany. Despite Putin, I like to think it's also out of date.
My favorite means of learning geography is through online quizzes and games. I can now name and locate all of the countries of the world, although I'm a little shaky on the Oceanian island countries.
I taught world geo for six years and it was a lot of fun: first half of the year was physical geography and then cultural geography. And we did...excactly what you're describing. Today, I teach US History and we start with physical geog and many kids don't know the Rockies from the Appalachians. It's pretty bad. And many don't remember their World Geo class.
To your father's excellent lessons I would only add that our relationship with geography changes as our technology evolves. And that is technology broadly defined from how railroads changes our relationship with the midwest to how the stocking frame / knitting frame made southern cotton explode as soon as the cotton gin came along. You can…
A lot of the anger at Israel comes from the ignorant idea that a country so much in the news all the time must be huge, so why do they care about Gaza? In fact Israel's about the size of NJ.
As I always say: "You can't think critically about what you don't know."
I like the piecemeal approach to geography suggested here (do a little bit every day, as a classroom warm-up). It's way better than throwing up your hands and saying, "Why weren't they taught this already in Grade X?"
Another thing that I think would be helpful to students would be to give them a sense of when various inventions came into common use. I doubt most of them can sequence railroads, and telegraph, and electricity, and automobiles, and ... (obviously I could keep going and going).
Again, a brief focus on when something was invented and how much time it took before it came into general use, would probably be interesting; and over time, they'd develop a sense of what…