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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (16941)	11/20/2003 9:29:41 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793682

Ignorance of subtleties of geography costs U.S. By Alexander B. Murphy SPECIAL TO THE ARIZONA DAILY STAR Why is America's image in the outside world at an all-time low? Maybe in part because the outside world has figured out we know so little about it. From the halls of our schools to the highest reaches of our government, the evidence suggests that Americans have only the vaguest understanding of how the world is organized politically, economically, culturally or environmentally. This is National Geography Awareness Week, and it is a good moment to ask why this is so and what it is costing us. The issue is not just whether people know the names and locations of capital cities or rivers - a common misconception of what geography is all about. The question is whether voters and decision-makers understand the geographic context within which events are situated. Take Iraq as an example. The pre-invasion debate was characterized by geographical naiveté, both in government circles and in the wider public arena. Iraq had been in the headlines for weeks before attention was directed to one of the country's most basic geographical characteristics: its division into three major cultural regions. And almost nothing was said about internal divisions within those regions, the spill-over of Iraq's ethnic and religious groups into other countries or the relationship between ethnic patterns and concentrations of key resources. It takes geographical blinders of this sort to make comparisons between the reconstruction of Iraq and the post-World War II reconstruction of Japan or Germany. Yet such comparisons were made, and they often went unchallenged. Is it surprising that the course of Iraq's postwar reconstruction has not run according to many people's expectations? What of the larger geopolitical context? Few Americans know that Iraq's Islamic neighbor, Iran, is dominated by Persians, not Arabs; that the "Islamic world" encompasses everything from traditional monarchies to secular regimes; or that trade patterns provide a weak foundation for Arab unity. Because American society is based on democratic participation by the population in decision-making, it is imperative that Americans have some understanding of these things. Yet, by and large, we do not; and our ignorance puts us in a very poor position even to begin to evaluate the geopolitical consequences of current U.S. policies. The United States is the only major power in which it is possible to go from kindergarten through higher education without a single course in geography. Some of our most prestigious universities do not even have geography departments - an unthinkable circumstance in other parts of the world. (When I told a German professor that my alma mater, Yale, did not teach geography, he commented, "But I thought Yale was a university.") There is some cause for hope. Over the past decade, geography's place in the curriculum has expanded in primary and secondary schools, and most major state universities, as well as some smaller colleges, support geography programs. At the same time, new approaches and technologies are enhancing our understanding of the evolving cultural, economic and environmental mosaic of the planet. But much more is needed. Ambrose Bierce once wrote, "Wars are God's way of teaching Americans geography." Perhaps it is time we found a less costly way of doing that. * Alexander B. Murphy is president of the Association of American Geographers and professor of geography at the University of Oregon.