“Can you believe this?” he asked. The study showed that 87 percent of college students in the United States cannot locate Iraq on a map of the world. Almost as many couldn’t find Afghanistan.
Fifty-eight percent couldn’t find Japan. And one in every nine could not locate the United States. Again, these are not preschoolers, but people who have been admitted to higher education and are between 18 and 24. None of that surprised me, because I have been teaching college students for a long time - at Wayne State University, at the University of Michigan, and occasionally elsewhere.
They are cheerfully, and profoundly, geographically illiterate. I often give classes blank outline maps of our nation.
I then ask them to name all the states. Everybody gets Texas, Michigan and Florida. Beyond that, however, it is pretty grim. I don’t worry if they mix up Rhode Island and Delaware. But my average student can place no more than thirteen states in their proper places.
A few even invent states that don’t exist. Last year I had to persuade one young man that no, there is no such thing as the state of Tacoma. A few years ago, a nice young woman asked me where the Soviet Union was. Well, it’s not anymore, I said. She found that interesting, but that wasn’t what she meant.
She wanted to know where it was on the globe. I showed her, and she left my office satisfied. Americans have long been renowned for their ignorance of geography, but it goes far beyond that.
Last semester, a college senior asked if I remembered World War II. “How old do you think I am?” I said.
“You said you were fifty-seven.” Well, then, how could I remember it? “Wasn’t it in the sixties?“ she said.
Not quite. A graduate student in the same class thought World War I had taken place in the 1930s. I showed another class a Hollywood version of Pickett’s charge, the most famous moment of the Civil War’s most famous battle. I wanted them to describe it in words. They did, but in the process I learned most thought Gettysburg ended the Civil War. They had no idea it lasted four years. One young woman from Macomb County said she could never remember which side wore blue and which gray.
These aren’t isolated incidents, or terribly stupid kids. They are all computer-savvy and can do Power Point presentations.
They just don’t read, other than what they are made to read or what they read on their cell phones. Most seem to lack all curiosity about anything that happened before they were born.
I have spent a lifetime neurotically afraid that I don’t know enough about anything. My students don’t feel that way.
Among the many things I don’t know is, why this is. Is it a failure of the education system and our teach-to-the-standardized test mentality? Is it because they are so bombarded with electronic stimuli that reading books can’t tempt them?
I don’t know, but I do know that Michigan’s next generation knows all about Lady Gaga and nothing about Mikhail Gorbachev.
And that just might be scarier than the old Cold War.
Ack! Break out your globes people! Or, play Trivial Pursuit on Wii and you'll also learn much about geography..:)
Posted by: Valerie Mead | April 22, 2010 at 01:57 PM
Actually, they don't care. They care only about what can make them money (PowerPoint presentations) or what titillates them (Lady Gaga). I used to blame it on what I called the "autoworker mentality", which was to excuse and even justify lack of education by pointing to income. But I was wrong about that, too, as I see now that many lack any curiosity beyond what makes them rich or powerful, e.g., G. W. Bush, Mike Cox, Frank Beckmann, Jennifer Granholm, Kwame Kilpatrick, etc., etc. BTW, did you succeed in getting any of your students to become more interested, or did you just chide them for their ignorance?
Posted by: Jim Majkowski | April 25, 2010 at 01:31 PM