You Can’t Argue with Geography
by Walter A. McDougall
September 2000
Vol. 6, No. 5
Walter McDougall is Director of FPRI’s
History Academy,
Editor of Orbis, and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International
Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. His book, with David Gress, on
history, education, and American culture is forthcoming. This essay is
excerpted from a larger paper commissioned by the Thomas B. Fordham
Foundation as part of the History-Geography Project for publication in the
Middle States Yearbook 2001.
I suppose I am an old-fashioned teacher. My subject —
diplomatic history and international relations— could not be further removed
from the avant-garde of post-modern cultural studies. My methodology is
traditional, centering on the critical interpretation of documentary
evidence and the logic of cause and effect in the belief that facts exist
and falsehood, if not perfect truth, is discoverable. My lectures and books
are in narrative form, because in political history sequence is critical to
understanding why decision-makers acted or reacted as they did. And my
assignments require students to demonstrate knowledge of at least the most
important names, dates, and events because concepts and theories are empty
unless one knows what factual evidence inspired them and what phenomena they
are advanced to explain.
Old-fashioned, demanding, some would say boring— and
yet, my courses in diplomatic history draw hundreds of students. Evidently,
the collegiate consumers of history, not to mention the book-buying public,
find more value and enjoyment in rigorous studies of the origins of wars and
peace than in speculative studies of, for instance, the “gendering” of
gravestones in 17th century France. The downside of having large classes,
however, is that the only students I get to know personally are those who
come to my office hours and voluntary discussion sections. So it was that I
was taken aback when one anonymous face from my 19th century European
diplomacy lectures visited my office accompanied by a big and decidedly
businesslike black labrador dog. I was about to make a joke, or a protest,
when I looked up and realized the young man was blind.
He felt for a chair and asked for my help: he had
received a B+ on the midterm, but was used to getting straight A’s. His
problem, he said, was with maps. He could understand the ideological or
commercial motivations for the foreign policies of liberal Britain,
Napoleonic France, the multi- national Hapsburg Empire, or reactionary
tsarist Russia. But he had trouble visualizing the strategic,
balance-of-power relationships among the various states. Suddenly I felt
both wholly inadequate and ashamed of feeling inadequate given the courage
he boldly displayed. If a student unable to read by himself could aspire to
study history, it was incumbent upon me to assist him. So I pulled out a map
of Europe, took the boy’s finger in my hand, and traced for him the
coastlines of the continent and the location and boundaries of the various
states. I showed him where the mountains and rivers were located, and tried
to convey their strategic significance. I described how large the countries
were — hoping that he had some notion of distance — and told him how swiftly
(or slowly) pre- industrial sailing ships and armies could move so that he
might imagine how railroads and steamships exploded the old equation between
space and time. Never letting go of his finger lest he become disoriented, I
repeated the lessons until he stopped me. His memory was extraordinary, and
he soon displayed a better feel for the geopolitics of Europe than many,
perhaps most, of my students blessed with sight. He would return
periodically, however, for more information, such as the locations of the
provinces of Italy and Germany that united into national states between 1859
and 1871, and I recall having an especially difficult time when the European
colonialism of the 1880s ushered in the era of world politics. But he
finished with an A in the course.
The blind student had to learn his geography in order
to understand history. My own love affair with history began with a
fascination for geography. As a youngster in the 1950s I enjoyed sports and
games, but was transfixed by atlases, globes, stories of the explorers, my
parents' National Geographic magazines, and travel and nature programs on
television. I traced my own maps and prided myself on knowing all the
countries and capital cities, highest mountains and longest rivers. By high
school this thirst for information about the world turned into a thirst for
history, including the origins of civilizations, the rise and fall of
empires, the “lost worlds” of South America or Africa, the flora, fauna, and
human cultures that characterized different climatic zones, the patterns of
politics and military strategy. If someone had asked me then to distinguish
between geography and history as distinct academic fields I could not have
done it. And I cannot do it today, anymore than a blind person can explain
European diplomacy without a mental image of the map. But I was not the whiz
at geography I imagined, as I found out in graduate school at the University
of Chicago. The professor asked our seminar on Central Europe why after 1918
the new nation of Czechoslovakia was uncomfortably dependent on Germany.
Disgusted by the silence that ensued he gave us a clue: “Where does the only
major river of landlocked Czechoslovakia reach the sea?” After a few
flustered movements I replied, “But, the Vistula runs through Poland.”
The professor fixed a cold stare on me and hissed,
“Look at a map!” The answer, of course, was the Elbe River, which runs from
the Czech heartland to the great German port of Hamburg.
Why Geography Matters
I learned then that one can never know enough
geography— or, to put it another way, one must learn more geography whenever
one endeavors to learn more history. That is why it is so disheartening that
most Americans emerge from their schooling as functional illiterates in
geography despite the fact that 90 percent of U.S. adults consider some
geographical knowledge a prerequisite to being a well-rounded person. The
poll, conducted on behalf of the National Geographic Society, showed that
only one-third of Americans could name a single country in NATO and that
half could not name any members of the rival Warsaw Pact. The average adult
could identify only four European countries from their outlines on a map,
and less than six of the fifty United States. One in four could not find the
Pacific Ocean. What is more, the group that performed the worst in the
survey were those aged between 18 and 24, a finding that would not surprise
those of us who teach history in universities. For it appears that many
American students were not even given a chance to learn much geography in
their elementary and high school years. Why is that? Is it because educators
have just been unaware of the importance of geography to many branches of
knowledge, not least history? Is it because they once knew, but have
forgotten? Is it because geography seems to involve rote learning of
“boring” facts rather than development of the “thinking” faculties? Is it
because the influential political-correctness and multiculturalist movements
are suspicious of a subject that emphasizes distinctions among regions,
invites unflattering comparisons and hierarchy among nations and cultures,
and has been used in the past as an intellectual tool of empire? Is it
because geography just seems passe in an era when communications technology,
commerce, and ideas “transcend boundaries” and make the earth a “global
village”? Or is it because geographers theHistomselves have failed to define and
promote their subject?
Whatever the answer (it is probably “all of the
above”), the Rediscovering Geography Committee, appointed by the Board on
Earth Sciences and Resources of the National Research Council in 1997,
lamented not only the “astonishing degree of ignorance in the United States
about the rest of the world,” but that most people think of geography as a
matter of memorizing place names. The committee rebutted, “A central tenet
of geography is that location matters for understanding a wide variety of
processes and phenomena. Indeed, geography’s focus on location provides a
cross-cutting way of looking at processes and phenomena that other
disciplines tend to treat in isolation. Geographers focus on ‘real-world’
relationships and dependencies....”
That would seem to be such a commonsense proposition
that no one would challenge it. It is, in fact, the first fundamental reason
why geography is indispensable to a sound school curriculum. We are all
geographers, after all, from the moment we learn to navigate the playpen or
find the bathroom and refrigerator, to the years we explore the neighborhood
on our bicycles and take a family vacation, to the careers we pursue as
adults. The general, admiral, or statesman is a geographer, but so too is
the common soldier or sailor, the corporate executive deciding where to
build a plant and which markets to target, but so too the salesperson, not
to mention the farmer, fisherman, miner, oil worker, pilot, engineer, truck
or taxi driver, real estate agent, manufacturer, consumer or, for that
matter, golfer.
One Jimmy Sneed, a legendary caddie at the Pinehurst
resort in North Carolina, was unschooled, but he knew his golf course and
golfers so well that he invariably chose the right club to use for each shot
... until, after World War II, Pinehurst began to provide yardage markers on
the fairways, whereupon “Sneed’s circuits blew.” Numbers meant nothing to
him, and his feel for club selection deserted him. The Polynesians who
crossed thousands of miles of open ocean to populate the Pacific Islands,
and the Native Americans who navigated the trackless Great Plains in search
of game likewise had no need of maps and instruments. But that only meant
that they were natural, intuitive geographers all the more keenly alive to
the sun and stars, winds and currents, landscapes and weather about them. So
whether we steer our way through the world by feel and folklore or maps and
instruments, geography is the context in which “we live and move and have
our being” (to paraphrase the apostle Paul). You cannot argue with
geography, as Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé liked to say, and geography in
turn “does not argue, it simply is,” as Hans Weigert put it. Geography
concerns the way things are, not the way we imagine or wish them to be, and
thus it is as fundamental to a child’s maturation as arithmetic, which
teaches that 2 + 2 are 4, not 3 or 22.
Second, geography is fundamental to the process of
true education in that it serves as a springboard to virtually every other
subject in the sciences and humanities. Children, as a British government
study observed, are like the mongoose in the Rudyard Kipling tale: “The
motto of the mongoose family is ‘run and find out’ and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was
a true mongoose.” Children’s minds are much the same. They “will enjoy
merely discovering what is just ‘round the corner’ or finding out from
pictures, and most will need no encouragement to explore the banks of the
river or visit a farm or even to investigate the well-known streets of their
own town.... So, too, when faced with glimpses of Everest, the Victoria
Falls, the lonely deserts of Arabia, Tibet and Antarctica, they often find
food for their sense of wonder and feeling for beauty.”
What happens next, usually in secondary school, is
that the student who was originally enthralled just by the sheer variety of
the world and its people, begins to ask, not only “what?” and “where?” but
“why?” and “how?” Why are deserts or rain forests here and not there? Why do
Asians eat rice and Mexicans tortillas, instead of bread? Why did the
Europeans discover routes to China instead of the Chinese discovering routes
to Europe? Why did democracy emerge in Greece and not Egypt? How did the
colonial powers manage to conquer the world, and how did today’s two hundred
odd countries emerge? What is a “country,” for that matter, and why are some
big, rich, populous, and mighty, while others are small, poor, or weak?
Asking such questions inspired by geography opens up a universe of
intellectual inquiry, because to answer them the student must turn to
geology, oceanography, meteorology, and astronomy, anthropology, economics,
comparative religion, sociology, and history. Geography is the window on the
world of the mind as well as the senses, and can be dispensed with no more
than reading, writing, and arithmetic. To educate, after all, means to “lead
out” (educo, in Latin), and no subject leads the student out of the
narrow, familiar, and “taken for granted” better than geography. That is the
second reason why it is indispensable in a sound curriculum.
Yet a third reason why geography is fundamental to
true education is that students without geographic knowledge are helpless
when confronted by adult issues, whether in school or outside of it.
Geography is vital to the examination of economic competition, poverty,
environmental degradation, ethnic conflict, health care, global warming,
literature and culture, and, needless to say, international relations. But
the universality of geography’s relevance has perversely contributed to its
demise as a subject in its own right. As Malcolm Douglass observes, “The
strange fact of the matter is that the role of geography in the school
curriculum is at once anomalous and ubiquitous. Geography lacks a clear
identity.... Nonetheless, by its very nature, geography is integral to all
human inquiry. It is difficult, or even impossible, to separate what is
geographic from what is not. In this sense, then, geography is everywhere in
the school curriculum. The major problem, both for geographers and
geographic educators, and for all curriculum planners and teachers, is to
find ways to acknowledge and act on this reality.”
The ways have always existed. They need only to be
rediscovered.
Three Programs to Push
Assuming a given state or school board is persuaded of
the need to reintroduce geography into the K-12 curriculum,what principles
should guide its planning?
First, teachers, textbook authors, and curriculum
designers must restore an “old-fashioned” emphasis on basic topography,
place names, and map reading. For whatever your ideological preferences, the
grammar of geography is conventional and grounded in reality. The Earth, as
Galileo insisted under his breath, does revolve around the sun and rotate on
its axis, and that was not just his “point of view.” The motions of the
Earth and heat of the sun are what create climate, vulcanism, erosion, and
all the features of lands and waters. On some points we may argue, for
instance whether Europe ought to have been considered a continent separate
from Asia, or whether the term Middle East is a Eurocentric conceit. But the
geographical and cultural distinctions that first inspired people to invent
those terms were real and are also worth understanding. Likewise, the
Mississippi River exists. Its name, like all names, is a social convention,
but the river is real, and no student can claim to “know” American history
without understanding the river’s importance.
How much factual knowledge is “enough”? One useful
exercise which teachers, textbook authors, and curriculum designers might
try is to recall the history surveys they took in college, or study some
syllabi from current surveys, and ask themselves what geographical knowledge
is needed in order to master that material? Conversely, they might ask
themselves what knowledge they would wish to assume their students possessed
if they were teaching the course. Thus, in my Modern History survey I do not
expect students to know anything about the political map of Central Europe
during the Renaissance, but I am crippled if they do not even know that
Venice is an Italian port city, that the Alps divide Italy from the rest of
Europe, that Germany lies north of the Alps, that the Austrians speak
German, that the Turks were Muslim and militant, that all Europeans were
still Catholic, and that Rome was the historic seat of the papacy. If I must
“go back to square one” to lay out such basics, then the best students will
be bored and the poor will be paying Ivy League tuition for high school
instruction. It is all very well to say that education should teach
youngsters to think rather than memorize. But unless their “memory banks”
are filled with facts and categories in which to deposit new facts, then
their “RAM” will have no “data to process.”
Second, history and geography should be kept as close
as possible to each other, perhaps even merged, because so much of history
is best approached through geography, and so much geography is taught best
through an historical approach. The former point is obvious: the human stage
is the world, and the plot of the play is the activity of human beings in
relation to their environment and each other. The latter point may be less
obvious. What I mean can best be expressed by a comparison to courses in
physics and astronomy that begin with the knowledge and theories prevalent
in the ancient world and then march forward in time, teaching students their
science in the same progression as Europeans (and others) learned it. Thus,
one studies Galileo’s experiments to learn the laws of mechanics, Kepler,
Tycho, and Newton to learn orbital mechanics and the laws of gravitation,
the experiments of Faraday, Ampere, Ohm, and Marconi to learn the formulas
of electricity, and so forth through atomic physics. Geography ought to be
taught the same way, however much that may seem to “privilege” Europeans who
explored and mapped the world with their galleons and brigs and geodetic
satellites. For in learning the progress of geographic knowledge from
Ptolemy to the present the students will not just be memorizing names and
concepts but witnessing an adventure story without parallel. They will
discover America, penetrate the interior of Australia and Africa, and race
to the South Pole along with the historical figures, and the geographical
knowledge they acquire will be linked to causes and effects rather than
stand alone as trivia.
Third, history and geography teachers ought to convey
to students how the realities of space and time have indeed changed over the
millennia, centuries, and sometimes mere decades as a function of human
technology, which is the nexus between the mankind and its environment. From
the first irrigation systems to the Space Age the evolution of civilizations
and their relationship to nature has been afunction of tools. The history of
technology might even be called the “third dimension” that rounds out our
picture of the past. Geography, the first dimension, describes terrestrial
space. History, the second, describes change over time. Technology, the
third, describes how human conceptions of space and time have evolved. But
just as algebra students cannot handle solid geometry until they have
mastered plane geometry, so history students are not ready to question human
conventions of space and time until they know the “lay of the land” and know
how to “tell time” historically.
One Dream to Realize
I have the pleasure of lunching one day a week with
Harvey Sicherman, the president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute,
and catching up on world affairs. As an experienced expert and former
speechwriter for three secretaries of state, he is a ready source of inside
information and insights that only later, or never, appear in the
newspapers. Above all, Sicherman is a master of the geographical factors in
war and diplomacy, and he amazed me several years ago by predicting exactly,
and weeks before time, the internal boundaries that would define the
settlement in Bosnia. “I've done the map,” he announced, and proceeded to
trace it out on a napkin. Since then I make it a habit when we are
discussing the latest crisis to ask if he’s “done the map.”
My dream is that every teacher and student of history
and geography, at the end of every block of instruction, can say proudly and
knowledgeably, “I've done the map.” Because that means they know who they
are, where they are, and how to get where they want to go. That means they
have had true education.
FPRI’s
History Academy,
directed by Walter A. McDougall, is a research and education program that
relates the teaching of history to the question of Western identity. Each
year the History Academy sponsors a weekend-long History Institute for high
school teachers and junior college faculty from all over the country,
featuring seminars led by the nation’s leading scholars. History Institutes
have covered a variety of themes:
Multiculturalism in World History (keynoted by William McNeill);
The Cold War Revisited (keynoted by John Lewis Gaddis); Two Hundred
Years of American Foreign Policy (keynoted by Walter McDougall); Teaching
History: How and Why (keynoted by Gordon Wood); America and the Idea of the
West (keynoted by William McNeill); and
Teaching the Vietnam War (keynoted by George Herring). Next year’s
History Institute will focus on
“Teaching World Religions.”
A Partial Listing of Publications Based on the History
Institutes
"The Merits and Perils of Teaching about Other Cultures” by Walter
McDougall
“What We Mean by the West” by William H. McNeill
“The Drama of Modern Western Identity” by David Gress
"Teaching the Vietnam War" by Walter McDougall
“Vietnam: A Pop Quiz” by Adam Garfinkle
“The New Cold War History” by John Lewis Gaddis
“Multiculturalism as Ideology and Fact” by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
“The Three Reasons We Teach History” by Walter McDougall
“Multiculturalism in Ancient Times” by David Gress
To support the work of the History Academy or to
inquire about participating in our programs, contact Alan Luxenberg at fpri@fpri.org
or call 215-732-3774, ext. 105.
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