The Assault on Geography

Copied this from the Guardian Unlimited where Mr. Simon Jenkins has put things into perspective quite nicely...

Just as the education system has downgraded geography in the pantheon of GCSE subjects, along with history, so the computerised shrinking of space has led to the loss of a sense of place. Beyond the walls of home and hearth lies nothing but the great wide world, comprehended through the prism of a screen. When we leave home, even driving a car no longer requires map-reading skills, as GPS guides us to our destination. If it fails we are as lost as if the engine breaks down. Knowledge of maps has gone the way of knowledge of gaskets and carburettors. Yet I cannot see how a well-rounded education can be stripped of a sense of spatial perspective and a sense of the passage of time. In this respect, the Thatcher/Baker curricular reforms of the late 80s were a disaster. They made maths and science compulsory and geography and history optional. They narrowed and dehumanised a large part of the syllabus.

For millions of children, the curriculum is now obsessed with subjects of little or no relevance to life outside school. If the examination figures are to be believed, the new curriculum has not inspired any surge in love of maths and science; if anything the opposite. Most children seem to hate them. Yet the GCSE has left pupils unaware of the world about them - its story, its nature - and, so we are told, even its fate. Britain's curricular priorities are crass.

Geography in the widest sense of the concept remains to me the queen of sciences. It holds the key that unlocks the coherence of the physical world as its sister, history, unlocks that of mankind's occupation of it. Without geography's mapping of planet Earth, the work of chemists, biologists and physicists is disjointed, mere technique.

It is geography that applies common sense to the statistical hysteria of the climatologists. It is geography that brings global warming into context and applies the test of feasibility to whatever political priorities are deemed necessary. It is geography that explains why each of us is located where we are, in neighbourhood, nation, continent and planet, and how fragile might be that location. Without geography's instruction, we are in every sense lost - random robots who can only read and count.

That government should regard such instruction as less important than algebraic equations or the listing of elements is not just baffling but Orwellian. Like the suppression of history, the suppression of geography has been a conspiracy against the true education of the human mind, against scepticism and the exercise of the imagination. It underlies the increasing evidence that British schools have hit some invisible barrier to educational advance, through which other nations have been able to pass.

The internet has plainly liberated millions from the confines of conventional sources of knowledge. But it remains limited to the dimensions of a lighted screen. The user can surf the world but not experience it: the world is squeezed into the experience of the screen. By eradicating distance, the internet eradicates an understanding of what distance means, of the diversity of peoples, nations, climates and environments. It reduces the world to a trillion pixels. Everest is neither in Europe nor Asia, it is on screen.

I cannot believe it makes sense to replace star-gazing with screen-gazing. The awareness of distance defines villages and communities, just as physical contact, not a chatroom, is the essence of friendship. Geography is the narrative of that distance.