Students learn the subject in other countries, but most American public schools don’t teach it — except as part of history and social studies.
Shradhha Sharma | Columbia News Service
Ten years ago at a convention in Baltimore, fifth-grade history teacher Lydia Lewis met someone she described as a “bright, college-educated young woman in her 20s.” Lewis was busily reviewing her notes for a slide presentation on geography when she felt someone tapping her on the shoulder.
Turning around, she saw the young woman standing there, a quizzical expression on her face. In her hand was a slide depicting a map of the United States. She held it upside down so that Florida was in the north and asked Lewis innocently, “Ma’am, which way does this slide go in?”
“I was completely shocked,” Lewis recalls. “But being a teacher, I thought this was one of those teachable moments so I started to explain to her the right way to look at the map. But she simply wasn’t interested.”
As teachers across the country try to help their students meet test-score standards mandated by law, there is one subject that has been left behind: geography.
By Marlene Deschler
Hirsch’s basic premise, laid out most clearly in his most recent book The Knowledge Deficit, is so straightforward that observers outside of education are often surprised at the uproar he sparks. Most school curricula are, according to Hirsch, vacuous and disjointed. Hirsch believes that knowledge acquisition is a deliberate process, requiring curriculum that emphasizes content rather than process and it must be organized around systemic rather than random acquisition of knowledge. Obvious? Well, this is a fundamental dispute in education circles because, as Hirsch discusses in Knowledge Deficit, much of American educational theory is predicated on 19th-century romantic ideas that celebrate learning and the acquisition of knowledge as a natural process. Where reading is concerned, Hirsch is especially vehement that lack of attention to curriculum is hamstringing efforts to improve literacy.
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