Here we go again!

BREITBART.COM - Young Americans geographically illiterate: survey:
"'Geographic illiteracy impacts our economic well-being, our relationships with other nations and the environment, and isolates us from our world,' said John Fahey, National Geographic Society president. 'Without geography, our young people are not ready to face the challenges of the increasingly interconnected and competitive world of the 21st century.'"

If memory serves, we went through this about thirty years ago. There was a survey that said students didn't know geography. Geography professors got a bit more respect, a few states required geography to be taught and a generation later we are still clueless.

For some reason I have always been attracted to maps. I got my folks to get me a subscription to the National Geographic when I was in grade school. I still collect maps and atlases in a sort of haphazard way. So I never understood why people wouldn't want to study geography. Of course, if all the course amounts to is unconnected lists of rivers, lakes, countries, mountains, etc. then maybe it would seem pointless.

The great virtue of geographical study is the way it helps to organize insights about history - war, exploration, migration and trade. To see, for example, how the great navigable rivers of northwestern Europe and of the Atlantic coast of the Americas helped to shape an economy that favored trade in agricultural commodoties in a way that the very limited access to the interior provided by the rivers of Africa's Atlantic coast did not. The ability to export grain and other agricultural products (tobacco and cotton in the case of the early American settlement of the southeastern quarter of the country) of course invited the reciprocal importation of manufactured goods and the trade between them enriched both the agriculturalists and the manufacturers.

I've got a BA in economics with 23 semester hours in geography and geology courses, but only one two-hour education course. If you know of an opening teaching geography, let me know.