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It's a Wonderful World
But we know so little about it
By Thomas Swick
All of us, if awakened in the middle of the night, can findd our way from the bed to the bathroom. In the dark. It's a start. Out of the wide world, we carve our own worlds and know them almost instinctively. We are masters of an intimate geography of floor plans, daily commutes, shortcuts, scenic drives, back alleys, and paper routes stretching back to childhood. We would be lost and poor without this geography.
But it is not enough to know one's individual piece of Earth, one's place, because today all places are lavishly linked. On an average day we may put on an Italian suit made in Malaysia; get e-mail in English, Hebrew, and Mandarin; order from a Romanian waitress in an Indian restaurant; fill the tank of our Japanese car with gas made from Saudi Arabian oil; and then settle down for a quiet evening of televised baseball with players from Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and South Korea.
We can graze a dozen different cultures simply by getting up in the morning. The broader world has engulfed, and enriched, our smaller ones.
This heightened exposure may explain, in an odd way, our general lack of curiosity about the world. It's right here, so why go out and explore it? Only about 25 percent of U.S. citizens have passports, a figure that suggests many of us are world-weary without ever having left home.
Also, the constant brushing up against foreignness — a phenomenon that a century ago happened mainly in large coastal cities — gives us a false sense of worldliness. We eat sushi and dance salsa and practice yoga. How much more cosmopolitan can we be? Well, cosmopolitan enough to be able to name and locate on a map the places from which those three things came. Knowing where a country is located is the first step toward understanding it.
Yet, as has been embarrassingly demonstrated over the past decade, Americans don't possess a very clear picture of the world. The National Geographic — Roper 2002 Global Geographic Literacy Survey found that when given a map of Europe, most of the 18- to 24-year-olds queried in the United States were able to identify only three countries. Half of the group could not locate New York, one of our most populous states.
A mere year after the 2001 World Trade Center attacks, only 17 percent of young people could find Afghanistan. Iraq and Iran proved even more elusive. Asia languished in a thick fog. We've eradicated smallpox, but we haven't taught our children to find Mongolia on a map.
It's not just the young — they take the rap because they take the tests. Geographical howlers are as prevalent, and as frequently unnoticed, as grammatical mistakes. People consistently confuse Switzerland and Sweden, put into Central America countries that are perfectly at home in South America (and vice versa), and go mum when it comes to Africa.
A visiting journalist from Zimbabwe recently reported that on a plane from Tampa to Fort Lauderdale, he sat next to a woman who informed him there were just two countries in Africa: South Africa and Africa. In the ensuing conversation, he learned that her uncle had been to Namibia. He asked why she had not mentioned that as at least a third African country. "But Namibia," she told him, "is a city in Africa."
The media are not a great help. Many newspapers, to cut costs and play to hometown readers, have closed their foreign bureaus. The glossy travel magazines often seem more interested in restaurants and resorts than in the countries in which they're located. My local public radio station, an excellent source for international news, a few years ago discontinued its weekend program The Savvy Traveler, replacing it with The Splendid Table. The popular TV show The Amazing Race presents the world not as a riveting place to explore but as an obstacle course to speed through in hopes of winning a small fortune. We've come a long way from the old "It's not the destination, but the journey, that matters."
In his book Why Geography Matters, geographer Harm de Blij traces the decline of our geographic knowledge to the 1960s. He points to public educators who in that fraught decade decided to lump geography, history, and government together under "social studies." De Blij notes that Harvard University has not offered geography to its students for about half a century.
Of course, there are savants in our midst who can name capitals, rivers, and seas the way some people rattle off movie titles. And the Kraków McDonald's and the Holiday Inn Maputo are testaments to a small group of Americans armed with a global, utilitarian knowledge.
But for the rest of us, the world we know is the world we've seen. A country like Turkey is a blotch on a map until we go there for vacation, and suddenly towns with names like Goöreme (where we spend a night in a cave hotel), Ürgüp (where we drink some excellent Cappadocian wine), and Fethiye (where the wedding party keeps us up all night) become as familiar as Seattle or San Diego.
This is what's priceless about travel: It allows us to fill in the blanks, put names to faces, and make bits and pieces of the wide world, now and forever, part of our own worlds. And through it, we gain a better understanding of everything from the front-page news to our next-door neighbors.
Yet no matter how impressive our grasp of geography — especially of the regions where we have lived and traveled-there will always be people who surpass us. They would be the locals. Geography is the field of the unfair advantage.
So we are all, to greater and lesser degrees, geographically illiterate. The world is far too bounteous for us to know it completely. But it's too infinitely fascinating for us not to try.
Thomas Swick is travel columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and author of A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania With a Maverick Traveler.
You are reading the May 2007 issue of Westways. Some information contained in this publication is time-sensitive, and the terms of some offers (cruise or vacation packages, for example) or services (provisions for roadside assistance, for example) might have been superseded by subsequent information and might no longer apply.