Bretton Cole
Reporter
Students need geography education. College students are at the height of their learning experience, but rarely can they differentiate a state and a country, underscoring how far removed students are from understanding geography.
“Geography reaches beyond memorizing word pairs,” geography instructor Dr. Denna Clymer said. We learn word pairs like states and capitals in elementary school, but geography is really more about spatial recognition.
“It’s such an important discipline in a global world where we engage well beyond our borders,” Dr. Clymer said.
Many students come into college without much knowledge of geography at all. It’s not a required high school course, and the last time most students in Missouri have covered geography material is in 5th grade.
It isn’t that college students don’t care about the world beyond their community. In fact, 80% of students believe the knowledge of foreign affairs is “really, really important,” according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
However, thinking it’s important and actually knowing it are two very different things. Only 63% recognized the Alps were in Europe. Only 31% were able to pinpoint where Israel was located.
It reaches beyond high school inefficiencies, though. Only 18 to 27% of 8th grade American students scored proficient or higher on basic geography questions, the Atlantic found.
Dr. Clymer also says that everything can’t be a high school’s problem, but added leaving geography out of the equation is a liability. “No matter what you pursue,” she said, “there will be components of geography.”
When we make a decision of where to move, what job to take or any other major life choice, there will be an element of geography that should dictate our decision.
I asked Nate Williams, a Crowder freshman, if Africa was a country or a continent. He hesitantly replied, “A continent?” The uncertainty was telling. Then, I asked him where Brazil was located. “Africa,” he said.
Asking several other students the same questions yielded similar results. College students are simply not adept in geography. Despite those questions being relatively simple, students found them difficult to answer correctly.
Not only does this speak to students’ ability to match geographical word pairs, but it also uncovers a concern for spatial recognition, cultural cognizance and world history.
The lack of knowledge students have of geography is discouraging, but there are some ways in which we can help remedy the state of education.
For general studies degrees, there are social science credits required. Geography falls under that category, so encouraging students to take geography as their social science credit is a good way to improve the understanding of geography among students.
We don’t know the exact direction geography education will take, but we don’t want to let students on the brink of adulthood become lost.
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