The ability to find a random geographic feature on a map is indeed not worth much. The ability to identify a country where we have been waging a war for the past decade and have a basic understanding of how geography affects our interests and decisions is worth much.
How so? I will grant you that there needs to be a sufficient level of geographic knowledge across the population as a whole, we can’t have the entire population ignorant of these facts.
For a particular individual, how does this knowledge (the specific location of Iraq and it’s surrounding neighbors) have worth, let’s say in comparison to knowing how to make French Toast?
As a person who doesn’t make decisions on international policy*, but does make French Toast occasionally, I know which knowledge has direct impact on my life.
*I do vote, but voting in the US is constrained to picking the guy with a D or an R after their name, and both sides get plenty of votes from people who know everything there is to know about Iraq.
I’m reluctant to voice an opinion in this thread lest I get branded an arrogant moron or somesuch, but I have a hard time retaining specific geographical knowledge. If you showed me an unlabeled map and asked me to point to Iraq, odds are I’d be off a country or two (but of course I know where the Middle East is). This fact doesn’t fill me shame or self-loathing and it’s not something I’m pledging to “fix” anytime soon. Why? Because it in no way impacts my ability to know what’s going on over there.
I think some people grasp geography better than others because of differences in learning. Visual learners probably have an easier time memorizing map features than, say, audio learners. As someone who isn’t a visual learner, information communicated by maps just doesn’t stick for me. I understand it but I don’t retain it. But if I read about a country, talk about it, and hear other people talk about it, the knowledge acquired from those activities leaves a long-lasting impression on me.
I don’t think OP is celebrating his ignorance; he’s just questioning the amount of value placed on being able to identify countries on a map.
This seems like a good time to ask the question I’ve been wondering about through this entire thread. When people talk about how one should at least be able to find X on a map, or how horrible it is if one can’t, are they actually talking about an *unlabeled *map?
I just pulled open a regular, labeled map of the world and timed how long it took me to find Iraq. It was three seconds, and about half that was the time it took for my feeble eyes to focus. Barring visual problems or some sort of leaning disability, I would expect any reasonably well-informed adult American to be able to locate Iraq fairly quickly on a conventional map. I would not think well of a person who spent a lot of time hemming and hawing and looking all over the world before they finally noticed Iraq. I would not, however, expect the average adult to be able to draw an accurate map of the Middle East from memory, or correctly fill in all the country names on an unlabeled map.
I don’t know if I could correctly identify Iraq on an unlabeled map (well, I could right now because I just looked at a labeled map, but I might not be able to later), but like you with the face I don’t particularly care whether I possess this skill. I don’t think I’ve had to label anything on an unmarked map since elementary school. It’s certainly nothing I’ve ever had reason to do as an adult. It’s important and useful to have a fairly good idea of where different countries are located, but I see little reason for most people to memorize a complete map of the world. If that’s something one finds fun or interesting then great, but if it’s just a question of being reasonably well-informed then there are plenty of things I’d consider more important to have stored in the ol’ noggin.
I’m getting that sense that most folks in this thread are talking about an unlabeled map. Maybe I’m wrong with that impression, though.