Where's Georgia again?

A few months ago on a flight back home from the Caribbean, I sat next to a nice gentleman who we will call Elmer. Elmer had a family with him, a wife and a few young kids who sat in the row in front of us. They were all quite nice and I enjoyed our conversation - it is always pleasant to have a few words with a fellow comrade while sealed in a metal cylinder hurtling through the air faster than the speed of sound.

Well, as we were on an international voyage (to be fair, it wasn't really international coming back from Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the US), we naturally talked about where else in the world we had been. Elmer had been a place or two, mostly in and around the US though. And I told him of my two trips to Europe and the upcoming move to Oxford. Whenever I talk about travel with anyone, I like to emphasize how wonderful Scotland is, because truly, it is amazing. I love everything about that country, so verdant, such fantastic history mixed with modern comforts; you should go, dear reader. So I rambled on a bit about the glory of Scotland and Elmer seemed at least nominally interested. Then came that fateful moment, the point of no return after which our conversation had an undeniably different tone. "Scotland, that's up there near New Zealand, right?" asked a curious Elmer. Now I admit that I sometimes assume certain things to be common knowledge which just aren't; some friendly readers may recall incidents involving the Bikini Atoll and the Simon and Garfunkel song "Scarborough Fair." But generally I can chalk those up to the eclectic conversations I had in my family growing up (and still have to this day) where dinner time topics could range from the doctrine of predestination to the theory of relativity and back all before I finished my mashed potatoes. This time, though, I knew he must surely jest - "Ha ha!" I laughed, expecting his face to light with the knowing glow of a joke well-placed. But Elmer did not reciprocate, and within a second I knew I had taken the bait for a joke that did not exist. I tried to recover, "Oh, ya know, they're not too close really...." Awkward silence. Poor Elmer - I think I could probably work on my tact some more.

Well, I hope you, dear reader, are aware that New Zealand is possibly the very farthest away on this Earth that you can get from Scotland. Perhaps Australia is more directly opposite, or maybe somewhere in the ocean, but the two nations are surely not neighborly. I felt bad for Elmer, really, and for some time to come I wondered if this was another mashed-potato moment. Maybe no one really knows where New Zealand is - I mean, who really keeps up with our antipodean cousins anyway (more to come on this in a future blog)? But since then, I have been assured by many diverse friends that most people at least know that Scots and Kiwis (as New Zealanders call themselves) inhabit very different, distant lands.

This unfortunate occurence came to mind recently with the onset of the Russo-Georgian conflict. Although I never encountered anyone in recent weeks who admitted a lack of knowledge of Georgian geography, I read many news articles that mentioned the general American unawareness of where in the world Georgia was, the country, that is. I probably would not have known either had it not been for a recent fascination with central Asia and the Caucasus region (and it didn't hurt that many James Bond and other spy video games involve post-Soviet states). Now I understand that people didn't know where Georgia is - not many of us will ever go there and it would not have much impact on the US in normal circumstances. But our lack of geographic knowledge in this instance and in the case of Elmer betray a general ignorance in the field among Americans. To be frank, it is really sad that so much of the world can name the US capital and many of our important cities, knowing fairly accurately where each of them is, when most Americans don't know even half of our own country's state capitals. There is no hope for world geography if we can't even master the domestic realm.

Now forgive me, dear reader, if you indeed have a strong grasp of world geography; in fact, I applaud you. I do not mean to say that all Americans fall short in this area; I do mean to point out that in general, we fail to teach geography adequately in our schools. In high school, I was not required to take a class in geography, nor in college; in fact, when I went through high school, geography carried the connotation of a low-level class, the sort of course that you exempt if you are "smart enough," to be blunt, though I know that is not the case in all schools. But no one ever tested me in geographic knowledge; for all they knew, I could have graduated high school thinking New Zealand and Scotland were landlocked neighbors in western Africa. Likewise, perhaps I still think that Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia are the capitals of Washington, Oregon, California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, respectively. (The true capitals are Olympia, Salem, Sacramento, Springfield, and Harrisburg.) I know of many, including myself at times, who think the capitals are simply the largest cities around. In college, geography seemed to be so focused on human migrations and anthropology that students still did not learn where anything was. Why does it matter where people groups ended up in Europe if we could not locate them now based on current landmarks?

Unfortunately, I don't presume to have the readership or the influence to spawn a new day in geography education in America. But truly, this is one field in which we are woefully ignorant. So next time you find yourself or a friend asking "Where's Georgia again?", pull out an atlas and have a look around.