Why Johnny Can't Navigate
Young adults in the United States fail to understand the world and their place in it, according to a survey-based report on geographic literacy released today.Oddly, however, the National Geographic report doesn't quite tally with the findings of the Geography Assessment of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, according to which 71% of American twelfth-graders perform"at or above basic" proficiency in geography.
Take Iraq, for example. Despite nearly constant news coverage since the war there began in 2003, 63 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 failed to correctly locate the country on a map of the Middle East. Seventy percent could not find Iran or Israel.
Nine in ten couldn't find Afghanistan on a map of Asia.
And 54 percent were unaware that Sudan is a country in Africa.
Remember the December 2004 tsunami and the widespread images of devastation in Indonesia?
Three-quarters of respondents failed to find that country on a map. And three-quarters were unaware that a majority of Indonesia's population is Muslim, making it the largest Muslim country in the world.
The sample for the 2001 NAEP report consisted of 25,000 students for all three grades reported-on (fourth, eighth, twelfth), selected from 1,100 public and private schools. I'm no statistician, but that strikes me as a large and representative sample. As a former NAEP scoring leader (in US history), I happen to know first-hand that NAEP exams are scored under highly uniform and controlled conditions. So the NAEP data seem pretty robust.
I see that people at Liberty & Power are having a minor ideological tussle about the National Geographic report—specifically, over the causal role of the public schools in generating students' ignorance of geography. But it seems to me that there is a methodologically prior question worth asking, namely: how do we reconcile the preceding two sets of findings, each apparently as real as the other?
Another anomaly: in 2002, after the release of the 2001 NAEP geography report, National Geographic praised American students for their improvement in geography. Well, NAEP hasn't done a geography assessment since 2001, and the 2001 assessment indicated that scores had been flat between 1994 and 2001, so it's unclear to me what's going on. What justified hope in 2002 but justifies alarm in 2006? Was there a sudden and precipitous reversal to geographical ignorance between 2002 and the present?
I had an interesting conversation with my Theory & Practice co-blogger Carrie-Ann Biondi yesterday about the report, and we mused more or less inconclusively about the causal explanation for such widespread ignorance.
I don't know the answer, but I'd venture this hypothesis. Maybe part of the explanation for student ignorance is the absence of any cogent explanation for why they are ignorant. That sounds paradoxical, but I don't intend it to be. What I mean is this: If we can't explain why students are as ignorant as they are, we can't offer cogent prescriptions to resolve the problem. Since we lack cogent explanations, we lack cogent prescriptions. Naturally, in the absence of cogent prescriptions, the problems go unresolved.
Of course, so long as the task of causal explanation is confounded by peoples' insistence on manipulating statistics to confirm false ideologies--liberal, libertarian, conservative, Progressive, leftist, multicultural, National Geographic-ist, whatever--we'll never explain or resolve anything.
I'm reminded here of a famous saying of Spinoza's:"I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them." How many participants in contemporary debates about educational policy could truthfully agree with that sentiment? Maybe the ones who can't are the biggest part of the problem.