Geography education emphasized

The education system in this country is missing something big, according to the National Geographic Society, and for the last 17 years, it has been trying put geography back in the curriculum.

About 85 Utah educators from across the state attended a three-day National Council for Geographic Education meeting, which ended Saturday in Salt Lake City, to discuss just that. Workshop presenters, described as the best and the brightest from Europe and the states, demonstrated stimulating and exciting methods used in making geography interesting and meaningful.

Gilbert Grosvenor, trustee chairman for the National Geographic Society said out of nine nations surveyed, the United States ranked on the bottom tier for geographic education. The nation lost interest in the subject sometime after WWII, he said, when citizens grew successful and did not have an eye on global neighbors. Geography was perceived to be a dull discipline of memorization of place and location, Grosvenor said.

"There was a joke going around about 15 years ago in some states that all geography teachers had the same first name — Coach," he said. "It was poorly taught and teachers were ill-prepared."

Then in 1985, Grosvenor founded the society's Education Foundation, which gave rise to state alliances and outreach programs committed to imparting a sound knowledge and love of geography to students.

Since 1985, the society has seen improvements in teaching and quality of geography in K-12 schools, Grosvenor said. When the program started geography was mandated in only half a dozen states, but today all but about two states require it. Nonetheless, it still is not taught as well as it should be, he said.

It needs more attention, more innovative methods and more excitement; it is the very fabric around which other disciplines are interwoven — economics, environment, demographics, migrations — all classic geography, said Grosvenor.

The going has been slow for most of the country, he said. But according to Cliff Craig, coordinator of the Utah Geographic Alliance, the state has made dramatic improvements in the last 15 years — bringing geography back from the dead and impacting a total 35,000 Utah teachers.

Educators re-wrote the geography program making it one of the top in the nation as far as quality, and in a geographic literacy test that students took last spring, Utah ranked 4.7 points higher than the national average.

But with the new No Child Left Behind mandate the alliance is concerned that geography will be put on the back burner again to make enough room for other required disciplines.

"I am a great supporter of the No Child Left Behind, but in geography, we have a whole nation left behind," Grosvenor said.

To help keep a leg up, the society is trying to establish a permanent endowment for the alliance programs to continue to help geographic education.

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