Abstract
For a time in my career as a reporter I got to live and work in Europe. What impressed me about my neighbors in Rome and London was their knowledge of geography, which was not considered to be solely the province of those with advanced degrees or the money to travel. The super in my apartment building knew because of what he read each day in the newspapers and what he heard on TV at night where various places were in the world…
The calm regard of Americans for a nasty and complicated globe is shaken time and time again by surprises which shouldn't be surprises. Kuwait sitting on its enormous lake of oil moved from being a clue in the crossword puzzles to a place where American troops were dying incredibly rapidly. Somalia had just entered the American lexicon when American troops were entering Somalia. This represents a pretty lousy way to learn geography, sending troops over, but if you look back over the long century that we're about to end it seems one of the few ways that we expand our geographical horizons…
If we're being asked to make decisions as a people about other places in the world and their fate and their future, it seems that Americans would have an interest in not constantly finding themselves with a hot foot, some surprise that some nasty little crisis has presented them with…
Excerpted from the testimony of Ray Suarez, host of National Public Radio's “Talk of the Nation,” at the May 26, 1994, public hearing in Washington, D.C., on the national geography education standards.
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