Dengl 46 Woeisme 1 - on Education

well - this is not a dengl "for fun" as this website is headed - it is for woe; maybe I should set up a separate site. Later.

this one began when I read a "light hearted" press article:

A story in the i Newspaper is headed:
A staycation? Forget it, most of us would only go and get lost
the author is:
Josephine Forster

The internet refuses to supply the article in the (small) i newspaper - but a very similar version, in the full Independent, by the same author consists of::
Trending: If you're staying at home this year, you'll clearly need a map
Josephine Forster Independent 12 March 2012


The recession-fuelled fashion for staycations is all very well, but it seems Britons are in danger of getting lost in their own backyard. One in five British adults couldn't tell you how many countries there are in the UK, a poll of 2,000 UK citizens found.

The royal family often holiday in the UK, at Balmoral Castle in Scotland, but more than half of those surveyed (53 per cent) couldn't say where that was.

One in five could not find the seaside resort of Blackpool on a map while the location of Stonehenge was a mystery to one in 20 people. When asked to name England's biggest mountain, 58 per cent answered either Mount Everest, Ben Nevis or Snowdon. A startling 25 per cent thought the Australian sandstone formation Uluru (Ayers Rock) was in the UK. Big cities fared no better, with over a third of people (33.8 per cent) suggesting that the Home Counties circled Manchester, Birmingham or Glasgow.

Karen Gee, of the travel operators Journeys of Distinction, which carried out the survey, said: "We were astounded that while Britons clearly have an enviable knowledge of famous cities abroad, they seem to display a lack of geographical awareness in their own nation."

Whether you blame our reliance on Google maps or SatNav – or the British weather – it's unavoidable. We couldn't locate the top sights of the British Isles if our holiday depended on it.

______________

Both forms of the article GENERALISE that "most of us" are sufficiently ignorant to get lost. Some questions did in fact deliver a MAJORITY who got them wrong (Mt Everest, Balmoral) though other questions produced well under 50% who misplaced the Home Counties or Ayers Rock (Uluru). Overall, while the story makes a stir about widespread ignorance, the journalist (who the web tells us has an MA in Journalism from the City University) seems herself to be shaky on the story that can or should be retrieved from the numbers in a study.

One of the problems about this is that once a story is seeded in one place, it gets repeated with the danger - or certainty - of distortion in subsequent tellings. Thus does myth wend its merry way into the folk zeitgeist.

I agree that these results from (presumably) a representative sample of 2000 reveal widespread geographical ignorance.

This may be (I tend to think that this is) because any geography lessons that occur in schools these days and in recent years do not bother to build up a cohesive "map in the mind" of the world, of the UK's place in it, and of the places within the UK; I have no idea what does go on in schools but I suspect their geography time is spent on what may be partisan programmes of tales about wells (or no wells) in Ethiopia, or on melting of the ice cap - without being all that sure where either of these places are. Perhaps the Ethiopians could get their water from the melted icecap? Does the east wind blow from Latvia therefrom bringing hot, or cold? Will Joseph Kony be found in Uganda or the Congo and where are these places, anyway? Will US Presidential candidates differentiate between Slovakia and Slovenia, (correctly) and does it matter if they can not or will not? Who knows - or cares whether others know?

I imagine that even more distressing ignorance could be demonstrated for example by asking - which British county has more (or more dense provision of) windfarms - Northumbria or Northamptonshire - replies would simply be guesses; and if asked to point to either county on a map - this would reveal even wider ignorance; similarly many people would not be able to (or care less about) identifying the whereabouts of Somerset and Sussex, or of Herefordshire and Hertfordshire. If they want to find out, it is said these days - people can go to the internet for the answers; find out perhaps from Twitter; but would they know what questions to put?

These are the people asked to vote in elections and referenda, who are trusted by the arch democrats as each one of them having a right to influence national policies from a base of what knowledge they have and the opinions and judgments based thereon.