Geography Education Curriculum, History of

Geography's Place in Schools

Geography was a core subject in Greek and Roman education. As such, geography was part of the classical education in the United States' earliest schools. When public education fully emerged in the 20th century, the discipline of geography was largely focused on physical geography. Thus, the modern origins of geography in public schools focused on the physical landscapes, climate, boundaries, and so on. Although understanding physical environments requires problem-solving skills, as a subject physical geography is largely a rote study of places and features on maps. The discipline does not presume that students are cartographers; it prepares them to be consumers. They are taught to memorize and synthesize the data represented on maps. The human component of geography was not unnoted; it simply became subsumed within another field called social studies. Through the 1960s, geography was in a tug-of-war as to whether the social component should be incorporated into geography or into social studies. It most often remained in the social studies.

The first real challenge to geography's integration with social studies arose in the 1960s when the High School Geography Project attempted to develop new geography that attended to solving geographic problems more akin to the discipline of geography. But the lack of experience on the part of teachers and policy makers doomed geography to stay the course. In the late 1980s, following dismal reports about students' geographic [Page 406]knowledge, the National Council for the Social Studies and the Geography Education Standards Project created standards that demanded students know more than just where places are located on maps. Both set of standards contain central themes—location, region, human characteristics, physical characteristics, movement of people and ideas, and humanenvironment interaction. These themes provide a rigorous method for students to learn the attributes of a region and thus the countries in that region and a way of categorizing information so that students can compare people and places and make predictions about people living in various environments. These projects also seek to use geography as a tool for developing a spatial understanding of students' surroundings. There is recognition that students make mental maps and that geography education should explore these maps in addition to cartographic maps. For all the efforts to make changes to the discipline, tests continue to show dismal results, and educators question the value of geography as a course. There are proposals in many states today that would remove geography as a distinct discipline and place it within history.

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