Over the course of the last several years, I’ve noticed a common trend among many of the elementary aged kids that I’ve met and had a chance to talk to: a lack of geographical knowledge. I have met a sixth grader who has been in a public school since kindergarten, who is an all-around good student, who thought that France was a city. This is not the only case of the sort that I’ve seen, and it surprised me initially, until I realized that the only reason that I wasn’t in the same situation when I was at that age was that I had exposure to geographical knowledge outside of the classroom. My mother tells me about having to learn and label US states and the countries of the world and I look at my own education and think, “Wait, I never had to do anything like that. Why?”
Alberta social studies curriculum is very skills-based. From active citizenship to media awareness to problem solving, the curriculum focuses very heavy-handedly on the thought processes and abilities that make one a productive and engaged member of modern society. That said, this focus sometimes fails to address some of the most basic knowledge: how is the world that we live in organized? I would direct your attention to this paragraph taken straight from the social studies program of studies for grade six:
In order for students to be able to develop spatial skills, we sometimes have to turn away from the new-age, innovative ways of looking at education and go back to the bare-bones “this is what you need to know” approach, especially in situations like basic to intermediate world geography.
That being said, the Alberta curriculum does not entirely overlook geography. The problem is that whatever geography is taught is overly big-picture or is mostly or entirely Canada-centric. I think I can speak for most students when I say that none of us will soon forget colouring maps of Canada and memorizing all of the provinces, territories and their capitals. Maybe the occasional world map was thrown in there, but as long as we knew what each continent was, not much more in-depth study was performed. To this day, I still struggle placing more than about half of the US states on an American map or label the countries of Africa and eastern Europe through the Middle East. I was never exposed to more than base-level geography knowledge in the classroom until into high school, and even then, the geography component is very specific to the situation being examined. I would go so far as to wager that if I were to take a random sample of students my own age and have them try to correctly label 50 or more countries on a world map (which is less than one third of the countries in the world), I doubt, given my own experience with my peers, that more than 60-75% could successfully complete the challenge or even come close (given the opportunity to
conduct this experiment, I would actually love to do it). If even high school students are unable to demonstrate this knowledge, which I personally classify as essential, there is a problem stemming from what is being taught or not taught at a base level.
There is such a huge focus in Alberta curriculum on critical thinking. Even though these skills are absolutely necessary to be able to appreciate and understand world world issues, curricular focus is so one-sided that geography and spatial knowledge, which are also integral to being able to get a big-picture view of situations of study, both in and out of the classroom. Granted, most situations that students study provide background information including geographical facts essential to understanding the case at hand, however, prior knowledge helps to connect the facts of the matter with understanding of the world as a whole. True critical thinking does not look at world issues as isolated incidents, but rather as a intricate web of interconnected scenarios, a task which is not made any easier without a basic understanding of how the world is laid out.
All in all, as much as the Alberta social studies curriculum aims to churn out well-rounded, well educated citizens of the contemporary age, unless students are taught this basic knowledge of world geography, a major hole remains in their skill set.
