Interesting, I can well remember being taught history at school without the faintest idea where all these places/countries/battlefields actually were, what the spatial relationship between them was, or what terrain/climate they were fighting in or over what resources/land routes/towns they were fighting over. What's more, timetabling at my school precluded doing both geog and history.
I guess the peril is it will perhaps halve the resources and staff given over to history and geography. But there's a lot of geographical illiteracy amongst schoolchildren these days anyway, especially it seems in the USA, remember those polls where a large % of the population, even as adults, don't know where say North Korea or Iraq are on a world map - oh well, so long as the guided missiles 'know', why should mere humans care? But even the guided missiles weren't too good at the geography of former Yugoslavia, or where the Bulgarian border lay, as the Chinese Embassy staff/Bulgarian villagers may care to confirm.
Could this raise geographical awareness -I'm not sure, but maybe getting the kids to realise the number of countries involved in contributing labour, raw materials, manufacturing, finance, and design, into their jeans, might not be a bad thing.
Hillary Shaw,
School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT
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