NO WONDER geography needs more emphasis, not less, in Arkansas schools.
We
ourselves are an embarrassing case in point: We got our past and
current African horrors mixed up in Monday's editorial. Robert Mugabe
is the dictator who's presided over the ruination of Zimbabwe, formerly
Rhodesia, rather than Rwanda, formerly the Belgian trusteeship of
Ruanda-Urundi, the scene of a genocide that preceded the one in Darfur,
a region of Sudan, formerly the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.
The
error was entirely our own and not that of our geography teacher in
grade school or the old Book of Knowledge, the twin and wholly
estimable sources of whatever geographical knowledge we still retain.The
map of Africa has changed wildly since we had to draw it and memorize
all the capitals back in class, which is no excuse for our mistake.
Rather, our cartographic ignorance is one more strong argument for
emphasizing geography, along with history, as a separate discipline in
elementary school... Link (sub req'd)