Considering how influential and widespread conflicts are between volatile areas today (think of places like Syria, Ukraine and Yemen), political geography is as important as it’s ever been. As a result, the school’s one-semester world geography course, typically taught to freshmen, should be more directed at emphasizing how the history and background of hot spots around the globe lead to what is happening today.
The class mainly focuses on less relevant topics like the five types of geography and urban centralization. These are topics that may not strike most freshmen as applying to the world they live in. While they should not be completely eliminated from the curriculum, these introductory concepts can easily be condensed to occupy a shorter part of the semester.
Currently, the curriculum doesn’t focus on World History or other more advanced history courses taken throughout high school, nor do they hold much relevance to current events. Consequently, the class serves as a period in which many students struggle to stay awake while watching documentaries, leaving many wondering why the class is even mandatory.
To make world geography more relevant and engaging, the curriculum should be changed to better reflect modern history and the news.
For example, one of the main movies that students watch is “Lawrence of Arabia,” which is used to show the foundation for Saudi Arabia’s current political climate. However, since this movie is almost 60 years old, learning about Saudi Arabia’s past would be better supplemented with education about the country’s current state to draw relevance to the material.
Learning about Kashmir, for example, is a great example of what the curriculum is doing right, as it connects the current situation into the region’s history and geography. As such, teachers should shift more of their curriculum to focus more on current events, similar to what they have done with Kashmir.
Not only would these shifts in emphasis make the class curriculum more interesting, but it would allow teachers to introduce important geopolitical areas, like Ukraine, Iran and Syria to relatively ill-informed students. After all, what use is there in a student knowing where Ghana is on a map when they don’t know what modern events are taking place there?
Right now, the school’s geography course simply focuses too much on the past, and as such, the class should shift more attention on analyzing how the past is affecting modern-day events, rather than only looking at the world from 200 years ago. Doing so will allow students to more efficiently grasp important events happening in the present, which is especially important considering how volatile today’s world has become.