Last year, only 34 percent of Americans could locate Ukraine on a map even as Congress debated billions in military aid that would shape global security. This geographic illiteracy isn't just embarrassing; it's dangerous.
In today's schools, students are far more likely to be introduced to coding languages or STEM electives than to a sustained study of geography. This shift may seem natural in an economy powered by technology, but it reflects a profound miscalculation. Geography is not a secondary subject. It is a cornerstone of civic literacy. Our lives, our identities, our communities, our politics are conditioned by place and space. A generation that cannot situate itself in the world risks becoming disoriented, vulnerable to demagoguery, and ill-equipped for democratic self-government.
Human existence is always rooted in place. The environments into which people are born shape opportunities, occupations, and cultural traditions. A desert village produces different forms of resilience than a port city; a farm town fosters different habits than an urban neighborhood. The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan distinguished between space, which conveys openness and possibility, and place, which infuses space with meaning. Indigenous knowledge systems have long recognized this truth: that wisdom itself is place-based, emerging from intimate knowledge of local ecologies and landscapes. To lose sight of geography is to overlook the very conditions that form identity and belonging.
Community life is equally dependent on space. Émile Durkheim underscored how rituals and shared spaces foster solidarity, while Robert Putnam famously demonstrated how the decline of bowling leagues, town halls, and neighborhood associations has weakened American civic life. Geography clarifies that social life is not abstract. Social life is organized through neighborhoods, public squares, and civic institutions embedded in physical landscapes. Where such spaces thrive, trust and civic engagement flourish; where they vanish, isolation and fragmentation follow. The design of a New England town common, with its central green surrounded by church, school, and town hall, embodies democratic ideals in physical form, a lesson lost when we fail to read our landscapes.
Politics, too, is inseparable from geography. Borders define sovereignty, districts shape representation, and natural resources determine both prosperity and conflict. The war in Ukraine cannot be understood without reference to its wheat fields that feed the Middle East and Africa, its Black Sea ports that connect grain to global markets, and its plains that have served as invasion corridors for centuries. Water scarcity in the American West shapes policy as surely as legislation does: seven states now battle over Colorado River allocations that will determine which cities thrive and which farms survive. During COVID-19, we learned that semiconductor shortages in Taiwan could halt American auto production, that a single blocked canal in Egypt could disrupt global commerce, and that the geography of meatpacking plants could determine virus spread across entire regions. How can citizens evaluate trade policy, immigration reform, or climate legislation without understanding the geographic realities that underlie them?
Critics might argue that geography education too often meant rote memorization of capitals and rivers, or that GPS has rendered such knowledge obsolete. These objections miss the point entirely. Geographic literacy isn't about memorizing facts but about understanding systems: how watersheds shape water rights, how mountain ranges influence political boundaries, how proximity to ports determines economic development. GPS can tell you where you are, but it cannot tell you why that place matters, how it came to be, or what forces shape its future.
But geographic literacy is not just about reading a map of the world. It is also about being able to read the environment around you, to understand how the spaces you inhabit are delivering subtle messages about power, priorities, and possibilities. For students arriving at university these weeks, it is worth asking: are your classrooms front-facing, or are they arranged in a circle? Is each student "pointed" at their instructor, or do they have a clear view of their fellow students' faces? What departments and administrative wings are gathered around your university's central quad? Can you accurately guess which buildings came first, and which are newer? Is your campus surrounded by a gate, with only a few ways in? Or can any passerby walk or drive onto it? Are your study spaces enclosed and hidden, or are they surrounded by glass, creating a fishbowl with you at the center? Are your science laboratories housed in buildings that match their surroundings, or do they rise above campus like towering monoliths?
These arrangements of space and architecture speak volumes about institutional values and pedagogical philosophies. A seminar room arranged in a circle models democratic deliberation; a gated campus suggests exclusivity over community engagement; glass-walled study spaces privilege surveillance over solitude. Understanding these spatial messages and questioning them is practice for reading the broader geographic forces that shape political and social life. When students can decode their campus geography, they're better equipped to recognize how gerrymandered districts dilute democratic representation or how highway placement can segregate communities for generations.
Many assume geography no longer matters, with much of our social and learning lives taking place online. We seem to inhabit a borderless world of feeds and streams. This is an illusion. The smartphones and platforms that make such life possible depend on cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lithium extraction in Chile's Atacama Desert, and rare earth processing in China. Data centers consume 200 terawatt hours annually, enough to power Argentina, and cluster near rivers for cooling and cheap hydroelectric power. Even our information has geography: undersea cables carrying 99% of international data follow colonial-era shipping routes, creating vulnerabilities that nations exploit. Social media algorithms create distinct "information geographies," serving different content to users in Bangalore than in Boston, shaping political realities as surely as any border wall.
Consider the residents of Newton County, Georgia, whose water taps began to run dry when Meta built a data center nearby, consuming 500,000 gallons daily. Or ask Ireland, where data centers now use more electricity than all rural homes combined. To ignore these realities leaves students unprepared for a world where digital sovereignty depends on server locations, where authoritarian regimes use geographic internet restrictions to control information, and where a single ship stuck in the Suez Canal can trigger a global recession.
The strongest argument for geography education is ultimately humane. Geography restores a sense of orientation in a world that can feel dizzying and fragmented. It cultivates empathy by showing how other people live in relation to their landscapes: why Bangladeshi farmers adapt to seasonal floods, how Swiss villages negotiate avalanche zones, what makes Phoenix's growth possible despite its desert location. It grounds young people, reminding them that life is lived in neighborhoods, nations, and ecosystems, not in abstractions or algorithmic feeds. When students understand how soil quality shapes Midwest voting patterns or how proximity to toxic waste sites correlates with race and income, they become citizens capable of pursuing environmental justice. Geography affirms our shared humanity by situating individuals within a larger, interconnected whole while warning against environmental determinism, the dangerous notion that geography is destiny rather than context.
Educators should treat geography as essential, not optional. Curricula must integrate geography across the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. States like Texas and Colorado have shown it's possible, implementing standards that connect local landscapes to global systems. Schools should invest in teacher training that emphasizes geographic literacy, and universities without meaningful concentrations of faculty whose research and teaching center around place ought to acquire them as soon as possible. Students should master not just how to read maps but how to analyze border-making practices, watershed management, and the geographic dimensions of inequality. They should use Geographic Information Systems to map food deserts in their communities, track urban heat islands that coincide with redlined neighborhoods, and understand how their congressional districts came to have such peculiar shapes.
Above all, geography must be taught as civic preparation, to ground the rising generation in the world as it is: textured, bounded, and interconnected. At a time of global upheaval and domestic fragmentation, geography is not merely another subject in the curriculum, just as living in and with the dynamics of one's place is something from which not even the most chronically online of us can opt out. It is the map by which Americans can once again find their bearings, not just as consumers in a global economy or users on digital platforms, but as citizens rooted in real places, responsible for real communities, capable of charting democracy's course through an uncertain terrain.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.
Isaiah Ellis is a professor of Urban Religions at Southern Methodist University.
Graph: global shipping routes, modified from graphic accessed at Wikimedia, under CC 3.0 License.
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