From the Archives - 'Teaching Geography: A Valuable Enterprise' (1997)

I first wrote about this topic in the late 1980s. This article appeared in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot on April 7, 1997, under the headline "Teaching Geography: A Valuable Enterprise."

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Lord Chesterfield, the 18th century English statesman, once remarked: "The world can doubtless never be well known by theory: practice is absolutely necessary; but surely it is of great use to a young man, before he sets out for that country, full of mazes, windings and turnings, to have at least a general map of it, made by some experienced traveller.''

Healy Tower, Georgetown University

When I was a child in elementary school, my teachers insisted that my classmates and I draw maps of all the major countries and regions of the world. Being all thumbs when it comes to handling a crayon or pencil, my grades were always low, mostly Cs. Nonetheless, I learned geography: I learned where things are and the relationship of one thing to another.

Today's students are apparently not being taught where things are. The serious teaching of geography in the schools seems to have disappeared. This is distressing.

For example, a few years ago at the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University - America's premier institution for the teaching of international affairs, alma mater of President Bill Clinton - almost a third of the brightest and most competitive freshmen in the school's history failed a basic geography test, even after taking a one-credit course in the subject. Earlier, of the 225 students who tried to test out of the course, only 23 passed, and of those, 16 were not U.S. citizens.

The questions on this exam were not difficult, but basic: What is the capital of China? Where is the Persian Gulf? Who are the two main ethnic groups of Cyprus? Through what countries does the Danube River flow?

Other, similar tests and surveys show similarly disturbing results. Many high school students tested a couple of years ago could not find the United States on a world map, a good fraction pointed to Brazil as the answer.

The consequences of this ignorance are grave. As Georgetown Dean Charles E. Pirtle put it, "How can we expect our students to understand news reports out of the Persian Gulf when they don't know where it is, much less where Kuwait, Bahrain and the Straits of Hormuz are?''

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick notes that "many of our most bitter foreign-policy disputes are a direct consequence of the fact that Americans decided sometime not to study geography anymore. It is impossible to think sensibly about foreign affairs without knowing what is where.''

Jeane Kirkpatrick photo by Rick Sincere

Ambassador Kirkpatrick explains: "In foreign policy, geography is destiny. What gives the U.S. a vastly different stake in Nicaragua than in, say, Burundi? Burundi is my example of a very remote place. I have been there, and I can testify that it is a very remote place. I do not think we should be indifferent to the hardships of its people, but I do believe that Burundi is less important to us than Nicaragua. The difference is rooted in geography.''

Knowledge about the static facts of geography - as real estate brokers say, "location, location, location'' - is important because other social factors can be so fluid and dynamic. When Ambassador Kirkpatrick commented on the differences between Nicaragua and Burundi, a Marxist regime in Nicaragua was threatening the security of the United States and its allies in the Western Hemisphere. Today, Nicaragua is free (if still troubled) while Burundi is amidst a maelstrom of conflict and pestilence that includes refugee flows, civil war in neighboring Zaire and Rwanda and endemic ethnic violence. Yet without knowing the facts about these countries - territorial size, population, economic products and neighbors - we cannot wisely judge the importance of recent changes and coming trends. As citizens, we cannot make well-grounded decisions about U.S. policy toward these places.

The new standards of learning and standards of accreditation for Virginia schools include a renewed emphasis on geography (among the other social sciences). The new standards suggest strongly that geography be taught in grade 10, although the Arlington public schools have a nationally recognized, model program that requires geography in grade 8. The Arlington sequence is more logical than the state's version, because teaching geography in eighth grade girds students with the conceptual tools and facts they need to learn world history, economics and other high school subjects. Every Arlington student I have encountered remembers the geography course fondly, and all agree that it definitely prepared them for future studies.

The task of other Virginia schools is clear: Reintroduce geography teaching as a separate discipline with an emphasis on facts. Children should be able to name the state capitals at an early age, the capitals of foreign countries soon afterward, and by high school should be able to fill in the blanks on a world map, naming oceans and rivers, mountain ranges and islands, cities and nations. Should we expect less?

Memo: Richard Sincere is co-chair of the Social Studies Advisory Committee for Arlington Public Schools.

From the Archives: Lamar Alexander honored for his work promoting civics, history education

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on March 5, 2015. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site was scheduled to go dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Lamar Alexander honored for his work promoting civics, history education

Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander (R) accepted the 2015 John M. Ashbrook Award bestowed by the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University in a brief ceremony at the Library of Congress on March 4.

The Ohio-based Ashbrook Center has presented the annual award since 1983, when the first recipient was President Ronald Reagan. Other recipients have included Speaker of the House John Boehner, former Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, and former Vice President Dan Quayle, as well as journalist M. Stanton Evans, who died on March 3.

In presenting the award, Ashbrook Center executive director Roger L. Beckett explained that, about ten years ago, as a result of legislation sponsored by Senator Alexander, the center competed for and received the first federal grant to administer congressional and presidential academies for teachers of American history and civics. From that first grant, which allowed 50 teachers (one from each state) to further their own educations, the Ashbrook Center's programs now include 4,000 middle- and high school teachers annually.

Beckett said Alexander was chosen to receive the 2015 award “for his integrity of thought and action, for his devotion to principle, and for his dedication to teaching the next generation about what it means to be an American.”

'What it means to be an American'
Alexander recalled that the subject of his maiden speech on the floor of the United States Senate “was the importance of teaching U.S. history in our schools so our children could grow up knowing what it means to be an American.” He noted that the lowest test scores for high school seniors “are not in math or science. They're in United States history.”

He conceded that “there's not much the federal government ought to try to do about that in local schools” because that kind of involvement at the local level is “not a very good Republican, federalist idea.”

He explained that he was inspired to sponsor congressional and presidential academies for school teachers, one from each state, to learn more about American history and how to teach it better.

Sense of history
He found an ally in the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), who, he said, “had a great sense of American history” and worked to find 21 Democratic cosponsors for Alexander's bill and helped to get it passed – ultimately resulting in the Ashbrook Center's first grant to administer the teacher education program.

Senator Alexander – who was Secretary of Education under George H.W. Bush and is now chairman of the Senate Education Committee – also recalled being at a conference in 1988 when someone asked, “What is the rationale for the public school?”

There was “stunned silence around the room,” he remembered, until Albert Shanker, then the president of the American Federation of Teachers, said, “A public school is for the purpose of teaching immigrant children reading, writing, and arithmetic, and what it means to be an American, with the hope that they'll go home and teach their parents.”

That, Alexander said, is “such a great definition of what we should be doing in our public schools.”

In addition to Lamar Alexander, three previous recipients of the John M. Ashbrook Award were present at the Capitol Hill reception: Lee Edwards, David Keene, and John Von Cannon.

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Original URL: http://www.examiner.com/article/lamar-alexander-honored-for-his-work-promoting-civics-history-education

Presidents at Notre Dame - Now, and Then

In reaction to President Barack Obama's address to the graduates at the University of Notre Dame this past Sunday, I have an opinion article in the commentary section of the Washington Examiner today. (It's on page 19 of the print edition, for those of you in the D.C. metro area who would like to pick it up and see it in full color, with accompanying photographs.)

The article, headlined "Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama at Notre Dame," notes that when President Carter spoke at the Indiana university more than three decades ago, his speech (about a "new" approach to U.S. foreign policy) was given analytical treatment in a full-length book just a few months later.

The article begins:

When President Barack Obama addressed the graduates of the University of Notre Dame Sunday, it was the first time in 32 years that a Democratic president had done so.

On May 22, 1977, President Jimmy Carter delivered an address on foreign policy at Notre Dame. Carter’s appearance was not marked by the sort of controversy that accompanied President Obama this year, nor was it the subject of the 24-hour news cycle.

Carter’s speech, however, was seen as sufficiently significant that a whole book of responses was published a few months later by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The book, Morality and Foreign Policy: A Symposium on President Carter's Stance, included such contributors as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Kissinger, Irving Kristol, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Limited space in the pages of the Examiner caused me to exclude some of the erudite, perspicacious, and even juicy comments made by the authors collected in Morality and Foreign Policy. Let me offer a few samples.

It has become something of a commonplace, and a jocular one at that, to make facile comparisons between the Carter and Obama administrations, especially with regard to foreign policy. (The comparisons were raised even before the 2008 election as a warning to voters about Candidate Obama.)

Thus it was somewhat jarring to read this paragraph in the essay by Charles Burton Marshall, author of The Limits of Foreign Policy and The Exercise of Sovereignty, in his essay entitled "The Valor of Ignorance." Substitute the word “Obama” for “Carter” and this reference to political messianism could have been written yesterday – or next week – rather than in 1977:

“Sooner or later events will demonstrate even to the tight inner circle that the Carter administration no more knows the secret for walking on water around the world than it has a formula for cleansing the public service or any other manifestation of the Old Adam The self-enthrallment then will cease.”

Another comment whose echoes we here today came from the legendary editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley, whose essay was called "Reflecting the Eastern Establishment":

“Almost certainly it is a mistake to look to President Carter’s professed morality to explain our concerns about his foreign policy. His version of morality is not that sharp a departure, and on experience so far not that powerful a force in shaping his policies. We would do better to worry about sheer inexperience.”

John P. Roche, then dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, tried to set Carter’s speech in a wider context in his contribution, "A Lack of Ideological Roots":

“As a thirty-year veteran who long since reached the conviction that commencement addresses were drafted by computers, I am certain I have heard this one four times. Indeed, had I absorbed it without advance information on the source, I might have attributed it to Eleanor Roosevelt, Arthur Goldberg, Harold Stassen, or George McGovern. (At half an hour it was a bit brief for Hubert Humphrey, God bless him.) In short, it was standard commencement pap by an American ‘statesman’: ‘Speech 5c—American Policy, Morality, and the World (for use at a liberal religious school).’”

Roche went on to say:

“Part of Mr. Carter’s problem in world politics is the lack of any ideological roots, a weakness which has been buttressed by a McGovernite ‘issues staff’ which sincerely believes that the world began in January 1977, when they took office. In this state of historical amnesia it is hard to deal with the degrees on the scale between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’”

While generally content with the themes underlying President Carter’s remarks, Jeane Kirkpatrick -- at the time on leave from the Department of Government at Georgetown University and later to become Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations -- raised six questions demanding clarification or explication in her essay, "Selective Invocation of Universal Values." One was this:

“Why does the President think that ‘a peaceful world cannot exist one third rich and two thirds hungry’? The implication is that the frustration of poor nations causes war. In fact that the notion that poverty causes war doesn’t wash. Poverty causes hardship, suffering, and death … but there is little evidence to support the notion that it causes war… Poverty is abominable, not because it leads to war, but because it perpetuates human misery. We can approach problems of war and poverty more effectively if we are clear about the relationships between them.”

The two contributors most sharply critical of Carter’s speech were Michael Novak and Eugene V. Rostow. (One of Rostow's key points is featured in my Examiner piece.)

Novak, then a religion professor at Syracuse University and later author of the insightful book, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, said in his response ("The March of Defeat") that Carter's Notre Dame address

“is a profoundly embarrassing and disturbing speech…. [The] President’s vision is deficient. It is deficient both in realism and fact. It is deficient in its moral vision. The President uses the word moral and its cognates – values, principles, social justice, and the like – very heavily indeed. But he does not use them well.”

Later in his essay, he added:

“One of the best ways to create an immoral foreign policy is to try too hard for a moral one.”

Rostow, who served in the Johnson Administration’s State Department and, by the beginning of the Carter administration was chairman of the executive committee of the Committee on the Present Danger, wrote in "Ignoring Soviet Realities" that

“President Carter’s Notre Dame speech is his most ambitious attempt thus far to define the American national interest in its course. The speech is deeply flawed: inconsistent; incomplete; and excessive in its claims of novelty…. The speech lacks any conception of the relationship between power and morality in international affairs.”

Ronald Berman, once chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, parsed the language of Carter’s speech. In "Confusing Domestic and Foreign Policy," he wrote:

“Where the language of this speech is moralistic,” he said, “it tends to have an effect just about the opposite to that intended: By devaluing our past motives it makes our present ones suspicious. How reliable can policy be which is based upon the acceptance of our moral fallibility?”

In a paragraph that timelessly retains its relevance, Burt Marshall, pondering whether disappointment might follow the non-fulfillment of the president’s high-flying rhetoric, noted that the

“distinction [between cynicism and skepticism] is important. A cynic shrugs off differences between right and wrong as merely conventional – a sham, as it were. A skeptic acknowledges such differences as real, but regards them to be often complex and subtle, and refuses to arrive at judgments on the basis of declaratory evidence only. Cynicism goes hand in hand with ennui. Skepticism kindles the critical spirit. Every one of us should be skeptical about foreign policy, because that attitude is what helps exact proper performance from those conducting it.”

Re-reading this book after some 30 years -- I began working at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in September 1979, and the Center's publications were readily available to read and absorb -- what struck me was how, despite their later affiliations and identifications, so many of the authors were (at least in 1977) firmly identified as Democrats, even if they later became more associated with the neo-conservative movement of the 1980s and, directly or indirectly, with the Reagan administration.

The book's editor, Ernest W. Lefever, had been a foreign policy advisor to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Rostow, as was noted, worked in the State Department under Dean Rusk. John P. Roche had been an advisor to President Lyndon Johnson. Although he served Republican presidents, Daniel Patrick Moynihan served in the U.S Senate as a Democrat from New York. Michael Novak had been a speechwriter for George McGovern. Jeane Kirkpatrick held on to her affiliation with the Democratic Party even through her tenure as UN Ambassador, up till (and perhaps including) when she icily invoked the "San Francisco Democrats" at the 1984 Republican National Convention. Irving Kristol, of course, is famous for coining the definition of a neo-conservative as "a liberal who was mugged by reality."

Except for Bartley, Berman, and Kissinger, I could not put my finger on another contributor to Morality and Foreign Policy who might be Republican. (I am not aware of any partisan affiliation of Roger L. Shinn, the last of the contributors, who at the time was Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary.)

It is hard to imagine a collection of Democratic scholars or activists today, coming together in an edited volume of essays criticizing Barack Obama for the policies he outlined in his speech at Notre Dame on May 17. Partisans of both Republican and Democratic stripes treat their top leaders with kid gloves. Just as Republicans -- with a few exceptions, such as Ron Paul -- were loathe to criticize George W. Bush even as he was abandoning conservative principles on issues like the economy, education, and foreign interventionism, so too are Democrats today unlikely to say an unkind word about President Obama's initiatives. (Disgruntled borborygmi in the blogosphere don't really count, do they?) It may not just be nostalgia that suggests that "in the olden days" policy debates were conducted more civilly and with less of a bipolar division than we see today. We may be remembering the past accurately when we say that.

Despite its being nearly 32 years old, Morality and Foreign Policy's essays are remarkably fresh. (The fact that President Carter in his address and several of the respondants speak at length about U.S. policy toward Iran and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes it eerily relevant, too.) While some references might be dated -- South Korea is now a thriving democracy, not an authoritarian dictatorship, for instance -- the foundational analysis of the contributors remains strong and applicable to the 21st century's international environment.

Morality and Foreign Policy is a slim volume (just 76 pages) but it is densely packed with insight. Look for it in a used book store or order it through Amazon.com. It will be worth the effort.

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Blast from the Past

While going through some old VHS videotapes in my collection -- many of them with no identifying marks -- I came across this promotional video made for the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1985, shortly after the Center published my first book.

This is a fascinating look back at the political climate of the mid-1980s. While many of the domestic issues discussed in the video are still current (especially with regard to education policy), images of the menacing Soviet threat seem like a relic from another century -- which, of course, they are -- but no less frightening for that.

Besides myself, this video includes cameo appearances by Ronald Reagan, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Bill Bennett, Casper Weinberger, Chester Finn, Linda Chavez, Orrin Hatch, Yonas Deressa, Ethiopian bishop Abba Mathias, and others. EPPC staff members who appear and in the video include founding president Ernest W. Lefever and Robert Royal, now with the Faith and Reason Institute. Alert viewers might catch a passing glance of other staffers, such as Raymond English, Carol Griffith, and Margaret Webb. Really alert viewers will see the faces of Elaine Rendler, David Rothbard, John Chettle, John Montgomery, and various journalists, think-tank scholars, and academics in the scenes of seminars and conferences.

What is refreshing about this video, which was, as I said, made for promotional purposes, is that there is no direct appeal for financial contributions to the Center. This was no doubt what the Center's directors had in mind when they authorized the video's production, but their reticence to ask for money in so many words is admirable.

What is striking, too, about the video is that it is more than just a brochure-made-for-television. It has a narrative arc, as a good documentary film should have, and it ties together its disparate elements in a thematic fashion. It does so effectively. I don't know -- or, rather, don't remember -- who wrote the script, but whoever it was should be proud of the accomplishment. It wouldn't win an Oscar for Best Documentary-Short Subject, but it is well-crafted and much better than similar videos of this genre from that era.

A small portion of this video could be used as a commercial for my book, The Politics of Sentiment. It also includes a snippet of my first appearance on CNN, in an early incarnation of Crossfire with Pat Buchanan and Tom Braden (the inspiration for the character played by Dick Van Patten on Eight Is Enough). My opponent in the crossfire that evening was Dr. Helen Caldicott of Physicians for Social Responsibility and we were discussing civil defense policy. Somewhere I have a Betamax recording of that entire program, and I am flummoxed as far as figuring out how to convert it to DVD and then to AVI or Windows Media.

(At nearly 13 minutes, this clip is too long to post on YouTube in one piece, but fortunately Blogger now includes video upload capability. This is my first attempt to post a video directly through Blogger, rather than posting it on YouTube first and then embedding the code in my blogpost. You bloggers will understand the difference.)

Jeane Kirkpatrick Dead at 80

I heard a breaking news story on WMAL-AM in Washington just a few minutes ago: Former Georgetown professor Jeane J. Kirkpatrick has died. She was 80 years old.

Best known as the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations during the Reagan Administration, Kirkpatrick had an acerbic style that endeared her to anti-Communist conservatives and drove her political opponents up the wall. A neo-conservative when that term did not have negative connotations, Kirkpatrick was one of the Scoop Jackson Democrats who joined forces with the Republican party in the late 1970s and early 1980s on issues related to the Cold War.

Kirkpatrick was a solid intellectual force who was a popular teacher in her years on Georgetown's campus (both before and after her tenure as UN Ambassador). Her speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention put the term "San Francisco Democrats" into the nation's political lexicon years before anyone had heard of Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Fox News reports that Kirkpatrick's death

was announced Friday at the senior staff meeting of the U.S. mission to the United Nations.

Spokesman Richard Grenell said that Ambassador John Bolton asked for a moment of silence. An announcement of her death also was posted on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-oriented think tank here where she was a senior fellow.

Kirkpatrick's assistant, Andrea Harrington, said that she died in her sleep at home in Bethesda, Md. late Thursday. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Ambassador Kirkpatrick's commencement speech on the day I was graduated from Georgetown University.