Dreaming of the Capital of Mozambique

I was gratified to read the other day that geography is being reinstated in our schools as a major subject.

I never knew it had been dropped, or downgraded, although I was aware that many young people today don’t even know where San Jose is, much less Bangladesh.

I was wondering how they could ever grow up to work the Sunday crossword puzzles if they didn’t know the location of the Atlas Mountains, the Gobi Desert and the Tasman Sea.

In grammar school I always liked geography better than any other subject, and I believe I can still recite the capitals of every country in South America, including Brazil, though its capital has changed from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia since I was a boy.

Geography is not only the study of nations but also of continents, mountain ranges, bodies of water, deserts, gorges, peninsulas, islands, rain forests, savannahs, rivers and other of Earth’s wondrous features.

Despite the mobility of our times, most Los Angeles children grow up right here, rarely venturing farther away than Disneyland. So geography, for most children, must be taken on faith.

How does a child know, for example, that there is really a place called China, or that there is a St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, or an Eiffel Tower in Paris, or, for that matter, that there are any such places as Rome and Paris?

I always believed that faraway places existed; partly, perhaps, because I was a great reader of fairy tales, and, later, of National Geographic magazine, mostly because of its remarkably educational photographs of such places as Borneo and Samoa, where young women walked about with their bosoms bare. National Geographic not only gave me my basic education in geography, but also in the beauty of the opposite sex. I have been fascinated by both subjects ever since.

Except for a road trip I made with my family to Missouri in 1929, or thereabouts, I never traveled enough to verify any of the distant places I had learned about in geography until I was 20, when I went to sea as a scullion.

I remember the morning we sighted Oahu, and I knew, for sure, at last, that the Hawaiian Islands were out there just where our geography book had said they were. On that same voyage I also verified the existence of Samoa, the Fijis, New Zealand and Australia.

I knew then that the world was very much as it had been portrayed in our books. I knew that there must be an Amazon River, a Sahara, a place called Tibet, and a New York City. Not everything we learn in school can be so graphically verified. The theories of Sigmund Freud, for example.

Of course, children today have the world brought to them by television, which is much more graphic and vivid than the pictures were in our geography books, or even in National Geographic. But there is more to geography than pictures.

I don’t pretend to know much about geography anymore. The last time I looked Africa had more than 50 countries, the names of which, much less their capitals, I could not possibly recall.

When I was in school the map of Africa, like much of Asia and about one-quarter of the entire globe, was safely colored British pink. I still have a framed Mercator’s projection of a world in which the sun never set on the British Empire.

I wonder how many children living in Los Angeles today have any notion of where they are in relation to the rest of the world.

Mike Welds of Fullerton recalls an incident that illustrates this geographical ignorance even among the academic community.

Having recently graduated from the University of Washington, he was a guest among other graduate students at a faculty social hour at Columbia University.

“A charming older faculty wife introduced herself and said, ‘Mr. Welds, I understand that you are from out West.’ I nodded. The lovely lady continued, ‘I have a married sister who lives out West. In Buffalo.’ ”

I was the goat of a similar experience when I was in grammar school. The teacher had asked every pupil in her class to say where his or her family was from.

“Back East,” I piped up.

“Oh?” the teacher said with an anticipatory smile, evidently being from back East herself. “Where back East?”

“Colorado,” I said.

I couldn’t understand why she burst out laughing.

All right--what’s the capital of Afghanistan?

And did you know that Reno is west of Los Angeles?