Education through Maps The Challenges of Knowing and Understanding the World

Abstract: The overall purpose of this thesis is to study, in relation to geography education and with a historical perspective, the challenges of knowing and understanding the world. The cases are all from Sweden. In the first paper, educational ideas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are studied, and the results indicate that some of the previously criticised educational ideas that were perceived as resulting from the ideas of nineteenth century regional geography in fact can be observed in earlier centuries and were criticised during the nineteenth century. In the second paper, school children’s ability to locate geographical names on outline maps is compared with children’s ability to complete the same task 45 years earlier. A total of 1,124 students were included in the latter study, and the results were compared with those from a study of 1,200 students from the same town conducted in 1968. The results raise questions regarding the picture of the continuous decline in children’s school results and show, for example, that children today are better at locating continents on a world map. The final paper identifies a new aspect of map reading difficulties. These difficulties in map reading are increasingly important in our global society, i.e., how the edges of the world map cohere. The paper shows that many map readers, children and adults, respond according to the idea of linear peripheral continuity, which indicates that the proposed continuation is along the straight line that continues tangentially to the original route when it crosses the edge. In general, this understanding leads to incorrect interpretations of the continuation of world maps.