Note on Maps 



GEOGRAPHY as currently taught in our schools is in many re- 

 spects not satisfactory either from a purely cultural point of 

 view or as a practical guide to the average man in the contemporary 

 world. Comparatively little geography at all is taught today, and 

 most of the other subjects presented to our young people sorely 

 lack an adequate geographical background. That which is presented 

 is sadly unimaginative and usually very biased in approach. Almost 

 all popular maps and educational atlases devote ninety-nine per cent 

 of their space to the political aspects of the world, and almost all 

 maps are displayed from a single point of view physically — namely 

 with the North Pole at the top of the page. This is often grossly 

 misleading. 



The coming of the air age has given great impetus to a reappraisal 

 of our planet and to the construction of maps showing its surface 

 from novel angles. In this, a few popular pubUcations — we would 

 single out news weeklies such as Time and Newsweek — have done 

 great service by bringing to the public simple, lucid, well-drawn 

 and often colorful maps viewed from all sorts of angles that present 

 current political and geographical problems as they really appear to 

 those faced with their solution. For instance, a map of a country as 

 seen by a bomber-plane navigator often looks nothing like a map 

 of that country in a school atlas. 



Then again, the mere distribution of land and water and their alti- 

 tudes or depths are not the only physical features of the earth that 

 can be shown on maps, and most atlases devote some, if only mini- 

 mum space to a few general features such as winds and ocean cur- 

 rents, human population, vegetation, and so forth. For the most 

 part, however, the emphasis is upon land surfaces and very little 



