There are manyvideoson the internet making fun of people in the United States for their ignorance about geography. There is even atrendon the Tik Tok application about this. But how much is due to an educational problem and how much because of the way geography was taught? What impact can this subject have on a person's worldview?

Much of the problem arises because United States citizens do not recognize America as a continent, which annoys Latin Americans (and rightly so). However, this confusion is due to the way they are taught geography. Like people in other countries such as Australia and England, they believe that there are seven continents, namely, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. In contrast, countries like Mexico are taught that there are five: Africa, Europe, Asia, America, and Oceania/Australia. In Japan, people learn that there are six continents: Africa, Antarctica, Australia/Oceania, Eurasia, North America, and South America.

How the world's division is presented is an essential part of how knowledge of the world is organized. The fact that there are so many differences explains the discontent surrounding the subject.

Even the Olympic Games'logoincludes five interconnected rings representingfive inhabited continents, but which are these, and why is there no universal agreement about what are the continents?

What is a continent, and how is it divided?

To understand why there are so many discrepancies in the number of continents, we must understand what the word "continent" means.

The American Institute of Geosciencesdefines a continent as "one of the planet's main landmasses, including the drylands and continental platforms." Other Anglo-Saxonpagesdefine it as "a large uninterrupted landmass surrounded by water." Even the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) describes it the same way, "Every one of the large tracts of land separated by the oceans." According to this second definition, North and South America should be one continent, just like Eurasia.

Geopolitics is one factor influencing the number of continents, depending on the source and the country. For example, all models consider Africa a continent. Europe and Asia are one sizeable continental mass. They can be taken as two continents, even while77%of Russia is in Asia and is a transcontinental country partly in Europe.

Another model divides the land masses according to thetectonicplates. There are 15 tectonic plates, of which seven have about ten million square miles and correspond approximately to the continents' shapes above them, following the model of seven continents.

Continents or cultural regions? Physical vs. cultural geography.

Although these classifications are somewhat arbitrary and debatable, it is essential to have a designation of the world by zones that serve as a starting point for more information, such as what the countries are like, their cultures, art, food, ethnicity, and businesses, etc. These aspects tend to make people generalize the attributes of people in the continents, for example, to believe that all of South America speaks Spanish, including Brazil, which does not.

Other examples may be to say "Asian food," rather than Japanese or Chinese, or to describe "African music" or "European art." These generalizations even apply to people, describing someone with almond-shaped eyes as having Asiatic features without considering that India is also in Asia. The people there generally do not have almond-shaped eyes.

One way to see the world is byregion, something that geographers do to facilitate their studies. In this model, there are eight regions, namely, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa, Europe, North America, Central America and the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Australia and Oceania.

Philip Bouchard, educator, writer, and software designer, writes that if the world were divided into cultural regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, South Asia (consisting of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), and the Middle East (from Morocco to parts of Afghanistan); it would be easier to sort the world and categorize the countries by culture.

America's case is more complicated. According to Bouchard, several people in the United States draw the line between North and South America at the southern extremity of Mexico. They do not include the countries of Central America in North America; yet, it is part of their standard geographical definition. If America were to be divided by cultural regions, the Central American countries are part of Latin America. The rest would be Anglo-America, composed of the United States and Canada.

Then there would be the following regions:

Europe

Middle East

Sub-Saharan Africa

South Asia

Oriental Asia or East Asia

Anglo-America

Latin America

To reach his conclusion, Bouchard focused on the following three concepts:

1) Each defined region must occupy a contiguous area of land.

2) Each region should be home to hundreds of millions of people.

3) A flat (non-hierarchical) model like this works best when the whole is divided into about seven parts, although it may have plus or minus one or two.

The above criteria, however, do not include Australia or island nations. If the adjoining land area requirement were removed, for example, Australia could be grouped with Anglo-America and England. The writer concludes by saying that traditional models based on physical geography are not ideal for learning about cultural geography. Understanding this concept helps to understand the world better and the ability to absorb details more quickly and have more accurate cultural generalizations.

The other side of geography: the maps

Learning geography goes beyond cultural regions or defining continents. Reading a map also has a significant impact on the way the world is observed. Plans are a teaching tool that are visual representations that shape the way the planet is understood.

Maps represent information, but their interpretation varies greatly depending on the context and the type. As on continents, there are different versions of plans, and they have different impacts on how people see the world.

Harley and Woodwarddescribethem, saying, "Maps are graphical representations that facilitate a spatial understanding of things, concepts, conditions, processes or events in the human world."

There are physical maps that show details and identify physical characteristics like rivers and mountains, and geographic ones that demonstrate landmasses. Political maps focus on dividing territories into concepts such as local authorities, states, and countries. Others are divided by language to highlight dialects in a physical area or country, and weather maps show things like sun, clouds, rain, and much more.

Historically, geographic maps have served to illustrate different points in time and the priorities of the creators, such as including a larger or smaller country. The HistorianDirk Raatdescribes how the Old World peoples, "the medieval Europeans and their New World counterparts organized space according to philosophical and religious principles." This means that the maps represent more than the landmasses. They include how people see themselves and their beliefs concerning the land they occupy, demonstrating that the maps have an inherently social and political weight.

The geographic maps are distorted.

In 1569, Gerhardus Mercator, a European cartographer, created a world map that remains popular today, theMercator Projection. It has straight lines that represent constant directions on the surface of the earth, helping to navigate but not to visualize the sizes of the masses.

Read more:

The Impact of Geography on our Worldview - Observatory of Educational Innovation