Though the book itself best explains its methods and objectives, a few matters of policy should be mentioned briefly here. Fundamental to the plan and point of view of World Geography is the conviction that geography should be presented to secondary-school students as a living drama and not as a catalogue of dead and disconnected statistics. The odds and ends of encyclopedic information about peoples and places which have so often passed for geography do not constitute geography in any significant sense of the word.
One has daily reminders of the fact that geography is still widely conceived as a body of dead statistical information. People are constantly asking, "How can a geography be written while the world is changing so rapidly and so radically?" "Bounding" countries had apparently been so large a part of the "geography" which these people had studied in school that the destruction of political boundaries seems to them to be synonymous with the destruction of geography itself. It has apparently never occurred to them that men are related to the earth no matter how boundaries are drawn; that the very shifting of political boundaries is in no small measure a reflection of geographic forces.
To be significant, the study of geography must lead to an understanding of these forces. It must point out the meaning and relationship of geographic facts. It must illuminate clearly the functional interdependence of all peoples and places the world around. This functional interdependence of peoples and places is the soil in which both world war and word peace grow. To understand it is the first need of intelligent citizenship; to explain it is the first responsibility of a course in world geography.
In working out the design of this book, the author realized that to deal effectively with the larger concepts of world geography secondary-school students need more training in the use of the basic tools of geographic science than most of them have had. They need more training in map reading and in the interpretation of charts, graphs, and tables; more and still more knowledge of simple place geography. It was also realized that though secondary-school students are sufficiently mature to think in terms of principles, they must yet be led to an understanding of principles through an abundance of illustrations. Finally, it was realized that even in a geography of world scope the geography of North America should be emphasized.
World Geography and its accompanying workbook and tests were carefully planned to meet these various special requirements. The trees of special requirements, however, were not allowed to obscure the forest of the main objective. That objective was to provide secondary-school students with training in the techniques of thinking geographically about world problems. With such training, Americans should be better able to cope with the world forces which are shaping— and will doubtless continue to shape—their individual and national fate.
J.H.B.