Geog Lesson

 Geography never appealed to me in school, therefore, I opted for History.  Neither, in my day, connected the Whys over the Whens and Whats. It was a matter of memorizing dates and major wars. Now after the schooling days are over,  we see the flaws in the lessons. The flaws are relatively harmless. The dates we memorized faded when we left school and we recall little about our years of cumbersome lessons. The fault is that the lessons didn't go further than mere names and numbers, times and locations.  Geography school lessons, when later, you travel the world, become the reality that was needed originally. Travel is the true geography lesson because it puts you in an actual place and lets you  feel and absorb  the environment of a place. It's the true geography. The "geography" of a people, nurtures those within its sphere. Where you are in the world, holds the people who live there, literally off the land. You experience what they eat, what the land and water produce according to the weather of the area, and how the people work on its "skin" or under it. You breathe their air and drink their water and sense everything that their surroundings permit, according to its use. We learn that people are so close to their geography that they are it. When they are taken from it, they are never comfortable and yearn to return. They may want to escape the politics of their country but they love their land. The land is not little lines and blobs of water that must be coloured blue as in school lessons. It is not about the dots to memorize, that are cities and towns and the black dotted or wiggly or straight lines that are rails and roads. The actual places live, they move, they have scent and sensation. They crawl with the humanity that made their histories whether denoted as good or bad. Places or land,  can't be erased like the lines on paper we worked on in our books, that determine  boundaries. We learned in school that as wars came and went, boundaries changed but the geography remained. If somehow when we are "educated" we could see more than numbers and name, but the ways of life, the work and the culture, we would perhaps love more of what we learn and hunger for more. I think that teachers who do this for their students, are truly teaching something that matters in forming our young to see and make the world a closer place. Why we are so wrapped up in dates and names and memorizing them to receive good marks, is ridiculous when what the people were like and why they were so, matters most. You can easily carry around with you a historical time line that shows you the numerical data. We all forget most of the dates of our essays at school anyway. I recall seeing checked off in the margins, test points toward getting an A the more dates you could drum up. They were soon forgotten.  What did impress us was when a teacher, if we were lucky, showed us the importance of the times and events that occurred on the land, to the people who lived on it and why they did what they did, in creating their histories. To hone in on what life was like as a serf or a king or a slave or an aborigine and what the true meaning of that lifestyle was to those who lived there is what is most interesting.  Until movies came along that portrayed the truths we didn't touch in schools about those who lived on the lands, we drew maps of or took notes on and memorized numbers, we didn't truly realize what it was like to be oppressed or ruled or regaled. The best entertainment films later, brought us right into the lives of those who went about in their lands and made history. From them we learned that the people grew out of the very soil. It formed them as they were forming their lands. The people are the lesson.