Boston Resets the Standard
It’s a first for North American public schools! Boston has just announced that the Peters World Map will now be standard issue in classrooms system-wide. Here's the fascinating story as reported March 19, 2017 in The Guardian, one of the world’s outstanding international newspapers.
The school system’s ground-breaking decision was also reported in The Boston Globe and by National Public Radio, and overseas by Der Spiegel, a prominent German news magazine. Others will surely be added in the coming days.
Will other school systems follow suit? To ask the question is really to ask, Why should millions of students – just because they happen to live outside Boston, U.S.A. and are not enrolled in that public education system - be brain-washed with distorting views when better maps are available?
In an earlier blog posting we highlighted a forward-looking private school – Mounds Park Academy in St. Paul, Minnesota – that uses maps, including the Peters, creatively.
Other Maps to Open Our Minds
Some of us make this point as forcefully as we can: There are many ways to see the world.
Parag Khanna, whose book Connectography: Mapping the Future of World Civilization I highly recommend, stands high on the list of those who think outside the Mercator box, who see the world with fresh eyes, realistically, provocatively. Esquire Magazine, for example, named him one of the "75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century." (Personal thanks to Jim Taylor, who wrote the helpful group guidance for the print edition of How Maps Change Things, for alerting me to a review of Khanna's book, by Taz Loomans; I now offer it to you, convinced that it will open up new vistas for you too.)
Please note that Khanna wrote his book - and Loomans her review - while Donald Trump and others were vying for the highest office in the USA; I believe these now seems eerily prescient, not just for Americans but for people everywhere.
Smart Cities and a Borderless World: What If Maps Revealed Infrastructure, Not Borders?
So, the world of mapping continues to change, and – equally important – continues to change us and how we live in the world.