The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers a chance for overdue conversations about what schools should teach when it comes to history, government, and social studies. Today, Ashley Berner, the director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, and I discuss how important it is for students in 2026 to know geography, including capitals, states, nations, and continents.
–Rick
Rick: Ashley, do students need to learn “mere facts”? Twenty years ago, in a 2006 TIME Magazine cover story on “How to Bring Our Schools Out of the 20th Century,” the then-dean of Stanford University’s esteemed Graduate School of Education mocked the idea that students should still learn South American geography, Civil War battles, or even the periodic table of elements. Why? As she put it, “You can look it up on Google.” That impulse has taken on extra oomph in the age of AI, when Harvard University’s Howard Gardner is predicting that, by 2050, children won’t need much formal education beyond a few years of “reading, ’riting, ’rithmetic, and a little bit of coding.”
I thought such notions were ludicrous two decades ago, and nothing’s changed. Indeed, a failure to teach bedrock knowledge leaves students adrift in a world of deepfakes and misinformation. A coherent understanding of history, politics, or civics is deeply informed by a sense of time and place. How do you expect someone to make sense of the causes or consequences of the Civil War, Westward Expansion, the Great Migration, the Cold War, or today’s partisan topography without a firm sense of when and where things happened? It’s impossible to talk sensibly about immigration, border enforcement, foreign policy, or tariffs absent a clear sense of physical geography.
Many years ago, when I taught high school world geography, I expected my students to memorize capitals, states, nations, and major geographic features as we studied each continent. Now, this work only consumed 10% or 20% of instructional time, mostly entailing fun drills that got each class off to a rapid start. Indeed, my experience is that students find a dose of memorization both engaging and confidence-building when it’s measured and energetic.
The lion’s share of our time was devoted to primary texts, projects, debates, simulations, and explorations of key economic and religious developments. We’d explore how the Rio Grande, English Channel, oil deposits, or access to fresh water helped to shape history and culture. But this learning rested on a foundation of geographic mastery—of knowing where the Rio Grande or English Channel was and why that mattered. Knowledge and understanding were complements, not competitors.
Ashley, what’s your take on all this?
Ashley: I couldn’t agree with you more. My dad used to say, “If you don’t know geography, you can’t know history. And if you don’t know history, you don’t know anything.” That’s true!
Two brief points. First, usable social studies knowledge is capacious and reaches far beyond a one-year civics course. The National Council for Social Studies defines “social studies” as an “integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence … [a] coordinated, systematic study” that draws on “anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology.” Far too few of our students encounter even a fraction of the content this list implies.
Second, students should learn the spatial and temporal facts you mentioned by heart, so that they can connect the dots across time and space. It’s just not possible to Google important policy disputes in real time when we’re at the voting booth or scanning the front page. We need to walk around with a lot of it inside our heads. The basic infrastructure of historical chronology and geography makes the real magic of history possible.
When my girls were in early elementary in the U.K., I found a hysterical rhyme to help remember the kings and queens of England. “First William the Norman, then William his son; Henry, Stephen, and Henry, then Richard and John. ” The three of us memorized it and can still crack it out at parties. More seriously, knowing that the Norman Invasion occurred in 1066 helps students anchor European history—and provides a point of reference when they study Asian, African, or South American history.
The team I co-lead at Johns Hopkins does extensive work in analyzing ELA and social studies curricula and recommending ways to place specific content front and center. A frequent recommendation from our team? Include a globe and a timeline in every classroom. Refer to them every day. Run classroom quiz bowls for countries and capitals. Help students identify a few anchor events in every century! It matters.
Besides the pedagogical prejudice against learning things by heart, what other barriers have you dealt with?
Rick: The biggest challenge is the weird bias against content mastery. Somehow, too many in and around education have fallen victim to a conviction that knowing stuff just isn’t that important. Worse, there’s a suspicion in some quarters that learning dates, places, speeches, and events is somehow in tension with “critical thought.” This isn’t a new development, but it’s gotten worse in recent years. And it’s not just K–12. In higher education, too, leaders argue for a “seismic shift” in which colleges “transition from a content-based curriculum” to “experiential learning theory.”
The fascination with technology has supersized all of this. It’s fueled the insistence that we should demote traditional content in favor of buzzy, content-free “new” skills like critical thinking, compassion, and communication. The appeal of this shift is obvious, since “new skills” make for exciting grant applications and inspiring keynotes. Trying to help kids master history or geography? Not so much.
I think the GPS is a pretty good illustration of what happens when we simply delegate knowledge to tech. Don’t get me wrong. I rely heavily on GPS-powered tools, from Uber to Google Maps. But I also benefit from decades of first having to manually navigate the world. After all, while GPS is a huge time-saver and massive convenience, it’s also cratered our sense of neighborhoods, direction, and physical geography. GPS or no, students are well-served by learning landmarks, direction, and a sense of place—that’s a big element of retaining autonomy in a world where they’re otherwise dependent on what screens show them or what AI tells them.
Cal Newport, professor of computer science at Georgetown, recently noted that OpenAI demoed various features when it debuted its ChatGPT Agent. He wrote, “At one point, it generated a map, supposedly displaying an itinerary for visiting all thirty Major League Baseball stadiums in North America. Curiously, it included a stop in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico.” That’s a hallucination that I’d like to think anyone would catch. But if you just trust the tech, you’re probably going to miss a lot of less obvious mistakes.
Moreover, the background knowledge here matters. I mean, a lot of discussion of red vs. blue state culture doesn’t make any sense unless you know the topography. The same is true when it comes to debates about national parks, offshore wind projects, or efforts to extend environmental protections. Arguments about redlining, school choice, or “food deserts” don’t make sense unless you know how to read maps and the history of certain neighborhoods. And it’s hard to even begin to make sense about international flashpoints like Ukraine, Taiwan, Venezuela, Greenland, or Israel-Palestine unless they’ve got a sense of the relevant geography.
I’m no Luddite. I’m not dismissing the benefits of new technologies. I am, though, arguing that students still need to know physical geography, in part to preserve the bonds that bind us to the physical world and one another.
Ashley: That’s a “yes” from me, Rick. Let’s just recap what research suggests about the value of learning seminal facts by heart.
First, the amount of background knowledge that students “own” and can retrieve is the key differential in achievement gaps.
Second, background knowledge is inherently subject- and topic-specific rather than thematic or general. It is not vague. It is precise and includes, in history, knowing dates, events, and places to enable higher-order reflection about causes and consequences.
Third, the “just Google it” approach is neither new nor helpful. Different versions have been making the rounds since the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s particularly upsetting that the purveyors of the anti-knowledge dogma, from Herbert Spencer and John Dewey until the present day have often been the beneficiaries of the liberal arts background that they deny to others. Furthermore, sloughing off the hard work of memorizing countries and capitals is detrimental to our basic ability to think, as a terrific paper on the subject explains (with thanks to Natalie Wexler for highlighting it).
Many parents know this instinctively. Look at the rise of the classical school movement; the game-changing work of New York’s Success Academy, whose liberal arts approach drives student success; or the accelerating power of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program in Chicago’s high schools. Expanding access to these high-performing schools and programs is necessary and important.
Finally, shared reference points enable what E.D. Hirsch calls “a common speech community” that makes social and civic interactions possible. We won’t ever have one common narrative about our founding documents, for instance, but all citizens should know what they say. Who’s down to memorize the Declaration of Independence by July 4th?
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
