Saturday, May 12, 2007

Geography: What City Is This?


Geography used to be an important field of study for students; unfortunately, with the ascendancy of the education philosophy of John Dewey in the 1920s and 1930s, it became a field subsumed under "social studies." For obscurant, anti-academic matter liberals like Dewey and his disciples, a subject like geography, as with all subjects, has no value unless it serves a political means to advance a social agenda, in Dewey's case socialism. To these "progressive" oafs, if academic subject matter does not promote correct social attitudes and politically correct behavior, it is only "trivia," hence the hostility by "progressives" to subject matter.

Geography, as with art and architectural history, literature, and history, needs to be taken back from these liberal, utilitarian educationists who, in the name of "social correctness," have stripped these noble fields of any inherent value, thus effectively killing interest in these subjects.

One example: As I was flying from Bangkok to Singapore, I sat next to an interesting young guy from England, and we chatted throughout the two hour flight. He majored in geography, which I stated was a fascinating subject. He stated he thought so too when he first decided to specialize in it, but the "geography of feminism" and other deadly postmodern courses killed his interest. That is postmodernism for you and typical of so many subjects that clinical, utilitarian liberals, who are so wrong politically, economically, and ethically, are out to destroy through their tiresome and misguided activism.

Therefore, in the spirit of Richard Halliburton's wonderful classic travelogue The Royal Road to Romance, perhaps the best of its kind ever written, I will attempt to help take back this subject of geography by getting back to what the subject of geography is supposed to embody: a study of the adventure of mankind in various lands, topographies, and cultures. The study of geography should inspire a joie de vivre, wanderlust, and desire for adventure and romance. In addition to this inherent interest in and of itself, by studying geography and traveling to other lands and cultures, one can hopefully understand one's own land and history better.

In honor of the great subject of geography, which literally means "to describe the earth," every weekend I will post a picture of a city or region around the world. From the topography and architecture in the picture above, does anyone know which city this is? Clue: It is a city with a population of two and a half million.

I will post the answer in a couple of days.


1 comment:

Gabe said...

The answer is: Daegu, South Korea, a city of two and a half million in the southeastern portion of Korea, about an hour from Busan.

I lived in Daegu for five years from 1997-2002.

The mountains in South Korea resemble the mountains in California, though the vegetation is different. The climate of South Korea is more like that of the Eastern U.S. except drier and colder in winter.

One could easily recognize that the picture was taken somewhere in South Korea because of the ubiquitous style of the apartment buildings.