"How accurate is the information you're being taught?"
The Guardian's article on the Mercator Projection Map
The article's main claims are:
1. For 500 years, the Mercator Projection has been the most popular map, with a majority of the world's population referring to it to gain a knowledge about their countries. A Flemish cartographer, named Gerardus Mercator, devised a map in 1569 to aid his nautical purposes. He did this by representing the lines of constant courses as straight lines, which helps nautical explorers navigate along colonial trade routes.
1. For 500 years, the Mercator Projection has been the most popular map, with a majority of the world's population referring to it to gain a knowledge about their countries. A Flemish cartographer, named Gerardus Mercator, devised a map in 1569 to aid his nautical purposes. He did this by representing the lines of constant courses as straight lines, which helps nautical explorers navigate along colonial trade routes.
Implication of the claim -
While Mercator's map would have been an accurate sea map, it is a distorted representation of many countries's actual land masses. There was an exaggeration of most of the Northern hemisphere, where North America and Europe was portrayed larger than South America or Africa. The map was also Eurocentric.
2. A newer projection of the world, called the Gall-Peters Projection (1974), is starting to be used in many Boston public schools. This is due to it being an 'equal-area' map that accurately depicts the surface areas of different countries (while still being a distorted 2D representation of our 3D globe).
2. A newer projection of the world, called the Gall-Peters Projection (1974), is starting to be used in many Boston public schools. This is due to it being an 'equal-area' map that accurately depicts the surface areas of different countries (while still being a distorted 2D representation of our 3D globe).
Implication of the claim -
The Mercator projection has been harboring a Western, imperialistic bias against other countries for centuries. The underlying reason behind the Mercator's distortion is to exaggerate the size of imperialistic countries in the Western world, and to correlate their land mass to their power.
3. They will be implementing the Peters maps to one grade level each in elementary school, middle school and high school. The Mercator map will not be removed, but all new maps purchases should be of the Gall-Peters projection.
Implication of the claim -
Changing to a new projection of the Earth can have an effect on people, especially students, who have to learn 'where [their] heritage is rooted is not accurate'. (Walters, 2017.) Furthermore, their existing view of their world and their countries are altered too.
Key words:
Paradigm shift - the change of a typical example/model of something.
Ethical bias - having the tendency to view certain things as morally good based on others' actions/opinions.
European Imperialism - it characterizes the period of colonial expansion by European powers.
Sources:
- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/mar/19/boston-public-schools-world-map-mercator-peters-projection
Comments
Post a Comment