The division of the terrestrial world into seven continents is seemingly the simplest topic in geography, yet it is actually one of the most complex – which is precisely why I find it so fascinating. Unfortunately, the educational establishment grasps only its superficial simplicity, ignoring the more important and interesting issues involved. The result, to put it bluntly, is miseducation of the young.
It is not difficult to demonstrate the poverty of the continental model. If a group of bright but geographically unschooled students are given a globe or an equal-area-projection map of the world and asked to count the planet’s major masses of land, they would never list the seven continents of the standard scheme, as there is nothing even approaching a physical separation between Europe and Asia. As a result, teachers generally explain that Europe and Asia, unlike the other continents, are regarded as if they were distinct landmasses because of features associated with humankind rather than with the natural world. Such an explanation, however, is misleading and largely incorrect. There is almost nothing in human history, culture, politics, economics, or demographics that separate European Russia from Asiatic Russia, European Turkey from Asiatic Turkey, or European Kazakhstan from Asiatic Kazakhstan. These countries are instead conventionally divided between the two continents on the basis of disputed minor physical features: the Ural Mountains, the Ural River, and the Turkish Straits. Yet none of these features are, or have ever been, significant barriers to movement, either of people or of other species. As a result, they make poor continental boundaries.
The separation between Europe and Asia – the original continental divide, around which all others were conceptualized – is thus rooted in physical geography despite the absence of physical separation. But elsewhere in the world, it is a different story. As a simple image search of “continents map” reveals, a substantial majority of such maps terminate Asia along an almost entirely straight north/south line slicing across the middle of New Guinea, with the eastern half of this vast island appended instead to Australia. In a geologically informed understanding of continents, all New Guinea belongs with Australia. But in the simplistic pedagogical understanding, the political division of the island between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, based on a colonial agreement between the U.K, the Netherlands, and Germany, overrides all geological, biogeographical, cultural, and deep-historical considerations. Evidently, since Indonesia is defined as an Asian country, all its territory gets slotted into Asia, regardless of whether it makes any sense to do so.
But if geopolitical considerations are used to delimit the southeastern extremity of Asia, why are they not employed in the west, where several countries are split between Europe and Asia (Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and even Georgia) and Asia and Africa (Egypt)? Or, to reduce the argument to absurdity, why is French Guiana – as much a part of France as Alaska is part of the United States – mapped as part of South America rather than as part of Europe with the core of the French Republic? The answer is simple: because continents are physical entities that have nothing to do with political boundaries – except, that is, when they do, as in the case of New Guinea.
What we have here is conceptual mess of the first order. Yet this is how we begin teaching world geography to elementary-age children. And in the United States, it often seems that we go little beyond that. Is it any wonder that the geographical ignorance of the average American student has become an object of both shame and amusement? It should be regarded as a national scandal, evidence of an unconscionable failure to teach basic world geography.
