Online geographical game

geosense.net is an online game designed to test your geographical knowledge. I read about this game on the newspaper. After I tried that, I found my geography is actually not that good! I could identify the country easily from the world map, but I had a hard time finding out the exact position of the city on the map.

I think this programme is in fact a very good tool for young students to learn geography. Through this online game, they could easily and happily absorb basic geographical knowledge. It is truly sad to say that most students in Taiwan know nothing about geography. Once I asked a junior high student where the capital of the USA is, and he told me the capital of the USA is New York. This is ridiculous. Most of them can only find the major countries, like Taiwan, China, USA or UK, on the world map. Beyond these common big names, other countries are alien to them. When they don't know the names of the countries, how could they identify them on the world map, let alone the cities.

The current inadequate educational policy in Taiwan results in poor performance of the Taiwanese students. The government focuses only on the teaching of what Taiwan is and tries to insert the dishonest national identity into the new generations. Students have to learn everything that is about Taiwan, like literature, geography, history and Taiwanese language. When it comes to the learning of other countries, such as world history, world geography or world literature, it is always only couple pages on the text book. It seems to introduce them is enough. Students are not required to learn in detail what the world is, but are required to know every little detailed thing about Taiwan. I am not suggesting that learning the required knowledge of Taiwan is wrong, but we also need to learn other knowledge that could equip us well in the international society. Geographically speaking, Taiwan is only this big. If we only focus on Taiwan without gaining further knowledge concerning the world, how could we compete with other countries? My next question to the government would be, 'Do you really think that Taiwan is the centre of the world?'

I would say, we could try to make Taiwan the centre of the world, but if we carry on this inadequate policy, we would be nothing and slowly disappearing form the international society, which is already happening now. After all, in this highly competitive globalised society, who cares about Taiwan! Only those who practice right policies and truly lift the educational level of their people could finally be the star shining in the international society.