World geography
By: John Hodgdon Bradley.
Edition: Rev. ed.
Publisher: Ginn & Co.
Published: 1957
Place of publication: Toronto
Language: eng
Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 583
Subjects: Geography
First sentence: A Note to the Teacher: 
Events of the past twenty years have wrought a profound change in the American attitude toward the study of geography. Americans have pretty generally come to realize that the oceans have lost their power to separate America from the problems and distempers of the rest of the world. The "hot war" followed by the "cold war" in Europe, Communist aggression in Asia and the threat of further aggression, increasing unrest and discord among the peoples of Africa and elsewhere—all have touched the lives of Americans in one way or another, and have influenced the behavior of their government. Americans have pretty generally come to feel that some of the most serious problems of America are world problems with their roots in world geography. Many American educators have come to feel that the study of geography, which in the past has been largely confined to the elementary school and the college, should be an important part of the curriculum of the secondary school as well.
The secondary school is the logical place to strengthen and to expand the knowledge of descriptive regional geography which pupils have acquired in the elementary school. It is the logical place to build on this foundation a knowledge of the world-wide geographic forces which have come to play so vital a role in the lives of us all. Up to about two decades ago, the American secondary schools had generally failed to do this. Where they had taught geography- at all they had presented it in the severely restricted form of physical or economic geography, or as a relatively unemphasized adjunct to courses in history and current events.
More recently, many educators have come to feel that geography so limited fails to meet the requirements of intelligent living in the modern world. They have come to feel that a broad training in world geography should be an essential part of both the natural science and the social science programs in the American secondary school. Most heartily sharing this feeling, the author and publishers of this book offer it as the basis for a thorough, realistic, and dynamic course in world geography at the secondary-school level.
Description: Though the book itself best explains its methods and objectives, a few matters of policy should be mentioned briefly here. Fundamental to the plan and point of view of World Geography is the conviction that geography should be presented to secondary-school students as a living drama and not as a catalogue of dead and disconnected statistics. The odds and ends of encyclopedic information about peoples and places which have so often passed for geography do not constitute geography in any significant sense of the word.
One has daily reminders of the fact that geography is still widely conceived as a body of dead statistical information. People are constantly asking, "How can a geography be written while the world is changing so rapidly and so radically?" "Bounding" countries had apparently been so large a part of the "geography" which these people had studied in school that the destruction of political boundaries seems to them to be synonymous with the destruction of geography itself. It has apparently never occurred to them that men are related to the earth no matter how boundaries are drawn; that the very shifting of political boundaries is in no small measure a reflection of geographic forces.
To be significant, the study of geography must lead to an understanding of these forces. It must point out the meaning and relationship of geographic facts. It must illuminate clearly the functional interdependence of all peoples and places the world around. This functional interdependence of peoples and places is the soil in which both world war and word peace grow. To understand it is the first need of intelligent citizenship; to explain it is the first responsibility of a course in world geography.
In working out the design of this book, the author realized that to deal effectively with the larger concepts of world geography secondary-school students need more training in the use of the basic tools of geographic science than most of them have had.   They need more training in map reading and in the interpretation of charts, graphs, and tables; more and still more knowledge of simple place geography. It was also realized that though secondary-school students are sufficiently mature to think in terms of principles, they must yet be led to an understanding of principles through an abundance of illustrations. Finally, it was realized that even in a geography of world scope the geography of North America should be emphasized.
World Geography and its accompanying workbook and tests were carefully planned to meet these various special requirements. The trees of special requirements, however, were not allowed to obscure the forest of the main objective. That objective was to provide secondary-school students with training in the techniques of thinking geographically about world problems. With such training, Americans should be better able to cope with the world forces which are shaping— and will doubtless continue to shape—their individual and national fate.
J.H.B.