Help Your Kids With Geography: A Step-By-Step Visual Guide, by DK

Does this book actually deliver in its promise to help one’s kids, or any other kids, with geography? That depends. Overall, this book is a mixed-bag, with some areas (like physical geography) being far more useful and practical than the woke trash that one gets in some areas of “practical” and human geography. Where this book focuses on the technical matters of understanding the field of geography, in how to understand maps and charts and the like, how to draw connections in space and time, there is a great deal of value to be found in this book. Unfortunately, that is not all there is to this book, and far too much time is spent in this book supporting leftist pet causes and showing that contemporary politics lays its corrupting influence on everything, including fields like geography that one would hope would be relatively immune from its evil clutches. Given that a great deal of the field of human geography, at least as it is researched in the contemporary academy, is pretty well corrupted, it is perhaps not a great surprise that this corruption would seep its way into late elementary, middle, and high school education as is the way here (as this book is aimed at those between grades 5 and 10, at the level immediately below AP Geography.

That is not to say that politics is the only flaw with this book. It should be noted that this book is designed for those with very limited familiarity with geography, as the drawings that make up this book’s visuals are rather primitive in nature. This is not a book that will wow with one’s deep appreciation of cartography. Those who are able to handle digital maps or an excellent atlas are going to be beyond the need for a book like this one. On the other hand, if one has just about no ability to deal with maps or other visual representations of industrial processes and the like, this book should provide a potentially useful guide, so long as one is aware that the book is almost as much about teaching the current thing in geography as it is teaching the lasting value and understanding of the field itself. For those parents and teachers who are rightfully aware and suspicious of the influence of corrupting trends in education, this book would have to be used with caution, with certain lessons taken from it and other lessons omitted because of their unhelpful nature. It is a shame that even in the field of pedagogy that we cannot have nice things when they are written and edited by the contemporary cretins of the left.

In terms of its contents, this book is relatively simple in its structure and takes up about 250 pages. A brief introductory section contains an introduction and sections on what geography is, how to think geographically, and geography in action. This is followed by the first proper section of the book, which examines physical geography. This section contains very small sections of 2-3 pages on such matters as defining physical geography, earth’s history and geological time, earth’s structure, plate tectonics, earthquakes, mountain building, volcanoes, rocks and minerals, soil, streams and rivers, ice ages, erosion and deposition, the atmosphere, seasons, climate zones, the hydrological cycle, winds, weather systems and forecasting, clouds and fog, biomes, distribution of species, various terrains, as well as oceans and seas. The second section of the book then discusses human geography, defining the term and tackling such issues as where people live, demography, migration, population change, human settlements and cities, the spread of culture, health, economic activity, farming, fossil fuels, manufacturing, the service industry, tourism, development, housing, pollution, deforestation, climate change, sources of energy, sustainability, food and water security, and conflicts and resolution. The third section of the book looks at practical geography, and it is the shortest section, beginning with defining the term and looking at continents and oceans, countries and nations, capitals and major cities, longitude and latitude, distances absolute and relative, geopolitics, maps and how they work, GIS, fieldwork, qualitative and quantitative data, graphicacy, using photography, and geographical inquiry. The book then ends with a glossary, index, and acknowledgements.