To the Editor:
As a high school geography teacher and the president of the National Council for Geographic Education, it is refreshing to see pushback against the increasingly common “just Google it” or “let AI handle it” mentality. (“Do Students Still Need to Learn Geography?,” Jan. 27, 2026.) This approach reflects a fundamentally flawed understanding of education and poses real risks to children’s intellectual and civic development. Students must internalize geographic knowledge to think critically, evaluate information, and recognize misinformation.
Geography, however, is not simply about knowing where places are. It is about understanding how space shapes human behavior, opportunity, and power. All people experience and use space every day, and those spatial realities profoundly influence their lives. Students live geography daily through where they reside, how they move, the climate they experience, and their access to resources and services.
While the opinion blog post rightly defends the importance of memorizing geographic facts, geography education goes further. It teaches students how space is created, controlled, and experienced and how spatial decisions have contributed to many of the social, economic, political, and environmental challenges we face today.
Without geographic thinking, students may know isolated facts but fail to grasp the forces shaping their communities and the wider world. They cannot fully understand why today’s local and global problems exist.
Celeste Reynolds
President
National Council for Geographic Education
Mashpee, Mass.
