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Comment by dividefuel | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to imply that people are primarily exposed to Mercator in school without discussing its shortcomings. However in my experience growing up in the 90s/00s, we discussed lots of different projections and their respective tradeoffs. It was drilled in pretty deep that the Mercator reflected shapes accurately, but not relative sizes. I also remember seeing Robinson projection far more than Mercator, though again we were reminded that it's not perfect either, and that any 2D projection will have its pros/cons.

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I went to public school in Canada (NB) in the 1990s and 2000s and we also covered the topic quite well. Not only that, but we also had ready access to spinning globes we could look at and compare to projections.

I think as Canadians this topic is covered because the geography of our country is skewed considerably more than many other countries both due to the scale, and the land mass the lay near the poles.

If I recall correctly it was the discussion on the size of Baffin Island, which looks almost 2x larger than Madagascar on the Mercantile map, when Madagascar is in fact just over 10% larger than Baffin.

Also, that we have islands nobody gives a 2nd thought to that are the size of Spain! :)

Growing up in Poland, I don't think we encountered Mercator until much later when actually learning about various map projections. I think Mollweide projection is more widespread here for full Earth maps, and it reduces the stretching near poles effect.

Yes, I would assume that Poland would prefer to avoid stretching near poles.

Can confirm, I'm pretty sure I was exposed to almost exclusively Mollweide maps as a teenager (Austria).

The best projection is a globe. A nice medium sized globe that’s portable is great for teaching relationships between land and water as well as geography.

Globe print resolution is usually bad. Anyone got a link for a modern, extremely detailed globe?

https://earth.google.com/

Hah. I meant a physical globe.

Trust me, in bad public education in the UK the map is simply presented. You cover the concept of how to draw the map but if the teacher used the word "protection" it causes eyes to gloss over...

Sounds like you had a good education my lucky friend and I hope it serves you well. I think the closest I saw was historical map putting Britain at the center of a big red empire before skipping several hundred years to cover Vietnam because the syllabus said we had to.

But didn't you guys have globes back then? It was the main object in our geography classroom.

German here - It's my understanding that in the US, classes rotate through rooms assigned to subjects (e.g. you go to your next class to the geography room). In Germany, subjects rotate through classes (e.g. 9th grade would have an assigned room, and the geography teacher would show up for the next lesson).

So personally, I don't think I ever saw a geography teacher carry around a globe, nor talk about projections. I feel like I learned about it reading XKCD 10 years later.

> It's my understanding that in the US, classes rotate through rooms assigned to subjects (e.g. you go to your next class to the geography room).

This is true after 4th grade, but 1st through 4th usually have kids learning every regular subject from a single teacher in a single classroom. Of course there are many states and even more school districts, and it's very possible that some of them do it differently.

Austrian here. We too have a single teacher from first to forth class, with the exception of religion and sometimes PE.

But I don't think that's the age to learn about map projections. My oldest child just finished first grade though, so I'll keep an eye open.

Ah yes, same here. At that age, though, we didn't have Geography, we simply had what I will call Science Class (for the Germans: This was Bavaria, so it's hilariously called "Heimat- und Sachunterricht" now), and I have no recollection what that covered. I think it was closer to how bees pollinate plants.

Looking at the syllabus for my state now (https://www.lehrplanplus.bayern.de/fachlehrplan/grundschule/...), the most advanced world map-related topic in elementary school is something like

Students

- learn how to read scale on a map

- understand where their home is on a map and in which state and country and on which continent it is.

Using their crappy search function, I don't get any results for map projections, Mercator, etc. at all, even further down the road.

(Note: I'm aware that Bavaria is known for being very centered on itself. This might be a large cause for this.)

Grade school didn’t rotate for me, high school the kids moved classes.

Somewhere in there we learned about projections (many were the “split globe” ones).

Elementary school (usually up through 5th grade) in the US usually has one classroom and one teacher for most subjects. All of my elementary school classrooms had at least one globe.

Globes, no that's too close to a football and can be kicked or rolled out of the classroom... I wish I were joking but hey that's the 90s for you

People had globes back when Britain actually had an empire. Mercator actually made many himself.

As another piece of data, I grew up in New York and had never heard about the Mercator projection until an adult.

You still grew up seeing it constantly, even if you didn't know what it was.

Yeah, but my point is that it was never explained as being inaccurate, or that there were other projections.

Also globes exist, which make those differences visible immediately.

We used Google Earth in geography lessons in the 2000 which shows nearly true scale

I was in public education in the US in the 60's and we often had lessons on different map projections when studying geography.

Yeah this is some old baby boomer trope about how bad the Mercator projection is, but it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom. Globes are a thing and the internet makes much of this discussion moot.

Until the "joke" of the flat earth got way out of hand and you realise that the internet is great at everything aside from context and this is something that isn't taught. Although I remember a professor screwing with us and changing a proof on Wikipedia to catch people out one term...

That’s a shameful act of vandalism on the part of the professor… :(

Not sure I'd agree. It was very public, very much reverted and very much a demonstration of the context of the internet. Not to mention a very easily verifiable proof, if people picked up the textbooks and noticed the subtle mistake.

He literally defaced a public good, and this cost the intervention of more sensible adults. A small cost, but still.

> it's been decades since I saw this hung up in classroom

Try to buy a world map for a classroom. Search things like "world map for classroom", "large world map", "world map poster" in Amazon. Probably 95% of the maps returned for these search terms are Mercator, but there are a few that aren't. American elementary school teachers are generalists, they teach geography without having specialized knowledge of geography, much less map projections. If such a teacher is buying a world map for their classroom, they're very likely to pick a Mercator map simply because that's what most classroom sized maps use.

(Despite this, American children are not raised to think that Canada is powerful...)

Only if you think the history of now is moot.

I don't remember being told about map projections at school.

Same here. I do remember the famous scene from West Wing which lead me to research the topic. Scene here: https://youtu.be/eLqC3FNNOaI

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