Carl Sauer

One of the lectures we read the second week for Geographic Thought is Carl Sauer's "The Education of a Geographer"--from Sept. 1956.

I've mostly skimmed out some bits and quotes here that I responded to, starting with, "We may draw no invidious distinction between professional and amateur; both are needed as cherishing and contributing to geographic knowledge."

Ah, I wish this were so--a lecture delivered when I was 5 months old. Before Sputnik. Before the Apollo program. Before pcs, cell phones, the web. Post-nuclear, not post-modern. Sauer throughout this lecture describes a geography that I might feel more at home with. More bits:

"The geographer ... comes rather late into our professional care."

"Ours is a task of slow accumulation of knowledge, experience, and judgment...We do not gain competence quickly, nor by the learning of ine special skill."

And Sauer would not rely solely on undergraduate geography majors: "we still get much of our best blood from those who come from quite other academic stocks and backgrounds," and later, "I doubt that undergraduate majors in geography are to be recommended for those who will continue as graduate students." Sauer prefers a "properly balanced liberal education"--key words for me, having bounced between so many majors, never quite finding something whole enough. [Chemical Engineering, to Biochemistry, to tutoring Engineering Physics, but a degree in Psychology, then a surprise Masters and Ph.D. in English, with a not quite complete masters in Counseling Psych in the middle.]

More of Sauer:

"Especially do we need more workers who like and are able to live on frontiers, such as those of biology."

"Putting labels on beginners herds them into premature profession." This seems such a flaw in so much of contemporary college--at Columbia College, our INCC course ["how to be a freshmen," 1 credit hour] stresses career testing, demands students have a major and complete a written "4 year plan," sketching out in dreary detail each semester ahead of them, contracts for benefit of parents, so that if courses aren't offered in perfect sync with these major plans, there is some financial compensation, and so on. There isn't much room for genuine exploration, and few students have a sense of what value an actual liberal education might have.

Sauer finds "liking maps" at the heart of geography, and states that "The geographer and the geographer-to-be are travellers, vicarious when they must, actual when they may." I would say "of course" to this, but I avoided telling anyone in my application/interview process just how much I do travel--approaching 80 countries, if I count airport and train passage countries. Somehow, all the professionalism made this feel, well, frivolous.

Geography is "always a reading of the face of the earth," but "Time-consuming precision of location, limit, and area is rarely needed." This a statement that certainly veers away from the department's current emphasis on GIS. He adds his "growing conviction that we must not strain to make geography quantitative." Further, he wishes to "underscore the unspecialized quality of geography."

He states that the regional course must bebased on personal experience and "much meditation." I don't disagree with this, though I have already been frustrated in trying to get my Iran/Iraq 101 courses approved for the CC Evening prograph, where perhaps unwisely a 2-semester "culture sequence" can replace the need for taking a foreign language. Although I've already taught this course as an upper level Honors course, I don't meet the new requirements of knowing the language, having a Masters in the field, or long immersion in the culture itself. Yes, yes, that would be swell--and I've unsuccessfully tried to get a visa to Iran (money more than politics involved), and have spent time in the U.A.E., and Bahrain, and Oman, and Yemen, and Turkey, and Tunsia, and Kuwait. But alas--not enough. I think my students lose out the most, and we certainly have some civic duty to help students be informed about people we have or may soon be bombing. I digress...

Sauer continues, "the principal training of the geographer should come, wherever possible, by doing field work," and then most appealing, suggests that letters from the field are something to appreciate--an art, an immediate link to the experience of place, and that "esthetic appreciation leads to philosophic speculation." We should invoke Shelley, and a few others, who have always known that poetry lies at the base of all fields of knowledge. Besides, I still write letters, depend on the physical act of writing with a pen which captures experience at a different level.

Sauer: "It is one of our oldest traditions to start by observing the near scenes; it is equally in the great tradition that the journeyman goes forth alone to far and strange places to become a participant observer of an unknown land and life."

Sauer's big finish:

We are aware that what we do will determine for good or evil the life of those
who will come after us. And therefore we geographers, least of all, can fail to
think on the place of ma in nature, of the whole of ecology. Man's intervention
in and disturbance of the organic and inorganic world has become so accelerated
that we may be tempted to escape fro the present into a future in which
technology has master over all matter, and thus promises forgiveness and
redemption. But will it? The moralist lives apart fro the quotations of the
market place and his thoughts are of other values.

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