I grew up in a small dairy-farming town in California’s Central Valley. The Redwoods sits to the north, and the Sierra Nevada mountains are nestled close to the east. The great Pacific Ocean builds and takes away the rock faces and granulated sand of the shore to the west, and a number of populated cities sit next to the desert spaces that serve as America’s driest and hottest spot to the south. 

There were brief mentions of these different landscapes during school. Still, I never heard anything about the public lands that we could visit to experience all that California had to offer until I moved away for college past the Grapevine mountain range that separated the San Joaquin Valley from the rest of Southern California. I was shocked to realize later that I had unknowingly visited Sequoia National Park as a kid multiple times, but I lived right next to Pinnacles National Parks growing up, never visited the park, and didn’t even know it. 

I recently went to Pinnacles National Park for the first time. What could have been a short day trip as a kid turned into a larger road trip as an adult with an entire group of people who had also never been to the park. I didn’t know anything about the national park growing up and didn’t hear anything about it until I was no longer living right next to it. This made me think about how this situation could have been avoided.

Knowing more about our surroundings should be included at all levels of education to provide extra context to the educational subject matter being taught. Future voting citizens everywhere should know about what’s going on around them, who’s making the decisions that are affecting their current lives and their future, and know more about their place in the world and how they fit in the greater discussion of human civilization.

The U.S. American public education system does not prioritize the unifying global needs of knowing geography and multiple languages. Students in the U.S. are assigned a state for their elementary school project but are not given the tools for recognizing any other country or culture. There’s no space for wanting to explore the world and all it has to offer when you have no idea anything outside of your birth country exists. You end up with a group of people so disconnected from the rest of the world and left at a disadvantage. Their knowledge of the world is stunted, and they think of everything with a very narrow-minded and limiting perspective.

Expanding one’s mind to the rest of the world creates an environment for better understanding. It reserves opportunities for diplomacy and peace and creates compassionate people who are conscious and mindful of their effects on the environment. If you want people interested in saving the planet and furthering the growth and development of humanity, then you need to raise and educate people on the subject of the environment and the humans that each have an impactful part in the environment.