We take for granted the map of the world we usually see in this country, but it only looks the way we know it because its scale puts Europe at the center of the world. But the Boston school board shows its students a different map of the world, on which Europe suddenly appears much smaller and Africa a lot larger. Why it is like that.
Many travel addicts have the standard world map hanging in their room: It goes back to the Belgian Gerhard Mercator, who in 1569 developed the two-dimensional projection of the globe that is still in use today and became known as the “Mercator projection”. But did you know that there are various other cards? For example the Peters projection?
The Mercator card was revolutionary
Mercator was the first to depict the curved surface of the earth as a flat map. He stretched the longitudes of the earth at the poles until they were parallel to each other. He then drew the degrees of latitude at right angles to it. However, this resulted in a distorted representation of the globe. Because with the two-dimensional representation of a curved surface, one can only show an incomplete version of reality: either surfaces and distances are represented true to the original, or angles and distances. All three factors at the same time cannot be represented correctly in two dimensions.
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Mercator’s map of the earth thus shows the angles and distances of our continents true to scale, a major breakthrough for navigation and shipping at the time. However, the price of this representation was the area accuracy. Because Mercator placed Europe at the center of the map as his homeland, our continent appears much larger on the usual map than it actually is. This also applies to the USA. Sweden also looks almost the same size as India on the Mercator map, while the Scandinavian country is seven times smaller. Africa and Latin America also appear much smaller on the Mercator representation than they really are in terms of area.
The Peters projection that students in Boston use to study
Unlike Mercator, he allowed the distances between the degrees of latitude to increase towards the equator at the expense of angular accuracy. The continents on his map appear distorted and elongated, but the area sizes are more realistic than on the Mercator map.
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For this reason, reports the British “Guardian“, the school board of the US metropolis Boston decided in 2017 to work with the Peters projection in geography lessons, which correctly represent the areas of the continents. The reason: The “wrong representation” of the earth’s surface creates a distorted world view among the students.
Boston has a high proportion of children from African American and Latino backgrounds. Hayden Frederick-Clarke, a Boston school board official, said so US radio station WBUR “More than 80 percent of our students are People of Color. The maps they are shown make the places they come from seem small and unimportant. It seems only right that we give them a more accurate representation.”
