West Wing - Why are we changing maps?

I'm doing last week's reading for my "Didactics of Social Sciences" class today (oops...just slightly behind!). The reading covers the difficulties of teaching geography to students. According to Jean Piaget children's cognitive abilities evolve through a series of stages progressively allow for greater abstraction of concepts, mainly: pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational stages. Primary education covers almost exclusively the concrete operational stage (from seven to twelve years of age). Abstract concepts are generally only able to be conceived toward the end of the concrete operational and formal operational stages. We don't tend to think about it, but teaching the very concept of a map, much less how to read one, is very abstract and therefore difficult for elementary students until around 5th and 6th grade.

Maps are something we don't give much thought to generally, but when you begin to think about it they are very complicated. How can you transfer something spherical onto a piece of paper? There are several different methods, but of course all are merely symbolic representations of the actual Earth's surface. None of them can be absolutely faithful to the area, distance, angle, etc of the world's terrain, even accounting for scale; there's a level of distortion innate in the translation from three to two dimensions.

Of course being our only guides for understanding location and spacial relationships, maps are quite useful; but the spacial distortions can be a problem if one doesn't fully understand that a map is merely that: a guide. They are not actual, true representations of our world.

While reading, I was reminded of this scene from my all-time favorite TV series, "The West Wing" and lucky you, I found it on YouTube to share. ;)

Kind of a trip, huh?