Geography Illiteracy and Reforming Geography Education in Egypt among University Undergraduate Students

For ages, Science has suffered from the ebb and flow of the same seashores. Geography in Egypt has been the center of these waves and fluctuations for more than fifteen years, although it takes about half this time in other countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and even the United States of America. The result of this negligence of learning geography in the secondary schools in Egypt is reflected in the level of students and its effect on their knowledge about the geography of their country when they joined (present and not past) the university.This paper aims to assess the level of geographic literacy among undergraduate students of geography in the Faculty of Arts, Minia University in Egypt, and to follow the reasons behind the decrease in the interest of studying geography, which has an impact on the level of students’ information and knowledge about their country. Also the study investigates the factors that may have influenced this geographic literacy among students. The Educational system policy in Egypt has played a negative role in the intellect of the people, and drove them out of learning geography. Because of the various troubles in the educational policy scene in Egypt during the last decade of the twentieth century, the Ministry of Education decided to let the geography subject in the secondary schools into an optional subject. Consequently, many students do not choose it, and this leads geography to become a marginal subject.