Contemporary education, apart from other things, means to acquire ability to use and read maps. The map is an indispensable means of researching and reporting the exploring results. It has an advantage over natural language because it is simpler and more encompassing for a certain kind of information due to the usage of signs which give it the universality. The language of the map is the language of graphics which stand in the same order in alphabet, numbers and articulation. That is my the map can be understood in its basic shape and independent of the written language. The map as a model of real space has a significant role in acquiring the scientific view of the world which is one of the main goals of education and formation of personality. The map content is very complex so that its understanding takes a few steps. First of all, we must perceive its outer content given by an adequate cartographic method concretely and visually with plasticity and signs. At the higher level of education, the inner content, structural and illustrative, the essence of which is to understand the regularities of distribution and intensity of phenomena and processes of geographic environment as well as their interrelations should be studied. The subject matter of cartography is linked, on the one side, with the general philosophic theory of knowledge, through categories of space and time, and on the other hand, with corresponding sciences of scientific disciplines, through cartographic method and language. Language of map can be considered as second language of geography. Cartographic language is much more complex than the language itself due to different ways of putting words into a sentence. In natural language that process is linear and words have grammatical forms. The process of reading maps is spatial, across the whole map, and depends only on the position of the mapped phenomena, objects and processes. The maps are mathematical and logical models, which are not just an illustration of the contents of the real space, but also of their specific and relational traits which can't be seen at first sight. The maps are the expressions of higher creative thinking which advances the didactic process.
展开▼