On occasion of UNESCO's birthday, Heiner Benking critically challenges and encourages the International Community, Industry, Science and Education to catch up with the times and acquire new, appropriate world-views, to do away with the old, misleading maps they are using.

Mr. Benking has long been dealing with issues of mental mobility, the acquisition of competences for switching between mental modes and models for exchanging, sharing, communicating, harmonising, composing, evolving and completing also our cultural and ethical worldviews in a new century of new global citizenship and new global cooperation in face of all encompassing, new global challenges.

A variety of examples show that world maps are widely used without checking their function or fidelity, often ignoring the purpose they were originally designed for. Experience shows, however, that world maps coin unquestioned images in our minds that can stick around for very long, throughout an entire life. How "true" are these maps? In what sense? To what degree? After all, whose truth?

To illustrate the fundamental need for Map Alphabetism, Benking shows how special interest groups wilfully select, design and create maps in order to serve certain ends. These maps are not neutral but laden with a message. Some are used on a daily basis to influence public opinion - maybe call it visual demagogy, oversimplifications and hidden messages - and misuse the public's absolute trust in the common base maps and projections we learned in school. Common tricks include cutting out of the oceans, using inappropriate projections, or using colours and legends pretending to portray a complete picture while, in fact, the old dualistic thinking of good and bad, labelling and "box thinking" is maintained.

Now what if these world maps do not at all represent the real world we live in, but are massively oversimplified and soaked with a hidden worldview that remains stuck in our minds? One example divides and classifies about half the world into happily intact, functional nations and "other, failing" nations, adding an "expert's advice list" on using pre-emptive military force to dominate the "failures" and their neighbours.

Do you truly believe in such a depiction of the world? Is your home all fine or all failing? Shall half of the world's nations and populations suffer from these absolutist stigmatisations and "recommendations"? Does the international community want, does the young generation deserve a world artificially escalated into good and bad? Shall children in schools learn to live and act by someone's theory of "survival of the fittest - of the best equipped cannibals"? Truly, such fabricated ideas, world views and maps undermine the very basic fabric of common humanity that we need for making it together in the 21st Century. But it takes "literacy" to see through the inconsistencies, infidelities and false assumptions, and offer better alternatives.

Even the key pacemakers towards sustainability, - the United Nations, global environmental research and management scientific institutions, civil society organisations, and UNESCO (which is in charge of making the crucial Decade for Sustainability Education a success through groundbreaking innovation of the school systems around the world!), are using outdated, inappropriate and misleading map "pictures" of the world, with very few exceptions.

Benking advocates urgently turning the UN 60th motto "Time for Renewal" into practice, focussing on curriculum development for schools and higher education, to help future generations be more aware of the frames, scales, projections and legends used and more able to evaluate maps and models - to become "Map and Earth Literate". With its global standing and role in the Decade, UNESCO is predestined and obligated to push, carry and cultivate a better "new way of thinking" also embodied, triggered and stimulated by "true" world maps supporting multi-perspective problem-assessment and problem-solving.

If we want to get beyond the mistakes and ignorance of past decision-maker generations, we need to see the world in new and better ways. Decisions - locally and globally - based on inadequate world maps and visual presentations will not help unite but separate and antagonize the Peoples of the world. With one-eyed interest groups playing the media with ever more misleading and dangerous worldviews there is no more time to wait. All the learning tools we need are available. It is now time to unite them and make the publicly available and applicable.

Neutral viewpoints into world-models and ways to communicate complex issues without overclaims and oversimplifications, helping the young generation to develop and share commons - something more than an alphabet - are available at the websites www.in-betweener.org/flatworlds and www.deepworlds.org. For a comprehensive look at world maps, map-making, literacy, earth literacy and new digital maps is www.in-betweener.org/flatworlds/maps/earth-literacy.html

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