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ABSTRACT
The importance of world images as a fundamental premise of world views has been brought to the fore by recent reports on the poor state of spatial knowledge and international understanding and empathy. It is assumed that geography education plays a special role in the development of the realization of realistic world images. In order to investigate this assumption in respect of the contribution made by geography education in South African schools, during the senior secondary phase, the World Image Place Vocabulary Test was administered to 699 matriculants. The results of the study show that the world images of matriculants taking geography, are significantly better over the total range of cognitive skills involved as well as with reference to the components comprising cities, states, morphology and regions, than the images of pupils not taking geography. However, the view is taken that the “New Geography” with its focus on concepts tends to alienate the subject from reality thus rejecting world image realization as a specific goal of geography education.