Who Gets to Name the World on the Map?

What a Changing Google Map Can Teach Us About Geography, Digital Life and the Way We See the World?

If your child tells you this week that the United States is being renamed South Canada, don't rush to buy a new atlas. It is a joke. But like many good jokes, there is a real story behind it — and that story raises some surprisingly important questions about geography. So, who gets to name the world on the map?

Who gets to name the world on the map?

Last week, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the US federal government to use Lake America instead of Lake Ontario. The lake, of course, is shared by the United States and Canada. The US government can determine the geographical names used by its own federal agencies, but an American president cannot require Canada, Britain or international organisations to use the same name.

Canada has rejected the change. Even New York State, which borders the lake, has said it will continue calling it Lake Ontario.

Online, people responded in the way the internet often does: with jokes. Suggestions that America might now be called South Canada or Canada South began circulating. There is even a tongue-in-cheek petition proposing the latter.

It is funny.

But a child could quite reasonably ask: Can somebody actually do that? Who gets to decide what a place is called?

And suddenly we have a Geography lesson.

Who does get to name a place on the map?

The answer isn't as simple as we might imagine.

Countries have systems for deciding the geographical names they use officially. There is also international work through the United Nations to encourage consistency and standardisation of geographical names around the world. But countries and languages do not always call the same place by the same name.

We have an excellent example here in Britain. We call the stretch of water between England and France the English Channel. In France it is La Manche. Neither France nor Britain needs to have got the name “wrong”. Different languages and communities can have established names for the same geographical feature.

There are examples all over the world.

What becomes more complicated is when a government deliberately changes the name it uses for a geographical feature shared with other countries or extending beyond its own territory.

We saw this in 2025 when the US government began using Gulf of America instead of Gulf of Mexico.

Britain did not simply follow.

UK geographical-naming guidance continues to give Gulf of Mexico as the conventional English name, while recognising Gulf of America as the US name. That distinction matters.

A government can decide what terminology its government uses. That does not necessarily mean it has renamed that part of the world for everybody else.

Then Google Maps Enters the Classroom Via the Map

This is where our Geography lesson becomes a Digital Life lesson. Google Maps has now changed what people see when they look at Lake Ontario.

• People using Google Maps in the United States see Lake America.

• People in Canada continue to see Lake Ontario.

• People elsewhere — including us here in Britain — are shown both names.

Google says it does this because it follows official government sources and has a longstanding policy for geographical features whose names differ between countries.

That gives us another very important question: If Google puts a name on a map, does that make it a geographical fact?

Google is an American company providing a mapping service used across much of the world. It has made a decision about how to deal with a change made by the American government.

Other mapping providers can make different decisions. And that is something children need to understand.

Google Maps is a source. It is not the world.

Digital maps can feel authoritative because they are so familiar. We use them to find the supermarket, plan a journey or discover where another country is. But somebody still has to decide what information appears on that screen. That doesn't make Google Maps bad or untrustworthy. It means we should understand what a digital source is and learn when to ask another question. That is Digital Life.

But Why Do People Care So Much About a Name?

Now our question crosses into Beliefs & Worldviews. Why should anybody care whether a lake is called Lake Ontario or Lake America? Because names can carry far more than geographical information. They can carry history, language, identity, culture, belonging and power. Lake Ontario's name has Indigenous origins going back centuries. The argument about changing it is therefore not simply about which words we print on a map. It raises questions about history, identity and who has the authority to decide which stories and names are preserved.

Two people can look at exactly the same naming decision and interpret it very differently.

• One might see national pride.

• Another might see political power.

• Someone else might see disrespect for history.

• Another might simply think the whole thing is rather silly.

Our job in education isn't to tell a child which of those opinions they must hold.

It is to give them enough knowledge to understand why different people might hold them.

That is Beliefs & Worldviews.

So, what has this got to do with homeschooling?

Quite a lot.

Over the past year we have been working hard on the way subjects develop through Orchard, including a substantial rethink of our Geography curriculum.

We want children to know where places are. Maps, countries, landscapes, rivers, settlements and physical features still matter. But knowing where something is isn't the end of Geography. We want children increasingly to ask:

• Why is it there?

• Who decided that?

• How has it changed?

• Whose information am I looking at?

• Would somebody somewhere else see this differently?

And this week's strange argument over a lake demonstrates beautifully why subjects sometimes connect in our weekly learning.

A child sees a South Canada joke online. To understand it:

• They need some Geography.

• Then they discover Google Maps has changed and need Digital Life.

• They begin asking why the name matters and enter Beliefs & Worldviews.

• They investigate where the original name came from and find themselves using History.

• They compare a news report, a government announcement and a viral meme and they are using English and literacy to decide what each source is actually telling them.

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Nobody had to invent a “Lake Ontario theme” and squeeze five school subjects into it.

The connections were already there.

Children Don't Experience the World One Subject at a Time

That is an important part of the thinking behind Orchard's weekly learning. We don't believe everything has to connect. Sometimes Science is simply Science. Sometimes the History children need to learn that week has absolutely nothing useful to do with their Maths — and trying to force the two together would make both worse.

But when the real world presents a question that genuinely crosses subject boundaries, we want our children to be able to follow it. Because that is what learning eventually needs to become.

Not simply: “Which subject am I doing now?”

But: “I have noticed something. How can I find out more?”

Perhaps the most useful Geography lesson this week won't begin with us handing a child a map. Perhaps it will begin with them looking at their phone and saying: “Hang on. Why does Google call it that?”

That question is worth following.

At Orchard, we don't connect subjects because it makes a planner look tidy. We connect them because that is how the world works.