The self in education

Photo by Flickr user Robotography

The idea that to be educated is to come to know oneself and one's place in the world (and to be initiated into that privileged world of human being) has a long and distinguished history. From Bildung, through progressive and child-centred education, to the liberal, analytical tradition that flourished with the pioneering work of Peters and Hirst, it would appear that a conscious, rational and autonomous self is a sine qua non of educational philosophy. Even highly conservative theorists have been able to find common ground with progressives on this point.

The educational odyssey

Photo by Flickr user The Waterboy

Most of us have a view on the question of 'where is home?' We might well answer this question in the plural, maintaining that the house in which we presently live or the town, county or country in which we were born are all a sort of 'home' for us. Geography itself has often been described as the study of the earth as 'the home of humankind'.

Young people are also likely to come to school with a strong view on where and what home is for them. I sense that one of the most valuable contributions that geography can potentially bring to a young person's life is the broadening and diversifying of their idea of what a home can and might be. It has the power to take us beyond a provincial and exclusive identification with home or community that everyday experience might bestow to us, and refocuses our attention on that shared home in which we have to get along - Earth. It may also enable us to see our own literal home (our 'patch') from a new, expanded perspective.

Place as possibility

Photo by Flickr user clazzi

Place has often been viewed as a sedentary, romantic and somewhat conservative concept and as such it is frequently regarded with great suspicion. The same goes for the notion of 'home'. In a recent thoughtful article on the matter, Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting writes,

"The politics of home have had a fraught and vicious history on the continent, and perhaps this explains how they have been set aside, and so deliberately ignored. But belonging can be reinterpreted and that's where a host of seemingly unrelated cultural responses to our predicament seem to be forging a new understanding"

The article highlights a set of ideas that are currently refocusing attention on notions of home and the 'geography of our lives'. New localism and environmentalism are both identified as key to this recent re-engagement with place. Bunting goes on to reinterpret home and belonging as 'ongoing projects', the continuous result of a 'shared commitment' and not an allegiance to an unchanging common identity or homeland.

From landscapes of neglect to landscapes of hope

Photo by Flickr user Nicobobinus

In a recent interview for The Guardian, novelist Anthony Cartwright talks about ‘landscapes of neglect’, those mostly urban places which have seen dramatic decline in socio-economic fortune in recent decades and which thus become fertile breeding grounds for far-right extremism. Talking about the town in which he himself grew up, he explains,

"Even as a boy, I was aware of this landscape of decay as the physical fabric of the town was boarded up, and that fed into the psychology of the place… at times of economic collapse, people always look around for someone to blame."

It would seem that in the current climate, there are a lot of people looking around for someone to blame. This study funded by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2006 found that as many as 18 to 25 per cent of the UK population would consider voting for the British National Party and it is unlikely that this statistic has since dropped.