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."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."
Significantly, the report finds that education, or rather the lack of it, is one of the key factors that contribute to high levels of BNP support. This would seem to support many a justification that has been given for education now and in the past. An education that nurtures tolerance, care and a sense of hope is as urgent now as it has ever been. I firmly believe that learning geography can help us here. A geographical perspective can help us to transcend narrow and provincial attitudes and cultivate a spirit of openness.
Alex Standish argues in this article on Spiked for a geography curriculum that shields children from the 'real world' of political responsibility. Now, I am not afraid to put my hand up and admit that I agree with Standish on some counts. Certainly, I am willing to accept that a geography that is pulled along solely by extrinsic political objectives is a diminished geography, and a classic case of tail-wagging-dog. However, that children should be shielded from the real world... I find this hard to grasp... how are children to form an understand of their place in the world if they are denied active engagement with it?
The question is one of relevance. It has been argued before that the curriculum lacks relevance to those from deprived backgrounds (see this report from the DCSF, especially section 6.2.4). It is unfortunate that it is those very areas that could hold claim to be ‘landscapes of neglect’, that is, inner city areas with a high level of deprivation, where young people are least likely to opt to take up geography after the age of 14. This is based on the findings of Paul Weeden in a paper which as far as I know is as yet unpublished. This is a somewhat cruel but not so surprising irony and the solution can only lie in reexamining the subject, to try and understand how we may rejuvenate its appeal for these young people.
I suspect that a truly place-based and community orientated education could improve the situation- an education that draws on, without remaining in, the sphere of localised knowledge and interests. At the Geographical Association we are envisioning a future where teams of ‘young community geographers’ will work with planners, shopkeepers and those in the cultural sector on a number of place-orientated projects.
Such a geography would act to enhance the capabilities of disadvantaged young people, their range of opportunities for engaging, doing and being. It would enable them to take part in conversations from which they are presently excluded, and give them the opportunity to re-think their existing notions of home, identity and belonging. This is the turning that a meaningful education can provide. It is to turn away from the everyday ways we look at and experience place, home and ourselves and to look at them askance, and to ask questions about them. It is real geography - writing and rewriting the world as we walk over it, touch it, smell it, delight in it and fear in it.
We cannot, and moreover, should not expect the study of geography to cure all of society’s ills, nor to magically resolve bigotry and extremism. But there is a place for geography. It can light our way, by challenging what we think of as home and in turn begin to transform our landscapes of neglect into landscapes of hope.
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