In recent years we have seen a number of pedagogical interventions that claim to make learning more 'engaging' and 'relevant' to young people. From 'personalised learning' to the ubiquitous 'personal, learning and thinking skills' we have seen a noticeable drift of emphasis away from the teaching of subject knowledge to the development of these generic personal skills. As we enter a time of change, with a new Government in office promising a return to 'traditional' subjects, it is perhaps time to take stock and consider if the pedagogical adventure might not have indeed gone too far. In this piece I am going to take a look at the claim that education in general, and geography education in particular, has become preoccupied with the self and with making itself relevant to young people, all at the cost of emptying itself of substantive intellectual content.
In a book entitled The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes (2009) chart the escalation of therapeutic principles and techniques in all phases of the education system and in the workplace. Such an approach to education has become possible, they argue, because of a wider shift in popular culture towards a therapeutic ethos. According to Ecclestone and Hayes, 'populist therapeutic orthodoxies' reflect and reinforce the concept of 'a diminished self'. That is, a fragile and vulnerable self with a diminished sense of human potential. Therapeutic education invites children and adults to see themselves as inherently flawed and at risk, and to lower their educational and social aspirations accordingly, the upshot being that therapeutic techniques, paradoxically and despite claims to the contrary, actually create more unconfident and unhappy individuals. Overall the authors judge therapeutic education to be 'profoundly anti-educational' and an abandonment of 'the liberating project of education'.
I am not going to present here a fully fledged critique of the book but instead want to focus purely on the implications of what the authors categorise as 'therapeutic' approaches to teaching and learning on the structure and content of the school geography curriculum. I think there can be little doubt that we have seen a marked shift in recent years away from the teaching of subject disciplines and towards more generic pedagogical techniques such as 'learning to learn', 'personalised learning' and 'building learning power' (see Claxton, 2008). These approaches are usually defended as offering an 'engaging' and 'relevant' curriculum for all learners, including those who are 'turned off' by traditional academic subjects. They focus on providing children with the skills they need to think and learn for themselves, whilst content (that is, subject knowledge) tends to take a back seat role. In general, they also emphasise 'soft outcomes' of learning such as emotional literacy and well being, as opposed to the cognitive knowledge and skills that subject disciplines have customarily favoured.
The chief critique that Ecclestone and Hayes direct towards these methods of education is that they are increasingly 'turning young people's worlds inwards'. Pedagogic methods that encourage and even compel young people to disclose their innermost worries and anxieties are portrayed as innovative ways of engaging disaffected youth with schooling. Yet, their real effects are more insidious. According to the authors of this book, such pedagogic adventures are sidelining the cognitive and intellectual dimensions of learning for a preoccupation with one's own emotions and feelings and an obsession with one's own self. It is at this point that teachers of geography should really take note, for what is geography if not a sustained study of the world outside of our self and of the many places, processes and interconnections that comprise that world? If Ecclestone and Hayes are correct in their perception of an increasing self preoccupation within education, then this might seem to spell the end of geography as we know it. Extending this trend into the future, we might imagine the subject eventually being replaced by therapy sessions, such as group reflections on places that seem emotionally significant for example.
Recent developments in geography education would seem at first glance to support this hypothesis. To take just a few examples, a recent issue of the journal Primary Geographer had a focus on 'the geography of happiness' and carried articles on children's attachments to 'special places' and ways of 'incorporating happiness' into the geography curriculum. A recent edition of Teaching Geography, a journal aimed at secondary geography teachers, carried an article about students involved in a project called Young People's Geographies in which they were able to 'choose what they wanted to study' and another one all about young people's personal experiences of fieldwork, in which the focus of the fieldwork seemed to be not so much the objective, physical features of the landscape, but on how that landscape made them feel. These examples are no longer unusual and indeed they represent the general zeitgeist that underlies most cutting edge geography education in the UK as promoted by the Geographical Association. I suppose that Ecclestone and Hayes would consider these examples to be perfect illustrations of the dangerous 'inward turn' that education has taken.
I believe that the real picture is actually less dismal than these authors portray. On the whole, I actually support the 'turn' towards feelings and experience that the examples above display, on the grounds that they provide a much needed balance to earlier versions of geography curricula that have over-emphasised objective, detached and analytical ways of knowing the world. Subjective and emotional ways of knowing are equally valuable, and a good teacher knows how to integrate these disparate 'ways of knowing'. I do nevertheless recognise that there is an important message in Ecclestone and Hayes's claims. There is a profound difference between reflecting on one's emotions during an educational experience and more insidious attempts to engineer well-being and happiness. It is this latter scenario that geography teachers must avoid and be vigilant for. The critical role of geography education in broadening young people's horizons is another ground for vigilance. Engaging and relevant geography that begins with young people's everyday experience is one thing, but it would be indulgent and irresponsible, to say the least, to limit their learning to that everyday sphere. As Michael Oakeshott once said, the ultimate reward of education is precisely "emancipation from the mere 'fact of living', from the immediate contingencies of place and time of birth." (Oakeshott, 1998) Sure, let us take time to explore and acknowledge our emotions and feelings about a place, but let us not dwell there.
I think that there is a wider issue to be discussed here about the balance between self-knowledge and world-knowledge as outcomes of the educational endeavor. I truly believe that both are essential and, moreover, that they are certainly not mutually exclusive. Though my spiritual practice of yoga and my readings in this area, I am confident that striving to truly know oneself is a most worthy goal in a human life. However, I also happen to believe that such self knowledge cannot be sought in total isolation from knowledge of the world that exists outside oneself. In this way, I find it hard to accept that classic ideal of the ascetic soul, meditating in isolation, away from all worldly concerns. In the same way, in the field of education, I suspect that coming to an understanding of oneself goes hand in hand with an understanding of the wider world. In coming years I hope to devise a sound and positive argument that geography, partly due its holistic and integrative nature, plays a crucial part in advancing both of these sorts of understandings and in their integration. In brief, I want to argue that geography enables the learner to come to an understanding of themselves as an authentic, emplaced, knowing and feeling self in a world of human and non-human others with whom they are fundamentally and inevitably interrelated.
And a final point on the so-called 'geography of happiness' mentioned earlier. The nagging problem I have with this, and other similar instances of 'happiness education', can be expressed in the following query: should education aim to make us happy and is there not rather something inescapably difficult about this journey we call education? In this world in which we all find ourselves, it is almost certain that we will feel unhappiness, pain and suffering at some point and to some degree. To me, it seems counterproductive therefore to insist zealously on happiness and instead it seems that a better tactic (and here I borrow from Alain de Botton (1997) who himself borrows from Proust) is to learn how to 'suffer successfully'. To bear the capricious fortunes of a human life, and to realize and accept that, after all, we will not always be happy and that our being may not always be well.
References
Claxton, G. (2008) What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education. Oxford: Oneworld.
De Botton, A. (1997) How Proust Can Change Your Life. London: Picador.
Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.
Oakeshott, M (1998) [1971] ‘Education: The Engagement and its Frustration’ in Hirst and White (Eds.) Philosophy of Education: Major Themes in the Analytic Tradition, Volume I: Philosophy and Education. London and New York: Routledge.
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