Michael Young on the question of knowledge in the curriculum

One book that has proven to have a formative influence on me as I begin my MRes is Michael Young's book Bringing Knowledge Back In (2008). Young is a notable sociologist of education who, at the beginning of the 1970's wrote a book titled Knowledge and Control (1971) in which he helped to usher in an approach to the sociology of education that linked the kinds of knowledge then enshrined in school curricula with vested power interests - an approach that has, of course, proved to be very popular. In this more recent book, Young charts how his position has altered significantly. Though he hasn't turned his back on the idea that knowledge is to a large extent socially and historically constructed, he now understands that the extreme social relativist views that have emerged since the 1970's have caused academics to avoid facing difficult questions about knowledge and truth. This, as I understand it, has in turn undermined, rather than advanced, the sociology of education's critical and emancipatory potential. As Young himself writes:

"the 'new' sociology of education that began... with a radical commitment to truthfulness, undermined its own project by its rejection of any idea of truth itself." (Young, 2008: 199)

Furthermore, Young now believes that it is the distinctly social character of knowledge that enables it to have a claim to truth and objectivity, and to give us a basis for choosing particular educational and curriculum principles over others. The fact that cultural objects are not analysable in the same way as natural objects does not mean that those working in the cultural sciences shouldn't pursue the maximum amount of objectification possible. He pursues a lengthy analysis of the works of Durkheim, Vygotsky, Cassirer, Basil Bernstein and others in order to substantiate this claim. I won't go into this level of detail here. The book, being as it is a collection of previously published essays, is a little on the repetitive side and I suspect that most readers will want to be selective in which chapters they turn to, as I was. However I do want to focus a little on the distinction Young makes between vertical and horizontal knowledge structures and on the idea of grammaticality, which can be found in the final chapter of the book.

Vertical, hierarchical knowledge structures are those which develop through integration into ever more unitary, more general sets of propositions and towards more general explanations and laws. Something like Physics would probably best represent this type of knowledge. Horizontal knowledge structures on the other hand are those which are plural rather than unitary and which contain parallel and largely incommensurable languages. The social sciences, in their current form, are more likely to be in this vein. Verticality and horizontality have to do with theory's internal development. Moving on to grammaticality, this term is to do with a knowledge structure's dealings with the external, empirical world; that is, its ability to identify 'empirical correlates'. High grammaticality therefore refers to a theory with a high level of worldly corroboration. Together, the criteria of verticality and grammaticality "determine the capacity a particular knowledge structure has to progress." (Ibid: 210)

For me, the interesting question then arises as to where geography fits into this framework. I suggest that here we have a discipline that is verticality challenging. We have a whole host of parallel languages, stemming from that original bifurcation of physical and human geography and then into further sub-disciplines such as economic, population, and various forms of cultural geography such as humanist, critical, feminist etc. My experience at university has been that these lines of enquiry tend to follow their own disciplinary paths, with few attempts made at dialogue and integration, though there may well be geography departments where a more integrative approach is taken. This is a far cry from the early holistic origins of geography (see Bonett, 2008) and reflects ever increasing specialisation in academia.

As for grammaticality, I think geography is particularly strong in this respect. Particularly in fieldwork, but even in the classroom, geography is a subject that reminds us that there is a world out there, beyond human imaginings and constructions. A world of human and non-human others that calls for our understanding and care. In this sense, geography is a corrective to a curriculum that has perhaps become too focused on the self, a topic I have broached in previous posts and which I will no doubt engage with again. One of the values of a geography education is precisely that it brings our attention to this world outside of ourselves and, if it does its job right, provides us with the resources and conceptual understanding to find our place within it.

Bonnett, A. (2008) What is geography? London: Sage.
Young, M.F.D. (2008) Bringing knowledge back in: From social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education. London: Routledge.
Young, M.F.D. (1971) Knowledge and control: new directions for the sociology of education. London: Collier-Macmillan.

Photo is by Flickr user ChrisM70 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Subjects and tradition

A few words about tradition…

We keep hearing from certain quarters the need for a return to 'traditional subjects'. I'm not exactly sure what these people have in mind when they talk about tradition in the context of education, or even if they have taken the trouble to examine the term at all, but it seems to bring to mind the vision of a teacher, at the front of the class, reciting important dates, locations and other facts to be absorbed and regurgitated. But is this the only way we can think about tradition? Is the only alternative, as those pedagogues who talk about 'learning for the 21st century' seem to believe, to surrender ourselves to the future and to be urged along by passing fads and the pressing needs of our times? I don't think this is so. As we are about to see, there is also a potentially radical sense of tradition that we can draw from.

Jacques Derrida once talked about 'an appeal to tradition that is in no way traditional'. What on Earth did he mean by this? The philosopher Simon Critchley explains it very well indeed. A conservative sees tradition as an inheritance (the conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott actually defines education as a sort of inheritance) and something to be passed down, from generation to generation as a kind of doxa, or body of unquestioned knowledge that, at least in theory, every individual should have access to. However, a radical conception of tradition sees it in a very different light. Here, tradition is something produced through a critical or deconstructive engagement with that inheritance. Doxa is now interrogated, questioned and made to answer for itself.

If we adopt this radical sense of tradition as an educator, we still, like the conservative, recognise the need for an inheritance of knowledge that helps us to make sense of the world, but rather than accepting it with blind faith, this sort of tradition calls for an attitude of critical engagement, a sifting through, or a recovery of sorts. As Critchley notes, "what this radical idea of tradition is trying to recover is something missing, forgotten or repressed in contemporary life" (Critchley, 2010: 32). The radical traditionalist understands that we have to sometimes look back in order to go forward. Engaging with tradition in this way might help us to avoid a situation in which education is reduced to a concern only with themes of contemporary relevance, and with preparing young people for 'the 21st century'.

This leads me to another point, that of society's ongoing obsession with the future. Critchely makes the interesting claim that talk of the future is actually reactionary. A relentless insistence on the future tends to curtail interesting, original thought. We are discouraged to cultivate memory and engage with tradition. For Critchley, "the future is about amnesia, and that's what's behind this ludicrous love affair with technology and forms of social networking… these are forms of oblivion, the desire for oblivion" (Ibid: 116). These will sound like awfully strong claims, but I do see his point, for I too experience social networking as a kind of oblivion, an unworld in which our identities are surrendered and where people endlessly 'communicate' but rarely seem to actually say anything.

Following from this, the frightening thing for me is any idea that education as we know it could be adequately replaced by the likes of Google, Facebook and Twitter. This is perhaps not so far-fetched an idea, and Ian Gilbert (2011) has indeed just written a book on this very topic. What would such an 'education' look like? I suspect it would be defined largely by amnesia towards the past and a fixation with the everyday. Genuine education must look to tradition as well as the present and future, but do so in the radical, rather than the conservative, sense. This requires teachers who have a wide appreciation and understanding of their subject and who will be well equipped to engage their students critically with the various forms of human knowledge that are their inheritance.

Critchley, S. (2010) How to Stop Living and Start Worrying. Polity.

Gilbert, I. (2010) Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google? Routledge.

Photo is by Flickr user Raggedroses and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Place and identity

"The so-called Romantic aspect of a region is a quiet feeling of sublimity under the form of the past, or, what is the same, a feeling of loneliness, absence, isolation." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

How can the 'form of the past' come to persist in the present? Furthermore, how can a region, or a place, make us 'feel' a certain way? Though there are really no ready answers here, let me draw your attention to Thursbitch (2004), a beautiful novel by Alan Garner which tells the story of the valley of the same name. Here, it seems that the landscape gathers together and somehow preserve the lives, thoughts and memories of those who have lived in and visited that valley. In the contemporary strand of the story, Sal, suffering as she does from a degenerative disease that causes short-term memory loss, returns to this valley over and over again as it quickly becomes the sole place which her memory clings onto and in which she feels safe. As a geologist, Sal can readily name and classify the valley's rocky outcrops and layers at first sight. Yet, there is far more to this landscape for her. She expresses to her carer, Ian, her impression that "this place knows we're here". Ian is more sceptical, merely permitting that what appears to be a "strong atmosphere is no more than our projection of our own experience and emotion onto a circumscribed place".

Many writers on place have commented upon its characteristic 'gathering' quality. In addition, many have tried to explicate the 'interanimation' of self and world that the comments of both Sal and Ian, taken as two equally compelling but incomplete perspectives, beg us to consider. For the philosopher Edward Casey (1993, 1996), that places gather is one of the essential traits revealed by a phenomenological topoanalysis. They gather not only material things but also "experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts." Interpretative archaeologist Christopher Tilley (1994) explores how particular landscapes take on meaning for the human inhabitants that dwell there, and how personal biographies and biographies of place are intimately connected. Places themselves, Tilley writes, "may be said to acquire a history, sedimented layers of meaning by virtue of the actions and events that take place in them".

Furthermore, particular objects and features of the landscape can provide particularly compelling foci points in the lives of individuals and groups, "providing reference points and planes of emotional orientation for human attachment and involvement." (Ibid: 16) This is certainly the case in Thursbitch too, where the high stones and sacred spring that grace the valley offer points of orientation for Jack Turner and his neighbours, as well as acting as symbolic markers at which the land can be honoured, "just so long as it's done proper, and we mind us manners". The question remains however, as to whether this power of a place to gather together experiences and histories and to become a nexus of meaningfulness for human individuals and communities, is, as Ian would have it, a projection of our selves onto an inert and empty place. Or, whether we allow that place itself has a certain agency, as Sal would seem to aver when she remarks on the 'sentience' of the landscape.

In Place and Experience (1999), another philosopher of place, Jeff Malpas, demonstrates that place can be seen as a complex but unitary structure comprising spatiality and temporality, subjectivity and objectivity, self and other. He explains how these elements are established only in relation to each other and within the topographical structure of place. He refers to Proust's In Search of Lost Time to show how places have a fundamental role in forming the identity of people, and vice versa. Although places may have an agential role in the formation of identity, it is important to note that this is an identity established not only in place, but in time also. As he writes, "Proust's achievement is to display the disclosure of the multiplicity and unity of experience, and so of the world, as something that occurs through the spatio-temporal unfolding of place."

My understanding of place has been largely influenced by Jeff Malpas and it makes sense to sketch out here some more of his position. For Malpas, place is definitely not to be regarded as simply a specific region of space, defined chiefly by its objective location. Neither however, is place to be regarded as a purely subjective phenomenon, that is (as some humanist geographers have at times implied) a personal response to a particular environment that one finds oneself in. Place does indeed have all of these as aspects, but is also so much more. "Places", he writes, "are established in relation to a complex of subjective, intersubjective and objective structures that are inseparably conjoined together within the overarching structure of place as such." In the book Place and Experience (1999), Malpas devotes many chapters of painstaking philosophical analysis, drawing on the likes of Martin Heidegger and Donald Davidson, to show how place possesses this complex but unitary structure. In essence, he argues that far from being grounded in subjectivity, place is itself the ground for all of our experience. In other words, the very nature of human being, of human thought, is established in place. Place, when understood in such a way, takes on an unprecedented significance as the following quotation clearly shows.

"...the claim is that we are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are engaged; and that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a central role – our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place-bound.”

These are striking claims to be sure, and there are ones that I will no doubt come back to in future work. Speaking of which, it is now only a couple of weeks before I begin at university again, a change of place I am very much looking forward too!

References

Casey, E. (1993) Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Casey, E. (1996) ‘How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena’, in Feld, S. and Basso, K. H. (Eds.) Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press.

Garner, A. (2004) Thursbitch. London: Vintage

Malpas, J. E. (1999) Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Tilley, C. (1994) A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths and Monuments. Oxford and Providence: Berg

Photo is by Flickr user Revo_1599 and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Education: a journey into the unknown?

An exceptionally well pitched and timely contribution to the curriculum debate is David Lambert's recent opinion piece in the TES entitled 'Crack curriculum's core and open a world of opportunity' (Lambert, 2010). With the ceaseless pendulum of educational policy apparently swinging back towards knowledge and away from the premium put on skills and pedagogy seen in recent times, now seems like a good time to put some thought into this matter and to think beyond the usual polarisations. Actually, it is essential that we do so, to counter the inevitable barrage of what Lambert accurately terms 'Gradgrind-sounding rhetoric about facts and old-fashioned subjects'.

Lambert argues that the past decade has seen the inexorable rise of a professional language of pedagogy. To my mind much of this language has become increasingly cumbersome and is often vacuous, with catchphrases such as 'learning to learn' being the order of the day. Because of this, many teachers have become disengaged from the curriculum, which has now been largely reduced to a 'vehicle' to 'deliver transferable skills'. Yet, as Lambert rightly points out, the curriculum is really more than this. The curriculum is all about the destination, or the aims, of an education and it is pedagogy that is perhaps better thought of as the vehicle. I certainly agree. We have all heard the old cliché that it is the journey and not the destination that matters yet clear headed thinking on this matter surely suggests that destination and journey are both of much import, even if that destination is not perfectly clear to us.

Crafting a curriculum involves making choices about the selection of knowledge that we are going to teach, and this selection, as Lambert points out, is always going to be influenced by our principles, values and our 'sense of educational purpose'. Although enlivening learning with relevant topics is an excellent idea, a curriculum totally fashioned according to the latest news items and contemporary themes is bound to be ultimately shallow and unsatisfying. Subject disciplines like geography are vital precisely because they offer a world of facts, ideas and experiences that take us beyond the everyday and familiar. As Lambert asserts, there is absolutely no doubt that starting with the world of the child's everyday experience is sound pedagogy. However, failing to move beyond that is a betrayal of education's promise. Again, it is to forget your destination through a preoccupation with the journey.

The 'move towards the unknown' that Lambert refers to here is particular pertinent for me and links up nicely with my previous posting on the question of education and technology. In that post I explored what Michael Bonnett (2002) had to say regarding 'education as a form of the poetic'. There we saw that genuine education may involve a listening to 'what calls to be thought'. This means an openness and receptiveness that goes way beyond the calculative, instrumental approach that both a single-minded focus on facts for the sake of facts on the one hand and generic skills on the other equally represent. Bonnett spoke of an 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay' that involves teacher, learner and subject matter. In this vision, the teacher lets the learner learn rather than attempting to impose learning upon them.

In the same way, both teacher and learner are engaged in letting that which calls to be learned show itself. This is an intent, rigorous, and by no means purely passive listening to what we may call, after Heidegger, the 'call of Being' or 'the song of the earth'. The geography curriculum is, I think, a particularly apposite place for this kind of teaching and learning to occur. Geography, as David Lambert reminds us, is all about trying 'to make sense of ourselves at home on planet Earth'. In this process of 'making sense' we are to a large extent venturing into the unknown. Of course, we know all kinds of facts and figures about the Earth and using these to incite curiosity amongst learners does no harm, but ultimately teachers and students alike are on a journey, and education is surely most at its most enjoyable when it is seen that way.

I fancy that his journey is somewhat like the ones taken by the early explorers of the Earth. That is, we are not completely without a destination in mind. We have an inkling of the direction in which we are headed and we are not totally 'lost at sea'. This would get us nowhere, and we would blunder forever onwards, with all the skills needed to sail the ship but with no guiding sense of purpose. However, our idea of our destination is necessarily patchy; its precise coves and peninsulas are hazy and as yet not fully revealed to us. It is this element of the unknown that pulls us and causes us to set sail in the first place. As I have said before, learning begins in wonder. Viewed like this, education is all about revealing and letting things come to light. It is an attentive, open-minded journey into what is part known, part unknown.

I should add, however, that to say that teacher and learner are on the journey together is certainly not to say that their roles are somehow equivalent or interchangeable. By virtue of the sheer fact that they have journeyed further and know the territory at least a little better, the teacher is charged with the praiseworthy task of guiding the learner, and this brings with it the need for serious, sometimes difficult, judgement. As Lambert rightly says, questions of knowledge and of curriculum are something that teachers should get involved with. Just as the learner’s role is not to passively absorb what is to be learnt, the teacher’s role is most decisively not to passively deliver it.

This is why any idea of education as simply an assimilation of prespecified facts or the acquisition of general skills is bound to be inadequate. It is time to bring to an end the persistent confusion and misplaced antagonism between knowledge and skills and to think hard about the heart of genuine education. Lambert's article is a commendable contribution to this task.

References

Lambert, D. (2010) 'Crack curriculum's core and open a world of opportunity', Times Educational Supplement, 27 August [Online]. Available at http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=6055960. (Accessed: 14 September 2010)

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Photo is by Flickr user publicinsomniac and is made available under a Creative Commons license

The question concerning technology and geographical education

In the post Heidegger and Technology we saw how, for Heidegger, it wasn't particular items of technology, nor even technology in and of itself that had led us to the nihilistic modern era but rather the essence that lies behind technology, that metaphysics of Enframing that wills to order everything and challenges things forth, including ultimately humans themselves, as resources to be exploited. Heidegger saw the work of art, such as the work of Van Gogh or of the poet Hölderlin for instance, to occasion a different, more authentic kind of world disclosure that allows things to shine forth and show themselves, free from the calculative and reductive tendencies of modern, technological, thinking. So, what consequences might all this have for our ideas about education? Is education also implicated in the technological mode of revealing and if so is there the possibility of an alternative?

From the emphasis put on examinations and 'teaching to the test' through to justifications of education that accentuate efficiency and 'economic competitiveness', it appears that there may be various reasons for thinking that education might indeed be under the insidious grip of Enframing. Fitzsimons (2002) writes that education itself has been reconceptualised as a key 'technology' for the projects of economic development and globalisation. In this vision, all the components of the educational enterprise, including students, teachers and knowledge are all seen as resources to be utilised as efficiently as possible. In addition, Dwyer et al (1988) have argued that 'schools are exemplars of inauthentic existence, and we can see it in many of their practices, such as the emphasis on rote memorization and unreflective praise of contemporary norms'.

So, if schools are indeed fully caught up in and actively perpetuate the technological mode of revealing things, is there any possibility at all for a more poietic mode of attunement to take place in the classroom? In an article that is as yet unpublished, James Magrini (2010) puts forward the case that there are windows of opportunity, particularly in the arts and humanities, to create 'small worlds apart from the oppressive effect of Enframing', in which students and teachers can engage aesthetically with the world and listen and respond to the 'call of Being'. These small but potent windows of opportunity put students in touch with 'contextual ways of knowing' in which they have the potential to see, hear, feel and 'attend to more facets of the experienced world'. This puts me very much in mind of the sort of 'Living Geography' initiatives that the Geographical Association have been advocating.

In a similar vein, Michael Bonnett (2002) has considered what 'education as a form of the poetic' might look like. In this vision we are invited to see education as essentially 'an ever-evolving triadic interplay between teacher, learner, and that which calls to be learned'. Unlike the highly controlled and instrumental way of thinking that defines the era of Enframing, poetic thinking does not conform to an externally imposed framework but rather involves a 'genuine listening to what calls to be thought in the evolving situation'. Such thinking is context-relative and expresses 'a receptive-responsive openness to things'. In a poetic mode of education, the teacher must 'let the pupil learn rather than impose learning upon her'. Importantly, this is not a wholly passive process. This kind of thinking is demanding and rigorous in its nature, for, as mentioned, it requires the learner to listen for what calls to be thought.

Bonnett rounds off with this wonderful passage which incisively captures what genuine thinking means for Heidegger, and what a poetic form of education would mean for learners, and is well worth quoting at length:

"For Heidegger, genuine thinking is not the assimilation of a series of gobbets of prespecified information and ideas, nor the acquisition and application of free-floating 'thinking skills,' but an exciting and demanding journey into the unknown. It is deeply rooted, being drawn forward by the pull of that which is somehow incipient in our awareness but has yet to reveal itself, and the fundamental achievement of education lies in learners coming to feel for themselves the call of what is there to be thought in this unthought: the harmonies, the conflicts, and the mysteries." (2002: 242)

This is an especially interesting quote because it connects with the ongoing debate about knowledge, pedagogy and the geography curriculum that my own research will be contributing towards. It would seem that the recent predominance of generic and transferable 'thinking skills' and other pedagogical devices have caused us to forget the real purpose of schooling, which is to give young people access to the ever evolving store of powerful and important knowledge (such as geographical knowledge) which can enable them to understand themselves and the world. As this quote points out however, this is best approached not as a matter of assimilating a series of predetermined facts, but rather as a continuing journey, made by both teacher and student, into what is, at least to them, as yet unknown.

There is a related question here about the extent to which technology might aid or hinder this journey. Does technology in education inherently conceal Being? That is, does it cause us to become less receptive and open to things, and more reliant on prespecified, highly structured frameworks that distance us ever more from the earth? In a rather interesting little interview on Radio 4 with author and TV presenter Christopher Somerville, he argues that in the age of the Sat Nav we have as a nation become more disorientated and geographically illiterate than ever before. The interview itself, spanning only four minutes, is short and Somerville's assertions are frankly shaky, but there are a few points made in it that can act as launch pads for further discussion.

In the interview, Somerville argues that people today are so dependent on their mobile phones and Sat Navs to orientate themselves that they fail to see the 'real' geography around them. It would be interesting to reflect a little more, from a Heideggerian perspective, on what constitutes this 'real' geography; is it the lakes, mountains and seas that lie behind the representations we see on our screens? If so, what precisely is it that makes these things so unique in their realness? Is it not possible that technology might actually help us to see, feel and hear more, thus enlivening our experience of the world? Could mobile phones and Sat Navs, creatively used, not enable us to become more, and not less, responsive to the landscape? These are all questions that are well worth exploring further, and I hope to do just that in a future article.

References

Bonnett, M. (2002) 'Education as a Form of the Poetic', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

Dwyer, M., Prior, L. And Shargel, E. (1988) 'The educational implication of Heideggerian authenticity', Philosophy of Education, 44, 140-149.

Fitzsimons (2002) 'Enframing Education', in Peters, M. (Ed) Heidegger, Education and Modernity. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc.

James Marini (2010 - unpublished) 'Worlds Apart in the Curriculum: Heidegger, Technology, and the Poietic Attunement of Art' Submitted to the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. Draft available online.

Photo is by Flickr user Luca Rossini and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Bringing geography home

I am now gearing up to begin my MRes and subsequent PhD at the Institute of Education in London this October. Here is a taster of some of the things that I will be working on...

"The geographer Tim Cresswell informs us that prospective geography undergraduates often arrive at his university for interview expressing an interest in places and the differences between them. However, this interest is rarely about a deeply theorised notion of what place is as a concept. Cresswell argues that if students at school were to engage with thinking more deeply about place then it might not only ease their transition to university geography, but their experience of studying geography could be enlivened and their understanding of contemporary social and cultural issues enhanced. I find this an appealing argument. The ideas of place, home, identity and belonging are often evoked in the media, and are part of young people's everyday experience. It would seem therefore to be important for them to develop the capacity to think about these issues carefully and critically, in order to take them beyond the 'everyday'. This is a crucial part of what has been termed 'geo-capability'. However, more research is required in order to how to see precisely how this conceptual approach might work in practice. In response to this perceived gap, my research project will be focusing on these two key questions:

• How can we teach and learn geography in way that fosters a richer and more critical understanding of place, home and belonging by drawing upon both the resource that is the academic subject of geography and the experiences of young people?

• What would a geography curriculum built upon and led by such concepts look like and what benefits would this would bring about for learners, in terms of their 'geo-capability'?

My intention is to carry out research with young people and teachers from three Sheffield schools representing considerably varied catchment areas. They will be involved in a project about place, home and belonging. The young people will be asked to keep a multi-media diary documenting personal and shared geographies of their 'home' city of Sheffield over the period of one year. Although the group will have a high degree of autonomy over their project, it is anticipated that they will use an experiential fieldwork approach that may include creative writing, photography and the use of digital media such as online mapping and Twitter. I aim to find an approach that allows young people's voices to speak honestly and freely. My methodology will be chiefly qualitative and will include a large ethnographic component, as I will be accompanying the young people as they carry out fieldwork and compile their diaries, thus being at once researcher and participant. Other techniques that I may employ include interviewing and the analysis of media that students produce during the project.

It is important to recognise that this research will also contribute to broader debates about the role of geography in the school curriculum. It has become commonplace to hear arguments about the irrelevance of 'traditional' school subjects in the information age and their inability to provide young people with the skills they require for the 21st century. However, David Lambert and John Morgan argue that the 'curriculum wars' here alluded to are based on a superficial reading on the relationship between subject knowledge and the curriculum. I agree, and my research is located in opposition to both the idea of a subject discipline as a 'transmittable' body of knowledge but also to the 'debilitating anti-intellectualism' that occurs when subject content is supplanted by a sole focus on educational processes and skills-building. I wish to contribute to an emerging vision for geography education that integrates student experience, teacher knowledge and skills, and the subject resource that is geography. I believe that my research will help clarify important distinctions between everyday experience, pedagogy and the school curriculum as well as contribute to academic discourse on place, home and belonging.."

Photo is by Flickr user Kirk Siang and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Heidegger and technology

 

In March of last year, newspaper readers in the UK were met with headlines along the lines of 'Primary pupils to learn Twitter instead of history' and 'Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter'. These articles were written in response to the publication of Sir Jim Rose's proposals for a new primary curriculum, which have since been overturned by the new coalition Government. Predictably enough, conservative papers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph were deeply disapproving towards such ideas. Now, let us put aside for the moment the question of whether these articles have distorted Rose's report. Let us also put to one side the absurdity exhibited in the idea of teaching the next generation of pupils about a strain of technology over which they will no doubt have a level of mastery over and above that of many of their teachers!

Let us instead cut to the chase. These newspaper headlines help us to focus our attention on a very important matter, that of the relationship between education and technology. Let us note that 'technological understanding' is one of the six 'core areas' identified in Rose's review. We see technology pervading every subject area, not least in geography where Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are playing an ever more central part. Is this, on the whole, a desirable circumstance? Is it anything new? Has education ever in fact been detached from technology? Or has a technological understanding of being always permeated education? In coming blog posts I will be considering these questions through Heidegger's critique of technology. First though, I need to take a closer look at what Heidegger actually had to say about technology, again with the help of Michael Zimmerman.

This is made all the more difficult because Heidegger's attitude to technology changed significantly during the course of his life. But we can say that, in general, he saw the modern technological era as but the latest and most degraded phase in humankind's forgetting of being, an era in which entities are viewed as mere resources to be exploited in the name of human power and security. To understand this, we need to get our head around what Heidegger understood by 'being', and in particular by 'Dasein'. For Heidegger, being is not an entity, but rather the event of the 'presencing' or 'unconcealment' of an entity. Dasein names the very distinct kind of being pertaining to humans. Only Dasein exists in the world in such a way that its own being and the being of others is an issue for itself.

Heidegger put special emphasis on the role of Dasein in enabling the being of entities to come to presence and manifest itself, by providing the 'clearing' in which entities can show up as entities. In case this all sounds a little too anthropocentric however, Zimmerman reminds us that Dasein did not own or produce this clearing, but rather is appropriated as this clearing. Dasein is in this fashion summoned by being and finds itself always already thrown into the world of entities and the ontological play of concealing and unconcealing. Authentic Dasein denotes a kind of embodied being-in-the-world whose essence is 'care', where 'to care' refers not only to ontic intervention but principally to the simple 'letting be' of entities; of not submitting them all the time to the calculating reason of human subjectivity. Authentic Dasein can be seen in this way as the 'shepherd of being'.

According to Heidegger, the degeneration of our understanding of being began in ancient Greek thought. Though Plato was to an extent still alert to the 'presencing' aspect of being, it was nevertheless he who first interpreted being as constant presence or eidos, the eternally unchanging form, thereby founding Western metaphysics. At a later date, Christianity would further embed this understanding of being as permanent presence, now produced by and grounded in a creator God. With the coming of Descartes and the age of reason, humanity would finally arrogate this creation and grounding to itself, "by asserting that for something 'to be' means for it to be representable as a clear and distinct idea of the human subject." In this critical phase entities, or 'things in themselves', were once and for all swallowed up by the human subject who was now the source of all knowledge and value.

This deteriorating historical, metaphysical understanding of being is what ultimately paved the way for the modern, technological, nihilistic era. The technological understanding of being is first and foremost a metaphysical one; hence Heidegger's famous claim that "the essence of technology is nothing technological". In the modern age, entities are 'challenged forth' to be interchangeable raw material to service human needs. Nature is thereby "deprived of any status apart from that of an object for scientific analysis or raw material for modern technology." This highly calculating and rationalistic era may not mark the end of history however; Heidegger appeared to believe that a post-metaphysical era of being was imminent. This would not be a straightforward return to an archaic way of life, but rather a new receptiveness to being as is exemplified in the work of art.

There is much that could be expanded upon in this short account, but this is far as I am going to delve into Heidegger's philosophy of technology at the current time. Needless to say, Heidegger's perspective on technology was, and still is, seen as rather idiosyncratic and has been subjected to much criticism over the years. However, though Heidegger's precise delineation of the 'history of being' might be disputable there is certainly something in his overall analysis that chimes with my own thinking. In the coming months and years I look forward to contemplating carefully the relationship between education and the objectifying, technological understanding of being that may still even now constitute our fundamental way of being-in-the-world. Does technology necessarily restrict the authentic disclosure of being, or can technology actually aid in renewing and revitalising our connection with being, or with nature? Can education, properly thought, bring us 'back to being' and facilitate a less domineering, more respectful attitude towards nature that would meet the aims of environmentalists whilst remaining progressive and optimistic about the capacities and future of humankind?

Zimmerman's 2002 essay 'Heidegger's Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism' makes for excellent further reading and can be found at his departmental web page.

Photo is by Flickr user mandyxclear and is made available under a Creative Commons license

On reconciling progressivism and environmentalism

In my last post I remarked on the similarities to be found in Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes' controversial thesis that a therapeutic ethos is becoming prevalent in our culture with the arguments made by humanist critics such as Luc Ferry against the theory of deep ecology. In the former we are told that there is in our culture an increasing and dangerous preoccupation with our emotional and irrational self and in the latter we see the emergence of a theory that seemingly wants to expel humanity from its position of superiority and views us instead as being of only equal importance to any other part of nature. It is arguable that both trends point in the same ultimate direction: towards a diminished notion of the human being that views it as fragile and vulnerable with little of the capacity for rational thought and willed, autonomous action so beloved of all those of a progressive stripe. Since writing that post I have been reading an essay by Michael Zimmerman (2003), who surveys some attempts that have been made to philosophically reconcile progressivism and environmentalism.

Many thinkers are in agreement that the emergence of European modernity saw a definite break from previous understandings of our relationship to nature, largely due to advances in natural science which have enabled us to predict, control and exploit the natural world. Meanwhile, in modern times 'man' developed "a new mode of subjectivity, egoic rationality, and a related ideology, anthropocentric humanism, which portray man as the source of value, the standard for truth, and the master of nature." (Zimmerman, 2003: 4) For many radical environmentalists, it would seem that only a turn towards a post-anthropocentric horizon could remedy the environmental and societal ills that have been caused by such an egotistical attitude, as it is simply not possible to fix the ecological mess with the same rationalistic, calculating tools that instigated it. From the perspective of radical ecologists, humankind is often portrayed as but one strand in a 'cosmic web' and only an attitude of compassion, empathy and submission to the greater whole will enable humans to get over the current ecological impasse.

The progressive response to such ideas is one of alarm and consternation at the apparently regressive tendencies that they display. As Zimmerman notes, in "demanding that humans conform to an allegedly more 'natural' way of doing things, and proclaiming the need for a mystical reunion with nature, radical environmentalists ostensibly promote an anti-humanism that... is inconsistent with progressive views of history." (Ibid: 5-6) These anti-humanistic views are seen to be all too compatible with reactionary politics, and we may indeed see in some of them (as Luc Ferry certainly does) the disquieting trace of the kind of ecofacism that drove anti-modern Nazi rhetoric. It is of interest here to examine the thought of Martin Heidegger, as Zimmerman does. Heidegger is a philosopher I have a considerable interest in, but his contribution to Western thought is often overshadowed by his engagement with National Socialism and his now well-proven early allegiance to it. Nevertheless, it is perhaps this dangerous tension in Heidegger’s thought that makes his work so fascinating and so crucial to engage with.

Heidegger saw the current phase of technological modernity as but the latest expression of humanity's degenerating relationship to the being of entities. According to his 'history of being', the domineering, exploitative relationship to Nature that typified his age could not be explained in purely social or economic terms but only with reference to metaphysics. In pre-Socratic times, humans existed in an authentic 'ontological openness' that allowed the being of entities (or Being) to reveal itself or 'shine forth'. However, with the coming of Socrates, Plato and their followers, humanity began its quest to find an underlying ground or foundation for reality. This search intensified and culminated in the philosophy of Descartes and others who saw humans as possessing a self-grounding rationality and free will that made them quite separate from nature (that infamous mind/body split). This changing conception of humanity and of Being paved the way for the typically calculating modern relationship to entities in which they are viewed as a 'standing reserve' to be 'challenged forth' and ordered. This is the essence of modern technology which Heidegger termed Gestell, usually translated in English as 'enframing'.

The modern way of revealing entities is thus essentially an objectifying one: "technological modernity is simply the working out of the claim that for something to be it must be the object for the autonomous, self-grounding human subject." (Ibid: 18) If we accept this as an accurate portrayal of modernity, then we can reasonably ask: where next? We have already seen some of the criticisms levelled at radical ecologists and others who would have make us return to a more primitive, 'authentic' way of dwelling upon the Earth. Zimmerman turns to the thought of Ken Wilber, who has developed an integral approach that tries in many ways to accomplish a reconciliation of environmentalism and progressivism. I haven't read any of Wilber's work myself, though now I have read this essay I expect I shall do. It would seem that Wilber perceives a future course for postmodern humanity in which body and nature 'below' and divine 'above' are reintegrated into a new evolutionary consciousness. In such reintegration, "the individual selfhood of rational-egoic subjectivity is both included and transcended in a more comprehensive form of awareness that is open both to nature and divine."(Ibid: 31)

For Wilber, progressives and environmentalists alike share a 'flat' ontology, largely influenced by natural science, in which the material and the physical alone comprise reality. According to Wilber, however, reality is not at all like this. The physical is but one plane in a many levelled reality, and the biosphere is contained within the 'noosphere'. In this vision, self-reflective consciousness constitutes a different level of reality that evolves from and surpasses the physical and organic planes. This seems akin to many Eastern philosophies that I have read. Wilber maintains that humans must develop this postmodern awareness, which is certainly not a regression, but which rather "transcends customary boundaries" such as the physical, organic, mental and artificial. Interestingly, as Zimmerman clarifies, "a prerequisite for the rise of this more integrative awareness is that the majority of people need to develop modern consciousness and institutions, although such development must avoid critical damage to the biosphere. Hence, the need for environmentalists and progressives to cooperate in reminding each other of what the other finds so important." (Ibid: 40, my emphasis)

So, in order for humanity to advance to the next level of consciousness, it would appear that the contemporary modern era of rational-egoic selfhood is, if you like, a necessary evil. It is a troubling but obligatory stage in our evolution. What’s more, despite its disdain by many primitivists, technology itself might be a crucial element in this evolution. The key may be in finding ways to use technology in ways that enhance rather than constrain human awareness. As Zimmerman writes, “there is no inherent reason that such technological innovations will impede rather than develop freedom, or that they will undermine rather than contribute to the higher, more integrated forms of consciousness.” (Ibid: 37-38).

With this blog posting I realise that I have somewhat strayed away from my usual field of geography education. I am treading in relatively unknown land. This is purposeful. Sometimes it befits us to look far beyond our immediate discipline, our intellectual comfort zone, in the hope that we may bring something back. Indeed, I hope in future posts to think through what the ideas explored here might mean for education and geography education in particular.

You can access Michael Zimmerman's 2003 essay online from his departmental web page.

You can also view Ken Wilber's remarkable looking website.

Photo is by Flickr user UIC Digital Collections and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Truly human?

In my last post I explained how Ecclestone and Hayes (2009) see the rise of therapeutic education and its focus on 'personal relevance' and 'soft skills' to be a grave threat to established liberal notions of education. Indeed, they deem it to be profoundly 'anti-educational'. Such techniques, they claim, turn young people's worlds inwards and instead of broadening their horizons cause them to see themselves as fragile, vulnerable and 'diminished' selves. Ecclestone and Hayes make it clear that they do not see this as a predicament facing education alone, as the idea of the diminished self has now come to permeate our entire culture and they attempt to chart why and how this has come to be the case. The withdrawal from subject based teaching to what they dismiss as 'faddish innovations' such as 'learning to learn' reflects an anti-intellectual climate in which confidence in the potential of human beings has tumbled. This view they make startlingly clear in perhaps one of the most controversial sentences in their book. Regarding the decline of the ideal of liberal education they state:

"Part of the reason for its loss is that many educationalists and teachers see children as incapable of education because they are no longer seen as truly human: there is no point offering an education you do not believe in to children you believe cannot benefit from it." (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009: 143)

So as well as being anti-educational, it would seem that modern trends in education are also anti-human and reflect the misanthropic sentiment that humans are no longer masters of their destinies. Ecclestone and Hayes cite Bookchin (1995) as identifying this problem over a decade ago, in his contention that human society was suffering from a 'failure of nerves', a waning belief in our 'uniquely human attributes' and a general decay in our self-confidence as a species. The decline of traditional subjects in schools mirrors this large scale trend. The outcome of all this, for these authors, is a disastrous paradox: despite the rhetoric of empowerment and increasing happiness, the incursion of therapeutic education results in a population that is unconfident and unsure of itself and which turns to the state in order to receive instruction on what to value and how to behave. They claim that this is why the New Labour government has been so eager to adopt these ideas into its educational policy. All in all, the current drive towards happiness and well-being looks to be authoritarianism by another name.

Now, surely most if not all educationalists can agree that education should enable those educated to become confident and happy individuals, even if this is not the foremost aim they have in mind. If Ecclestone and Hayes are right then there would seem to be a strong argument here against the variety of techniques they group together as 'therapeutic education'. But despite adding a whole section of their book subtitled 'a response to our critics' I still remain unconvinced in a number of areas. For a start, throughout the book the evidence for the case remains at a very anecdotal level, usually consisting of short interviews with friends and colleagues and their children! In addition, there seems to be something very arbitrary about what they choose to bundle together under the 'therapeutic' label. Of course, any teaching practice whose sole focus is on instilling proper attitudes, values and behaviour into children is really rather undesirable, as is any practice that instills a feeling of vulnerability and weakness. But do all of the diverse pedagogical methods that these authors put under this banner really have this insidious effect? With such anecdotal evidence I really find myself with no way of knowing.

Their arguments remind me of these put forward by the philosopher and one time French Minister of Education Luc Ferry in his book The New Ecological Order (1995) which I read whilst researching my MA dissertation. In this book, Ferry mounts a case against deep ecology, which he considers to be threatening human culture and self-confidence in the same way as Ecclestone and Hayes think the therapeutic ethos is. According to Ferry, the entire world of reason and the mind is endangered by the emergence of radical ecology. This dangerous theory papers over all that is truly special in human culture and jeopardizes our democratic societies and institutions. For Ferry, deep ecology is fundamentally undemocratic and as a fundamentalism it has arisen to fill the void left by the demise of other ideologies. It represents a new ideological order that, left unchallenged, would seize the hearts of those battle hardy militants who have been 'left in a state of shock' by the 'death of communism and leftism'. This is somewhat similar to a point made by Ecclestone and Hayes to the effect that therapeutic culture has replaced the gap left by the passing of collective forms of working class organisation and the consequent 'absence of politics'.

In both these cases, the opposition depicted seems to be one of human reason and autonomy against looming and sinister forces that would undermine that hard won reason and autonomy. These forces might take the form of peculiar ideas about humans as mere parts of a living, interdependent system called the Earth or they may be more general doubts about our ability to reason, tackle difficult areas of knowledge and to cope with our emotions. These are big claims and all I am doing at the moment is setting out the scene. These are issues that I will be confronting again and again in my work, and I feel sure that some reconciliation can and must be made. Ecclestone and Hayes state with conviction that 'the majority of young people are not damaged'. On the contrary, based upon my own (anecdotal!) school experiences and from conversations with my partner who takes yoga into schools, I see that there are a lot of young people out there needing some healing. I am also unafraid to acknowledge that the Earth itself is desperately in need of healing.

The big question is, what kind of humanity do we aspire too? As the Ecclestone and Hayes are at pains to point out, we are not going to get very far if our human capacity for self-belief and self-will are reduced to such a level that we come to consider ourselves as inherently flawed beings, who can't even lift a finger without harming the Earth. In order to stand a chance of changing the world, we first need the requisite confidence to do so. We also need the requisite knowledge, and for me that's exactly where geography education comes in...

References

Bookchin, M. (1995) Re-Enchanting Humanity. A Defense of the Human Spirit Against Anti-Humanism, Misanthropy, Mysticism and Primitivism. New York: Cassell.

Ecclestone, K. and Hayes, D. (2009) The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education. London: Routledge.

Ferry, L. (1995) The New Ecological Order. Volk, C. (Trans.) Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Photo is by Flickr user Cold Press Publishing and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Has the geography curriculum become self-obsessed?

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.

Photo is by Flickr user blueiii and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Geography as holistic discipline

In a previous post concerning the need for continued justification of geography as a school subject I suggested that one possible route towards such a justification is to call attention to geography's holistic nature. What evidence do we have that geography has such a nature, and why might gaining a holistic understanding of humans and their environment be of any use to a young person growing up in this century? I didn't have the room to delve into this issue in that post, and I don’t believe it is one that can be dealt with hurriedly. However, I will begin my investigation with a look at the work of Alistair Bonnett (2008), who has written a very impressive introduction to geography, one that should be read by all with an interest in the subject.

A poem

 

Closing

I opened, unaware of this world.

Naïve, a patient hand nurtured me from the soil.

I transformed, took leave of the trellis

That had been erected to support me.

I found my freedom, reached out with

My thin, tender stems to feel the sun.

I grew, looking everywhere for that light.

With the passing seasons I became bolder,

Put on a passionate display. Violent floral reds.

But inside me, in my roots and cells,

I felt empty. I witnessed foliage to the

Left and right of me dying, shriveling up.

I felt feeble. Then I came to acknowledge

My impermanence. I was a fragile being,

Just a straw, not even that. Then began my

Laughing days. I laughed as the leaves

Turned brown and the days shorter. Laughing,

As I knew I was dissolving, returning to

The soil. Now I am folding.

I am closing.

I'm here.

Benjamin Major

No new post this week as I have been working on writings that I hope to see published. The collection from which this poem comes, along with several older essays that will never see the light of day, can now be found on my brand new Scribd account.

Photo is by Flickr user hepp and is made available under a Creative Commons license

Nature as a teacher

The 'organic concept' as developed in the writings of the early German romantics is perhaps not as well known as it might be. In brief, the concept, a fusion of the philosophies of Fichte and Spinoza, sought to unify the natural, physical world and the mental world into an organic whole (see Beiser, 2003). In this model, nature is the absolute and the mind is one part, the most highly developed part, of that whole. There is only a difference in degree and not a distinction in kind, between the mental and the physical. According to this theory, the mental activity of the genius (the artist or the philosopher) is but nature coming to its self awareness. Nature remains indeterminate and inchoate without humanity. But as plenty of Romantic poets have demonstrated through their work, it may also be true that humans can discover or reflect on their own self through exposure to nature.

There can be little doubt that humans have transformed their environment to a far greater degree than other species. This capacity for transformation and rapid change lend to humankind a somewhat precarious destiny. We may use our extraordinary capacities of imagination and love to live in friendship with and amongst human and nonhuman others, or we may continue to believe that the earth serves man and remain 'masters of the mystery that the earth breathes'. As the most complex manifestation of nature, the romantics understood quite well that humans bore a heavy burden. With the benefit of an aesthetic and moral education that taught the individual how to truly love what is not of themselves as a family, as community, we might at least approach wholeness. Friedrich Schlegel once wrote that to 'follow nature' is the only precept of a moral education. (See Beiser, 1996: 152) Why did he say this? Because Schlegel thought that despite humanity's elevated position, nature may remain the best teacher of all. Nature can teach us how to live well…

Geography and educational aims

This post follows on from the previous one on Justifying geography.

The kinds of aims we should have for the living of a fulfilling human life are clearly highly debatable, as is the idea that we can provide any kind of objective list of aims in the first place. However, I am not delving into this particular issue here (see White, 2005 for more on this). In this post I am more concerned with examining how we might go about justifying geography in light of the kinds of aims which actually have been enshrined in the latest version of the KS3-4 National Curriculum (and I assume here that these have been decided upon after lengthy and painstaking deliberation). I must also add that at the time of writing a new government has just taken office that holds some very different conceptions of education from its predecessor, and so it could be that these aims are revised again in the not too distant future. Nevertheless, the aims as they stand are not overly contentious, and they provide a good starting platform from which to begin our justification for geography. I see this as an unavoidably slow and meticulous task that really requires empirical evidence to back it up. However, we can at least make some headway here.