Earth to academia: on the need to reconnect university and school geography

Abstract

Bonnett (2003) has made a valuable contribution to the continuing debate over the problems facing geography in higher education today. While many of the issues are located in the academy itself, or at least within the organizational and funding apparatus around it (Short 2002), Bonnett follows other com mentators (Shaw and Matthews 1998; Lees 1999) in pointing to academic geography's insularity, and its problematic relationship with the world outside (reflected in curricula, research agendas and the profile of academics outside the academy), as both cause and consequence of the approaching 'crisis' (Bradford 2003, 20; see also Martin 2002). This debate has paralleled, rather than intersected with, discussion about current trends in school geography (Stannard 2002a). While Shaw and Matthews urge academic geographers to make more use of the media, and Lees argues the case for greater public activism, Bonnett's contribution is all the more welcome in that it identifies school geography as one medium through which academic geographers could communicate more widely and engage more actively in the wider world. Discussion has hitherto tended to focus on the implications of trends in school geography for future undergraduate recruitment. While there has been no decline in the total number of students entering single honours geography courses, the future looks bleak: falling applications for postgraduate teacher training courses (geography is now an official short age subject); more HE departments having to top up numbers or even substantially recruit through clearing (RGS/IBG 2000); a decline in the number of HE departments offering degree courses in geo graphy (Gardner and Craig 2001). Geoffrey Griffiths of Reading University was quoted as arguing that the decline in the numbers applying to read geo graphy would have the greatest effect, initially, on the 'new' universities (The Guardian 2001). These concerns are reinforced by the prospect of positive feedback: a drop in the number of specialist geo graphy teachers, coupled with the downgrading of geography within the school curriculum, may well result in still fewer students being inspired to carry on with the subject to university, still less to want to teach it (Hoggart 1999). These trends, and their implications, have begun to focus academic minds on what is going on in geography in schools. School geography in England reached its high water mark in the mid-1 990s (Walford 2000), after a century of expansion. Walford saw the current crisis looming even while the waters were at their highest: 'As the 21st century begins, geography may well be looking with some concern at a year by year decrease in the numbers who study it at all levels of education' (1996, 134). Since then, indeed, the decline in school geography seems to have turned from a blip into a trend (Walford 2001 b). The latest evidence supports Brown and Smith (2000) in their assertion that each year a smaller percentage of the cohort is choosing geography at GCSE and A-level. To understand the background, it is necessary to outline the status of the subject within the national curriculum.