Educational ideas in geography education in Sweden during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the relationship between maps and texts

Abstract

Descriptions of the geography education of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Sweden are typically offered to contrast with current ideas in geography education, and the content of geography textbooks is the focus of this comparison. The role of maps and visual pedagogy are ignored, and the educational ideas developed from regional geography are only regarded as old-fashioned encyclopaedia-like descriptions to be removed as the academic field of geography changed direction in the twentieth century. The objective of this paper is to describe the educational ideas of geography education during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Sweden, focusing on the relationship between maps and textbooks. The sources are texts from 1726 to 1969 that were written to instruct geography teachers. These texts demonstrate that educational ideas emphasised context and understanding in geography education, critiqued rote learning, and opposed the focus on texts over maps. The old discussion about avoiding encyclopaedia-like descriptions of regions in geography textbooks has continued to the present day Sweden, but is now described as a dichotomy between regional geography versus thematic or systematic studies in geography.