There is a strong sense in which 'everybody knows' what geography is about. After all, it is studied in school compulsorily to the age of 14, and both the increasing incidence of overseas travel and the prevalence of maps and place descriptions in media reporting give geography an apparently uncompli cated role as a descriptive support to the under standing of everyday life. However, such a view is at variance with the core concerns of academics in geography-even those for whom 'place' is a major focus of interest. Numerous academic commenta tors continue to highlight concerns that what we actually do bears little resemblance to 'popular' conceptions of the discipline (Unwin 1987; Crang 1996). Such concerns have focused not only on the fact that the analytical and interpretive aspects of academic work are overlooked, but also that signifi cant developments within the discipline have been neglected or misunderstood (Rawling 1996). Of course, these concerns about a divergence between academic and popular geographies are not new. It has long been argued that non-academic practitioners have been slow to catch up with devel opments in academic geography, and divergences within the discipline have to some extent been amplified following each of the so-called paradigm shifts since the quantitative revolution (Strachan 1984). The relationship between academic geogra phy and school syllabuses is a helpful example: it is difficult and costly to review school syllabuses, and when changes do occur, they are often in response to wider educational and social developments, which do not necessarily give priority to the pre occupations of university geographers (Rawling 1996). One of the problems lies in the difficulty of identifying precisely which changes to school sylla buses might produce an improved understanding of the academic contribution in geography. The approaches of conventional science, while very much under interrogation in some areas of the discipline (see, for example, Demeritt 1996), need to be taught not only as a foundation for appreciating the debates raging over its weaknesses, but also as the premise for responding to many of the most pressing dilemmas in environmental and technologi cal spheres. At the same time, school students need to be introduced to the 'social' scientific approaches that are essential for understanding human environ ment interactions, and to appreciate the scope that lies within the humanities for yielding insights into the ways in which processes such as language can construct our understanding of the world (see, for example, Barnes and Gregory 1997; Doherty 1997). School geography curricula have battled with such issues for generations, and yet the problem is still only partially resolved, as any lecturer faced with classes of fresh undergraduates will, we suspect, only too readily confirm. The Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) (RGS-IBG) (1997, 2) has acknowledged that 'public understanding of what geography is and what it has to offer often falls far short of reality'. As the issues of the 'new regional ism' and the 'cultural turn' in human geography have begun to establish another new landscape for geo graphical work, perhaps it is time once more to