ABSTRACT
Driver and Maddrell (1996: 371) believe that ‘citizenship’ is: ‘a word which appears in various incarnations throughout the history of the twentieth century, and has played a prominent, almost talismanic, role in discourses of geography education in many parts of the world’. It is certainly true that in the UK definitions of citizenship, and of citizenship education, have shifted over the past century and a half, particularly in response to the aftermath of two world wars. Marsden (1995 and Chapter 2 of this volume) succinctly outlines ways in which geography and citizenship education combined during this period; in the early nineteenth century the concept of good citizenship was tied to notions of being a good Christian, but shifted towards a closer association with nationalism following the passing of the Education Act in 1870. As a result geography (and history) delivered a version of citizenship education which openly promoted patriotic and imperialist sentiments in the classroom. Indeed, the geography textbooks used in many state schools tacitly encouraged young working-class males to emigrate to the colonies, an act which was seen as an honourable expectation of ‘true citizens’ of the British Empire (Driver and Maddrell 1996). However, despite the influence of nationalist and imperialist notions of citizenship held within many geography textbooks at this time Walford (1996: 441) reminds us that:
it is simplistic (and a misrepresentation of the evidence) to cast geography teachers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century simply as jingoists, despite some of the ways in which they characterised race and reflected some particular contemporary political apprehensions.
