ABSTRACT
It is helpful to make a distinction between societal values as reflected in textbooks and other teaching materials and using the curriculum to consciously attempt to change the values system of young people. Again, sometimes both of these things are going on simultaneously, as was the case with the national bias found in many twentieth-century textbooks. This chapter will show how, as a result of the ethical turn, the US geography curriculum has progressively embraced objectives that can be categorized as the latter, resulting in the growing inclusion of nonacademic aims for the subject. This transition fits into a broader pattern in which all subjects have had to demonstrate their contribution to citizenship education. The teaching of geography in both the US and England/Wales, albeit with different timing, has become increasingly informed by social and political concerns rather than the demands of the discipline itself, as discussed in the previous chapter.
