ABSTRACT
It is perhaps worth trying to place this book in context. Our argument in this book is that geography teachers have a long history of engaging with debates about the contribution of the subject to a broad education. This is inevitable, since geography studies the world and therefore reflects it in some way. Of course, there have always been arguments about how exactly geographers should do this, and these are documented in the first section of the book. This should be seen as part of a long tradition of geography educators reflecting on the purposes of geography teaching. At the same time, the book is also written in response to more immediate events. The last two decades have seen the centralisation of curriculum debates, with the result that many of the discussions about the content of the school curriculum have been muted. It is almost as if the ‘curriculum problem’ posed by Norman Graves (how to select what to teach) had been ‘solved’ (Graves 1975). Teachers know what they are expected to teach, and what concerns them is how to ‘deliver’ the agreed content of the curriculum. The consequence of this turn is that the school geography curriculum soon becomes ‘stuck’ because it is increasingly difficult to stimulate any sustained and serious engagement about what should be its contents. This is an argument we have sought to convince readers of this book that they need to engage in. We have provided examples to show how questions of geographical knowledge are never settled, being always subject to revision and change.
