ABSTRACT

The specific role geography teachers fulfil is more related to the overt curriculum and theoretical ideology. The reality, rather than the rhetoric, of school geography, suggests that the majority of lessons cultivate a voluntary submission to existing social, spatial and environmental relations. Geography teachers do contribute to the process of hegemony where behaviour and common sense are shaped to conform to the necessities of capitalist production. Marxist theories of education and the state vary in the emphasis they give to the economic or cultural role of schooling and in the degree of autonomy they allow education within the overall social dynamic. Salter and Tapper provide a model of educational change which focuses on the varied contexts within which economic and social demands are translated into educational practice. Educationalists in university departments and colleges of education played their part by combining positivist geography with rational curriculum theory to provide the professional perspectives on which new kinds of in-service education were based.