ABSTRACT
Answers to questions concerning how well geography ‘prepares pupils . . . for adult life’ are both easy and hard to provide, depending on one’s starting point. From the subject perspective, the Geographical Association (GA) has produced a useful and highly successful publication (Grimwade 2000), available to teachers well in advance of the start of the new national curriculum arrangements in September 2000. This outlines geography’s position in relation to the whole of the so-called ‘new agenda’ (of which citizenship is a part). But apart from pointing out some of the ‘evidence of declining political engagement, particularly amongst the young’ (ibid., p. 12) which is deployed to justify the introduction of citizenship as a statutory component of the secondary curriculum from 2002, it provides little discussion of the means, or of pedagogy or of the concept’s contested nature. What we emphasise here is the need for a serious analysis of pupil needs both at the level of their lived experience and, at a greater scale, in terms of their understanding and engagement with a ‘supercomplex’ world (see Lambert 1999) and rapid social change. The geographer John Adams provides one illustration of what we mean here in his book Risk:
Everyday around the world, billions of . . . decisions get made. The consequences in most cases appear to be highly localised, but perhaps they are not. Chaos theorists have introduced us to a new form of insect life called the Beijing butterfly – which flaps its wings in Beijing and sets in motion a train of events that culminates two weeks later in a hurricane in New York. Extreme sensitivity to subtle differences in initial conditions, the chaos theorists tell us, makes the behaviour of complex natural systems inherently unpredictable. Prediction becomes even more difficult when people are introduced to such systems – because people respond to predictions, thereby altering the predicted outcome. Rarely are risk decisions made with information that can be reduced to quantifiable probabilities; yet decisions, somehow, get made.
