ABSTRACT
In Britain’s schools, but interestingly not its universities, geography teaching is largely apolitical, working instead within long-established traditions that have underpinned the status quo. Contentious issues, if they are dealt with at all, are located in narrowly defined areas that inhibit the active involvement of pupils in the events themselves. There are exceptions to this, particularly in development education, environmental geography and the continuing debate about ‘values’ in geography. But such work is always limited by the choices teachers make within their own schools and the structural limits to choice such as examination syllabuses and specifications. But these exceptions remind us that geography does have the potential to convey the contentious and political. Its content, after all, describes distributions, locating and accounting for differences (in short is relational) with profound political implications – Dicken and Lloyd’s ‘access to goods and proximity to bads’ (1980: 281-361). Finally there is also geography’s distinctive claim that here is a discipline that locks the use of natural worlds into the beliefs and actions of our social worlds.
