CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN GEOGRAPHY'S CONTRIBUTION TO CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION IN ENGLAND IN THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURY

The relationship between geography and education for citizenship has for long been associated with one of the subject's claims for a place in the curriculum. Suggestions that geography should be included in the school curriculum, for example, were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the grounds of the increase in Britain's international and overseas trade coupled with the gradual development of a middle class of merchants demanding greater knowledge of the world. In other words, it was claimed that knowing and understanding of other parts of the world served a citizenship end. However, there was no evidence that these counsels were ever widely put into practice. How could geography contribute to citizenship education if it was not part of the curriculum in school? The answer was obviously that it had to secure a place in the curriculum first. In retrospect its success in gaining a place in the curriculum was arguably partly due to its contribution to citizenship education. The achievement began largely in the nineteenth century. Thus Watson, who made a study of the growth of modern subjects in English schools found it difficult to trace a single reference to the teaching of geography in secondary schools in earlier times, though apparently at Westminster school members of certain forms were instructed after supper (in summer only) in the finding of places on ‘maps’. Much of the evidence suggested that whatever geography was taught by private tutors or learned individuals through the books which were undoubtedly published in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the public and grammar schools did little or nothing to teach the subject. It was only in the eighteenth century that one began to see some stereotypical forms of geography being taught in a number of schools, concentrating on basic physical and political geography, increasingly by means of catechetical methods.