Education and Geography

Education's role in creating geography

Education, as an institution, is responsible for the creation of the human geography we encounter and interact with daily.

The first statement above by Shaull was the introduction he gave to Paulo Freire's (1970) first English-edition book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As Shaull suggested then and others have asserted since, the influence of Freire's educational and social thought has had a significant impact on views of educators and others the world over (Roberts 1998: 105). Indeed, my interest in Freire's work and contributions by other critical educators has been stimulated by an inherent 'geography' often embedded in such texts and how this impacts people’s sense of space and behavior.

It would seem evident that there is a link between education and a resulting ‘geography’. In the first instance, education is a primary public function of governments the world over. It is through education that a nation can have a workforce that is efficient, knowledgeable and competitive. The common good can be provided for via education. Education is therefore an intensely political activity (Richardson 1998:128). It follows, then, that it is stooped in regulation and mechanisms of control manufactured by prevailing political ideologies. Take for example people in Australia will spend over 2,000 days (or a full 5 ¾ years) of their lives being compulsorily educated for the express purpose of being useful citizens. This is an implicit social contract with inherent rights and assumed responsibilities for the tripartite involved (state, society and individual). The importance of education can not be dismissed and the geography of education should likewise not be overlooked.

Further emphasis needs to be placed on the role of education in creating the contemporary geography we exist in. This can be simply dealt with by recognizing that the purpose of education is to produce worthwhile (read: employable) citizens. Indeed, economies have been established on the merit of its education system to output useful workers. Drucker (1999: 99), for example, recognizes the integral role of the American Community College system in value-adding to America’s human capital. Richardson (1998: 115) also recognizes the role of education (specifically literacy) has played in attempts to create an efficient and competitive workforce.

I would like to introduce what I see as the implicit geography that is found in Freire's (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. A brief synopsis of this work with a geographic lens reveals that through the struggle of people seeking to humanize their existence they are attempting to change the world about them, to be liberated from those who oppress their freedom. This operates through several mechanisms such as labour, education, acts of resistance and so forth. Essentially, it is through these mechanisms that the prevailing political structure is modified to be more inclusive of the oppressed unique needs. Such changes initiated by peoples desire to fulfil their needs by ‘restoring their humanity’ (ibid.: 28) is relevant in a geopolitical sense when struggles between groups, separated by geographic difference, attempt to harmonize needs. Thus, the push and pull of ideologies over space chrysalides emergent geographies, boundaries between groups are formed.

The actions of competing groups who wish to express their needs operates, to be sure, on a macro-spatial scale. For example, Freire (1970: 93-94) talks of experiences of dependency sharing themes between regions in the same county (i.e. rural and metropolitan areas) and across the Third World. Yet, a micro-spatial scale also exists as a dominant theme in Freire and other critical educator’s work. Indeed, it is at the scale of the individual body that the struggle between competing political geographies is manifest. Indeed, the social construction of scale, to follow Kelly (1999: 381), is embodied in much of the work of the critical educators where the impact of educating the individual is part of a wider social process.  It is upon the individual, after all, that the ‘ideology of domination’ (McLaren 1998) acts to mould them into the citizen that is acceptable to the dominant powers of the society. The individual in this sense brings to a school or other institution of learning their own reality derived from their own experiences. The individual makes sense of the world through these experiences and the experience encountered in a school. Domination and oppression of the individual’s own construction of reality is pursued in order to impose the sanctioned view of reality.

A method used to dominate the individual is the defining and imposition through state apparatuses literacy. Literacy, defined more often than not as the national language, is imposed through schools and other educational institutions as a tenant that marks the ability of the individual to be a potentially useful citizen. In Australia, as Richardson (1998:116) points out, English literacy has been used in the past “as an important instrument of cultural assimilation of minorities into the majority culture.” This domination of minorities eventually petered out, giving way to the recognition of minorities and their languages, although it persists in less overt forms given its perceived importance in economic and cultural well-being (Richardson 1998: 117).

Curiously, those that would seem to play the part of the dominator are the products of a system that validates the merit of education. Bourdieu (1998) suggests that the few that do become dominant in devising the policy for others owe their power to education: they are there because they have proven their competence in using knowledge. Bourdieu surmises that the way these people see the rest of the world is quite different from reality. They see their position, an inheritance of their education, a ‘gift from Heaven’ rather than the reality of being located in a social area where education was well dispensed. Thus their perception of reality impacts on the views they possess of education. They may retain their belief on their intelligence being given from n high rather than a result of their geography. This geographic ignorance may well manifest in attitudes and policies of neglect for disadvantaged areas educational needs. For example, poor areas may not get the funding for programs enjoyed by richer areas.

To recognize the differences in social situations needs to be a first step in determining what kind of education is needed to free the people in an area. This was a fundamental thrust of Freire’s work in attempting to set up literacy programs, requiring educators to recognize and integrate local realities into the educative process as a first step in expanding people’s experiences (Roberts 1998: 107).

Freire’s (1970: 62-63) ‘banking’ concept of education focuses on the domination of the individual by flooding the conscious world of the student with what is considered worthwhile knowledge (i.e. the mind of the student is a vessel to be filled). Thus, a barrier is formed between the natural ability of an individual to generate their own meaning of reality and the reality constructed for them. As the methods of oppression are applied over time to the individual, this barrier becomes impermeable, isolating individually interpreted reality. The individual then becomes passive in their ability to react against the knowledge they receive, becoming conditioned to the expectations of the dominant powers (Freire 1970: 63).

The key point that ties the thoughts of Freire in with a micro-spatial individuality is the way the individual relates to the world. Dismissal of the banking concept of education and instituting in its place education for freedom allows the connection between the individual and their relation with the world to be determined by their own experience and reflection (Freire 1970: 69). Through this, the individual has the ability to create and recreate the cognitive as well as the physical world about them (Freire 1970: 88). The geographic connection is, in this case, consequential: the action of a critical mind expresses itself in the modification of the space about it. Countering the critical mind by an oppressive education is, make no mistake, also space forming. The difference is in the dynamics of the space formed: organic, evolutionary or flexible in the critically minded; contrived or imposed if dominated by bankers.

One of the significant outcomes of critical educator’s thinking as it arose in the early 1970s was the hypothesizing of a connection between education and the depletion of the world’s natural resources. Garrett Hardin (1968: 1248) recognized the central role of education to surmount the “tragedy of the commons.” A body of literature arose that recognized depletion as a problem that education could help to resolve. More recently, David Orr (1999) has kept this connection alive by emphasizing many of the same points that needed to be changed to have an impact on ensuring a sustainable future. For example, he asks for the basic assumptions of why humans treat nature as they have done to be challenged as well as to integrate citizenship into the curriculum. Furthermore, the educational institution needs to be questioned to develop its viability and ability to instill critical qualities into the students that pass through.

One day, maybe I’ll develop the ideas here further…

References

Ashcraft, Norman and  Scheflen, Albert E. (1976) People space: the making and breaking of human boundaries, Anchor Press, New York.

Bourdieu, P. (1998) Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of our Time, Trans. R. Nice, Polity Press.

Drucker, P.F. (1999) “Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge”, California Management Review, 41(2): 79-94.

Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Herder and Herder.

Hardin, G. (1968) “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, 162: 1243-1248.

Kelly, P.F. (1999) “The Geographies of and Politics of Globalization”, Progress in Human Geography, 23(3): 379-400.

McLaren, Peter (1998) Revolutionary pedagogy in post-revolutionary times: Rethinking the political economy of critical education, Educational Theory, 48(4): 431-463.

Orr, D. (1999) “Rethinking Education”, The Ecologist, 29(3): 232-234.

Richardson, P. (1998) “Literacy, Learning and Teaching”, Educational Review, 50(2): 115-134.

Roberts, P. (1998) "Extending Literate Horizons: Paulo Freire and the Multidimentional World”, Educational Review, 50(2): 105-114.