Geography of Education: Scale, Space and Location in the Study of Education 9781474223249, 9781474223270, 9781474223256

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Geography of Education

Also available from Bloomsbury Education as a Global Concern, Colin Brock Education Around the World, Colin Brock and Nafsika Alexiadou Education in the United Kingdom, edited by Colin Brock Geography, Education and the Future, edited by Graham Butt Global Education Policy and International Development, edited by Antoni Verger, Mario Novelli and Hülya Kosar Altinyelken

Geography of Education Scale, Space and Location in the Study of Education Colin Brock

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Colin Brock, 2016 Colin Brock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-2324-9 PB: 978-1-3500-6390-7 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2325-6 ePub: 978-1-4742-2326-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brock, Colin, author. Title: Geography of education: scale, space and location in the study of education / Colin Brock. Description: New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012090 (print) | LCCN 2016024001 (ebook) | ISBN 9781474223249 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474223256 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781474223263 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781474223256 (epdf) | ISBN 9781474223263 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Comparative education. | Human geography. | Education and state. | Education and globalization. | BISAC: EDUCATION / Comparative. | EDUCATION / Educational Policy & Reform / General. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Human Geography. Classification: LCC LB43 .B763 2016 (print) | LCC LB43 (ebook) | DDC 370.9–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012090

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Rex Ashley Walford OBE (1934-2011) one of the most enthusiastic and influential servants of both geography and education. In his own words: ‘I remain convinced of geography’s potency to teach both a stewardship of the physical world and an understanding of the need for harmony in the human world and of its great value in a properly humane education.’

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Foreword, David Ley (University of British Columbia, Canada) Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Geography, Education and the ‘Geography of Education’ 2 The Geography of Educational Reality 3 Aspects of the Geographies of Education Systems 4 Geographies of Non-Formal and Informal Education 5 Geography, Survival and Sustainability Conclusion

References Index

viii ix x xii 1 9 43 81 125 163 183 189 213

List of Figures Figure 1.1 Figure 1.2 Figure 2.1

Education: A composite and integrative discipline Geography: A composite and integrative discipline Walford’s model of dynamic themes in geography and its application to examples from education in a spatial perspective Figure 2.2 Spatial scales and factors affecting education in any location Figure 3.1 Early states and the political integration of space Figure 4.1 Peaks and troughs in literacy and schooling in the major ecological zones of mid-nineteenth-century England Figure 4.2 The extent of the Lincoln Diocese under St Hugh Figure 5.1 A holistic view of education as a humanitarian response Figure 5.2 Temporal scale and education as a humanitarian response Figure 5.3 Essential components of a relevant curriculum Figure 5.4 Integrated education with locale-specific, global humanitarian and environmental sustainable perspectives

11 12

56 60 85 127 129 172 176 178 180

List of Tables Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 2.4 Table 2.5 Table 2.6 Table 2.7 Table 2.8 Table 3.1 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 5.1

Forms of education Geographies and education in four journals since 1990 Thrift’s typology of knowledge Basic geographical skills applied to educational themes Adaptation of Broek’s model of geography and its application to education Application of Haggett’s model to educational themes Determining periods for a comparison between Germany and England and Wales Multilevel analysis: Griffin v Bray and Murray Thomas Countries of the world by number and percentage of the global population Matrix of small states and territories by population and region Selected examples of education under attack List of places where people can experience non-formal education in England The core principles of REFLECT Martin’s existential challenges to human and environmental survival

13 21 44 45 47 51 59 61 63 71 106 133 136 175

Foreword For more reasons than one, this foreword takes my mind back to my English grammar school education in Windsor in the 1960s. It was there, and then, that my peers and I were introduced to one of the seminal books of the period, Michael Young’s The Rise of the Meritocracy. Though written as a satirical assessment of an education-stratified society, the term quickly lost its critical intent, and became a descriptive, indeed a prescriptive, assessment of British society, and of course our place as a privileged cohort within it. For success at the 11+ exam, and placement in the top stream of an academically oriented institution would lead invariably to university admission and its lifelong benefits. That regimen was, however, soon to be superseded, and today we are again in a period of administrative experimentation in the UK, with new modes of schooling and the downscaling of educational jurisdiction, as each state school in England becomes, in Colin Brock’s words ‘a virtually separate little education system of its own’. The more general thesis of a virtuous link between educational achievement and socio-economic outcomes has become one of the great promises of modern society. It is a promise that has been accepted eagerly by some immigrant groups, with heavy emphasis of educational success leading to the group’s accelerated economic integration. The path trod by Jewish students in Britain and North America is now being pursued by Indian and Bangladeshi youngsters in Britain and Chinese and Korean students in North America. But like so much of the discussion about modernity, the link between education and economic outcomes rests on dubious assumptions. It presupposes equal opportunity in social background and in available schooling. As Paul Willis showed so powerfully in Learning to Labour, the cultural biases against learning can compromise the progress of some working-class children in England, just as the culture of achievement expressed in tutoring services and after hours schooling can advance the examination results of Chinese-American children in Los Angeles or New York. But there are also spatial impediments to educational outcomes, what Colin Brock calls ‘the inherently spatial dimension in the learning process’. City and country, core and periphery, developed and

Foreword

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developing, local and global, on-line and off-line, secure and insecure places  – all contribute to unequal configurations in the geography of educational opportunity and achievement. Such a geography of education, enriched with additional spatial concerns like distance, mobility and scale, provides not only a descriptive template but also a critical evaluation of what the educational topography should be. Brock’s global view of education as a humanitarian response is attentive to those who remain marginalized and excluded from the advantages of learning. His career, and the research of the many graduate students he supervised as UNESCO Chair at Oxford, sought out these educational interstices, in the refugee camp, among the homeless, with street children and prisoners, in opportunities for girls and women in patriarchal societies, in short among those people and places where modern society’s educational promises remain unfulfilled. This book brings together Colin’s abiding passions for education and geography, and outlines their integration as a progressive project. My great fortune was that I benefitted from his charisma in both fields in the classroom at Windsor Grammar School. David Ley FRSC Professor of Geography University of British Columbia Vancouver, Canada

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the support of a number of people who have been very important to the composition and production of this book. It has been an ambition of mine to argue, in publication, for a book on the Geography of Education as my whole professional life has been bound up with these two areas of study and teaching. So first I would like to thank Kasia Figiel of Bloomsbury for taking on the idea of what I believe to be a first ever book entirely on this theme, and for her professional advice throughout. Thanks also to Maria Giovanna Brauzzi of Bloomsbury for handling the practicalities of its publication. I have been fortunate to have had a long succession of mentors in both fields but I must mention my geography teacher at Rutlish School, Merton, the late Hubert Walker who was a massive inspiration. In the university world there are three very special people who have been immensely supportive, the late James Porter CBE, Professor Sir William Taylor CBE and Professor Richard Pring. My thanks go also to Professor David Ley, who I have known for more than fifty years, for his willingness to write the Foreword to the book. More recently, the work on geographies of education by several scholars at Loughborough University, led by Professor Sarah Holloway, has given me a real boost. My thanks are due to my daughter Alison Brock for her patient technical assistance with the figures and tables. Finally my thanks go to my wife Shirley Brock for her patience throughout not only the period of my concentration on this work, but also more than fifty years of support throughout my career, including the indexing of many of my publications. All shortcomings of this book are entirely down to me. The theme is potentially vast, and I trust that my selection of issues on which to concentrate and to explore will have been appropriate to the aim, and hope that others will progress the visibility of the geography of education. Colin Brock Cottingham, East Yorkshire, UK

Introduction

This is not so much a textbook as a story of two areas of intellectual activity that need to get to know each other better. It is a kind of ‘go-between’, an attempt to convince them that they have much in common and much to offer in harness, as it were. This does not mean that both geography and education have a range of other interests and attributes operating independently, or indeed in relationships with other fields or knowledge. The task will not necessarily be easy, for as Tony Becher (1989) observed, academia is tribal territory, especially for teachers and researchers in higher education. Academic tribes are by definition creatures of exclusion, residing in sealed knowledge compartments. As geographer David Sibley puts it: This compartmentalizing of knowledge is a characteristic of academia associated with the growth of more specialisms. It secures monopolies and insulates the purveyors of knowledge from the threat of challenging ideas. Compartmentalized knowledge, kept within secure boundaries, gives power and authority to those who peddle it. It is not just rational argument that determines the rejection or acceptance of ideas: fear, envy and covetousness also play a part. (Sibley, 1995, p. 122)

Fortunately, in recent decades, the cult of specialism has begun to give way to interdisciplinary endeavour. In geography too, this process has been under way for a while, with Johnston writing in 1998 that the territoriality of geography appeared to be fragmenting around the edges. As Whatmore (2013) has it: Like archaeology and anthropology the range of research and pedagogy undertaken in the name of geography spans subject matter and approaches to it found across the spectrum of the humanities and the social and natural sciences. Suspended between the magnetic poles of ‘human’ and ‘physical’ geography, the diversity of the geographical project is a source of both strength and weakness. At its best, it equips scholars to tack between radically different knowledge practices, fostering an inventive inter-disciplinarity rather than a prescribed path to some transcendent integration. (p. 162)

This quality has been recognized by the journal Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in its innovative section labelled ‘Boundary Crossings’. In

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Geography of Education

one of the early examples, Haklay (2012) writes on ‘Geographic Information Science: Tribe, Badge and Sub-Discipline’. This is recognition indeed of one aspect of the geography of education. Education is to do with the acquisition of knowledge and skills by, for example, students from teachers in the classroom; by employees from employers at the workplace; by children from parents at home; by learners from media and Information Communications Technology; and by migrants from academic institutions and workplaces in host countries. These are just a few examples to illustrate the inherently spatial dimension of the learning process, a process that runs from birth to death. The acquisition of knowledge and skills is susceptible to political interference, especially but not exclusively in the commercial field: Knowledge politics refers to the use of particular information content, forms of representation or ways of analysing and manipulating information to try to establish the authority or legitimacy of knowledge claims. (Elwood and Leszczunski, 2013, p. 544)

Such deception can also occur in the non-commercial, especially political, field in the form of so-called ‘spin’ and through, inter alia, partial quotations taken out of context. It is not unknown in the academic world. All knowledge politics has an epistemological dimension in attempting to assert credibility. Geography, as a discipline or subject, is part of the formal schooling of a significant portion of the world’s population, though it is far from being universally taught. In some countries, notably the USA, it is not taught at all, a situation lamented by De Blij (2012): Even today, despite the best efforts of the National Geographic Society and its allies, an American student might go from kindergarten through graduate school without ever taking a single course in geography – let alone a fairly complete program. That’s not true in any other developed country, nor in most developing ones. Geography’s status is quite different in Britain, Germany, France, and such countries as Brazil, Nigeria and India. (p. 15)

Likewise, in higher education the study of geography is widespread, other than in the USA, but less so than at school level. It is of course universal, albeit unwittingly, in the informal education of everyone. What passes for ‘geography’ in all three forms of education is overall and necessarily eclectic. Nonetheless, Bonnet (2003) went so far as to claim: Geography as the World Discipline: Connecting Popular and Academic Geographical Imagination, while Walford (2000, 2001a,b) examined its growth over a century and a half with characteristic

Introduction

3

enthusiasm. For most people, though, geography, even in a primitive traditional form, has not been part of their formal education beyond the age of fifteen at most, and often less. The result, among other things, has been a widespread disconnect between university and school geography (Stannard, 2003), made worse by increasingly narrow specialization within geographical academia. This in turn has led to a concentration on specialist tribal publications rather than books with a wider, more popular, audience. Be that as it may, there have been several imaginative innovations over the last decade in universities, such as Geography Cal, a consortium developing computer-assisted learning at the introductory undergraduate level, which can be accessed by schools. In the UK, with the assistance also of the Geographical Association (GA), Bonnett’s (2003) recommendation for universities to develop links with local schools through which ‘information, approaches and ideas can be shared’ (pp. 319–20) is being taken up, including by Cal, for which some credit is due to the University of Leicester. Some geographers such as Nick Crane have also been active in the popular media, promoting the subject with their enthusiasm. Nick Crane presents four BBC series (Coast, Great British Journeys, Map Man and Town), has written ten books covering geographical issues in the wider world and produces podcasts on behalf of the University of Oxford. The geographical, as well as the educational, is well represented in metaphor: the biological ‘throbbing heart of the city’ and the hydrological ‘fount of knowledge’. Taylor (1984) compiled and edited an entire volume on ‘metaphors and education’, but Thomas Lane Peacock, through his fictional character Mr McBorrowdale, came up with a metaphorical comment that included both geography and education, while being dismissive of the latter as a discipline: The bore of all bores was the third. His subject had no beginning, middle or end. It was education. Never was such a journey through the desert of the mind: the great Sahara of intellect. The very recollection makes me thirsty. (Armytage, 1954)

The desert metaphor was used in a different sense by one of the pioneers of the geography of education, Robert Geipel, who referred in 1968, in respect of the then West Germany, to ‘the existence of educational deserts in maps portraying wide variations throughout the state’ (Hones and Ryba, 1973, p. 6 ). The geographical term ‘landscape’ has been borrowed by other forms of learning and used metaphorically (in literature, for instance, one hears the phrase ‘literary landscapes’). According to Dursteler (2005), the ‘landscape metaphor’ may be based on forms of learning in the past: The landscape metaphor is one of the most interesting and used one. It appears that the concept of a (topographical) map and the mental schemata associated

4

Geography of Education with it are very widespread. Maybe this is due to the ubiquity of maps, known since very ancient times and used through many centuries. According to others it is because they constitute a natural metaphor for the human beings that have evolved in a spatial environment that required a knowledge of terrain and space in order to survive. (Info@Vis Message No. 168)

In the very early days of less settled human communities, it would have been pubescent and adult males who would gain a wider perspective on landscape and territory than the females, though they too would have gained an understanding at the local scale. Like many other fields, geography was slow to become gendered, with major initiatives seen in this regard only in the 1990s  – by Momsen and Kinnard (1993) and Hanson and Pratt (1995). As regards the need for greater recognition of the geographical factor in the study, analysis and development of education, Brock and Cammish (1997a) summed it up as follows in the context of less developed regions and with respect to gender: The considerable disparity, and in some places incompleteness of institutional provision (even at primary level) relates directly to difficulties of physical access which adversely affects girls more than boys; there is an overall and profound urban/rural dichotomy which favours towns and cities, especially in respect of secondary school (and especially single-sex) provision for girls; patterns of transportation and migration affect educational provision and take up, again normally disadvantaging females, and in some cases extreme physical difficulties, such as flooding and other hazards act in the same way. The influence of this (geographical) factor can only be overcome by more sophisticated and multivariate spatial analysis of educational needs and the planning and implementation of integrated development projects as a result. Educational planning on its own would be futile. (p. 2)

Gender studies has now become mainstream and so issues relating to gender, education and geography will be incorporated throughout this text rather than in a special chapter. This does not mean that ‘Gender, Geography and Education’ does not warrant a book of its own. It does. This is self-evidently not a book primarily for the tribe of specialist research geographers, though it may hopefully highlight some issues they may wish to follow up. Rather it is for their students, and even more so for students of educational studies and related social sciences, at undergraduate, diploma and master’s levels, their teachers and other educational practitioners. This is for a number of reasons. First, so far as a geography, or geographies, of education has or have developed, it has come from geographers, including some – this includes

Introduction

5

the writer – who have worked largely in the field of educational studies. This has happened over the last four decades or so, with an acceleration of certain aspects since the turn of the millennium. By contrast, the geography of education as an accepted member of the family of the foundation disciplines of educational studies, did not gain recognition as such until the Oxford Review of Education 35:5 (2009) included an article on it by Chris Taylor (pp. 655–69). This was followed by the inclusion of the same text by Taylor in Furlong and Lawn (2010) in their book arguing for the resuscitation of these foundations, whose decline had been aided, at least in England, by the field of teacher education and training having become largely a technocratic and managerial exercise. This text is presented in five chapters, each offering a different aspect of the geography of education. They are not part of a continuous developing narrative, but their sequence is intentional. The presented material is first introductory, then theoretical and conceptual, then factual and analytical, and finally projectional and hopeful. Some themes recur throughout the narrative because they find a place in multiple contexts. There is reinforcement rather than repetition, and it is intentional. Chapter 1 argues for, and illustrates, the synergy that exists between the natures of both geography and educational studies as composite disciplines. They are both, inter alia, profoundly spatial, education being concerned with information flow in a range of contexts, from formal settings to non-formal and informal settings, at scales from the individual to the global. The various components of, mostly human, geography are discussed in relation to educational influence and activity as well as the increasing appearance of education-oriented themes in selected leading journals of academic geography in the UK over the last twentyfive years or so. Chapter 2 is concerned with the geography of educational reality. It initially presents the fundamental change in the nature of geography from the 1960s onwards and applying a selection of these changes to educational phenomena. Selection of the work of key figures in this transformation of geography is deliberate since their thinking was fundamental to it, and the writer has attempted over the years to illustrate them through application to educational themes. This is important because, as mentioned earlier, the majority of people, including most involved in educational studies at university level as teachers or students, will not have studied geography beyond a very elementary level. Indeed, less than half in England will have included geography in their bundle of GCSE, or for those older, of GCE ‘O’ level, subjects. In England, that situation could become even worse, since students working for the so-called ‘English

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Geography of Education

Baccalaureate’ – itself a contradiction in terms – must now choose between history and geography. The fundamental geographic notions of place, space and scale are discussed in relation to educational activity, with scale being illustrated at local, regional, national, international and global levels, as well as the key issue of temporal scale in both geographical and educational studies. Theoretical discussions concerning knowledge, epistemology and space, as put forward by Thrift (1985), are included as well as more practical issues relating to the massive range of national scales existing, in terms of both demographic and spatial gradients. They range from China, with a less than unified education system than might be supposed, to Pitcairn with a population of barely fifty people and only one school. Generalizing about educational reality within such an extraordinary range of scales is clearly impossible. Nearly half the nations of the world are disproportionately small by any standard, and so form a special field of study – ‘education in small states’ (Crossley, Bray and Packer, 2011; Martin and Bray, 2011). Many of these small states are inevitably on the peripheries of both demographic distribution and political power. Notions of core and periphery are fundamental to the geography of education and therefore considered here. Modern formal education systems developed as part of the apparatus of the nation-state in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and competitive nationalism is still a driving force in contemporary developments in education. Chapter 3 is concerned with the development of such education systems and especially their internal diversity and disparity over time and space. The development of formal education in early towns and cities preceded the expansion of territorial spheres of influence that led ultimately to, in effect, ministates and then larger states. Educational developments grew with the expansion of both urban spheres of influence and regulated space. Such developments are then considered in the USA and England. A review of particular issues then follows, such as: typologies of education systems; education under violent attack; private sector provision; and the development of cross-national issues such as education and migration in human terms, and the significance of networks of educational development, with ‘education hubs’ as nodes in cyberspace as well as physical locations. Formal education systems are internally disparate and externally overlapping. They are not discrete as may be supposed, whatever official regulations and accounts may say. Chapter 4 concerns itself with the forms of knowledge acquisition that account for the majority of learning by humankind, namely non-formal and informal education. Commencing with the historical geography of non-formal

Introduction

7

education in Britain in relation to industrialization and urbanization, it moves on to consider issues in adult education. In England at least, these developments preceded the formation of elements of a statewide schooling system. Adult education and, especially, literacy in the developing world are then discussed, leading directly to issues of gender and educational opportunity. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are particularly important in this regard and consideration of their contribution in spatial terms shows increasing confrontation with the state, as governments seek to retain control of learning opportunities within their territories. Moving to a more informal education focus, discussion then moves to the contexts of children, young people, families and communities. This is necessarily linked to issues of an intergenerational nature as well as of social class. Beyond these regular social structures are millions of people, including children, in situations of incarceration and slavery, and the chapter closes with a focus on refugees, homeless children, orphans and street children and their numerous geographies of education. Educational issues in relation to the internet will have been touched upon in previous chapters, but in the fifth chapter the focus is on cyberspace and learning. Geographies of cyberspace are considered – these are many and intersecting – while overlapping in spatial and operational terms with terrestrial geographies of education: formal, non-formal and informal. Cyber-geography is not placeless, but is also an agent of globalization; it is a phenomenon that is not new, but which has gathered pace exponentially. In the same way, as with earlier agents of communication innovation there are many gaps, known as digital divides, that have profound effects on the acquisition of knowledge and skills. The effects of cyberspace in the mobilization of knowledge are highly disparate for both physical and political reasons. Knowledge and power, as already acknowledged, enjoy a fundamental relationship that has implications for access to education. Misinformation is a part of education and has gathered pace in the age of social media. The final section of Chapter 5 takes a different view of geographies of education, this time in relation to the necessary humanitarian response to survival and environmental sustainability. Whereas humanitarian responses to educational needs are conventionally concerned with disasters, natural or human-made, the range of existential challenges likely to build in the twentyfirst century demands an urgent and innovative educational response. This is education as a humanitarian response on a global scale (Brock 2016a), but due to the fundamental local/global link of the internet, the local scale on which all geography of educational reality occurs can be facilitated. The discussion

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Geography of Education

proceeds to examine how this can enhance the local resonance of curricula through the organized interaction of aspects of all three forms of education, formal, non-formal and informal. Unlike many other geographies of education, this has potential to minimize disparity, provided that the necessarily creative leadership of educational activity has been developed (Bottery, 2016). A brief word about sources and references. As a university teacher of nearly fifty years’ standing, I am strongly averse to the modern trend to recommend only recent sources. This trend has come about due to tribal pressures to publish and thus to meet a prime criterion for promotion, as well as due to the pressure to read online rather than to read a hard copy. Many older sources contain relevant and significant contributions to any argument, and I have no compunction in using them where I think appropriate.

1

Geography, Education and the ‘Geography of Education’

Introduction This is a book for geographers and educationists alike, a prime aim of which is to further the understanding of the work of each about the other. In terms of educational studies, as of now, the geography of education is very much the infant in an otherwise adult family. On the geographical side, however, especially over the last twenty-five years or so, there has been an increasing recognition of the geographical factor as affecting education. Spatial issues are fundamental to learning, teaching and information flow, as discussed in a splendid publication by Brooks et al. (2012). As such, this welcome development is a constituent of human geography, though the writer is in agreement with Kraftl’s (2013) caution as to recognizing geographies of education as a sub-discipline of geography itself. This relatively recent interest aside, key reasons for the rather belated presence of a geography of education would appear to be:

a) a failure on the part of most educationists to recognize the profound change in the nature of geography since the 1960s, with its dynamic recognition of concepts of space, place and scale in the analysis of the earth’s surface phenomena, especially those that are human related. b) a failure on the part of most geographers to be aware, or take interest in, the spatial and locational dimensions of educational provision and activity (admittedly, some have recently recognized education). This degree of mutual disregard is extraordinary, given the essence of geography being spatial and locational analysis, and the nature of education being, among other attributes, a ‘space adjustment technique’ (Spencer and Thomas, 1969, p. 449). However, as Holloway and Jöns (2012) observe: In the twenty-first century Anglophone geographers have exhibited a growing interest in education and learning (Holloway et al., 2010). Geographies of

10

Geography of Education education and learning consider the importance of spatiality in the production, consumption and implications of formal education systems from pre-school to tertiary education and of informal learning environments in homes, neighbourhoods, community organizations and workspaces. (p. 482)

This implies transitions in space and time, an issue focused on by Itta Bauer of the University of Zurich, who locates geographies of education in a fourfold matrix along with personal geographies, geographies of transition and geography education, followed up in Bauer (2015) in an article on ‘Approaching Geographies of Education Differently’. In light of this very welcome development, these and other nascent interdisciplinary efforts need to be brought to the forefront of undergraduateand masters-level studies in both geography and education. For that reason, this discourse will turn initially to a basic description of the nature of both fields and their high degree of comparability.

The Nature of Geography and Education Compared Both geography and education are composite disciplines. That is to say, their identities rest on a particular array of contributing subjects and disciplines. This does not deprive them either of a distinctive character or of an essence that justifies their existence:

a) geography is the spatial and locational analysis of human and physical phenomena from the edge of space to the earth’s surface and below; and b) education is the production and dissemination of knowledge – the term ‘knowledge’ being defined here as what is learnt: in short, what individual people of all ages actually know, and what they do to provide for, and to access, knowledge. Education can be divided into ‘education the phenomenon’ (actual learning and teaching) and ‘education the discipline’ (the study of teaching and learning and the factors that enable them to operate). Figures 1.1 and 1.2 attempt to illustrate the synergy between geography and education in diagrammatic form. Such knowledge can here be taken to include both information and skills, so as to discount the unfortunate distinction between ‘education’ and ‘training’, and the related widespread denigration of the latter in terms of esteem. It is also taken to include the totality of what is learnt from all three forms of

Geography, Education and the ‘Geography of Education’

11

Figure 1.1 Education: A composite and integrative discipline Source: Brock, C. (1992), The Case for a Geography of Education, PhD Thesis, University of Hull, pp. 25.

education – formal, non-formal and informal – throughout life. Table 1.1 offers definitions of these three forms. While these three forms undoubtedly exist, as in all typologies, there are boundary crossings and overlaps between them. Non-formal education can sometimes be just as formal as formal education, but it is different in that it is not necessarily part of an education system as such. Nonetheless, organizations offering non-formal education, such as the police or the military or religious groups or NGOs, may offer occasional or intermittent events in schools and colleges by invitation as well as outside in the community, that is, in civic society. Likewise, informal education is taking place within schools through face-to-face

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Geography of Education

Figure 1.2 Geography: A composite and integrative discipline Source: Brock, C. (1992), The Case for a Geography of Education, PhD Thesis, University of Hull, pp. 33.

interactions between students or via social media, whether permitted or not. As Mills and Kraftl (2014) put it in their book on informal education, ‘We use the term “geographies” to refer to a range of perspectives on how informal educational practices operate in, through and as spaces’ (p. 5). It is already clear that there is considerable synergy between geography and education, and therefore obvious potential for geography of education to stand alongside the other foundation disciplines of education. Allen and Massey (1995) found a concise way of expressing this synergy in two sentences: ‘Our knowledge of the world is always from a standpoint, a certain location. We see it from here, rather than from there’ (p. 2). Education, in all three forms, is not

Geography, Education and the ‘Geography of Education’

13

Table 1.1 Forms of education Formal education: The hierarchically structured, chronologically graded ‘education system’, running from primary school through the university and including, in addition to general academic studies, a variety of specialized programmes and institutions for full-time technical and professional training. Non-Formal education: Any organized educational activity outside the established formal system – whether operating separately or as an important feature of some broader activity – that is intended to serve identifiable learning clienteles and learning objectives. Informal education: The truly lifelong process whereby every individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative influences and resources in his or her environment – from family and neighbours, from work and play, from the market-place, the library and the mass media. Source: Fordham, P. and Poulton, G. (1979), pp. 210–11: as quoted from Coomb, P. H. et al. (1973), New Paths to Learning, New York, International Council for Educational Development, UNICEF.

only to do with the acquisition of knowledge and skills. It also has to do with what Orr (1994) terms ‘cleverness’, a quality of humankind that can be both positive and negative in its effects. Much of the current debate about educational standards and reforms, however, is driven by the belief that we must prepare the young only to compete effectively in the global economy. That done, all will be well, or so it is assumed. But there are better reasons to reform education, which have to do with the rapid decline in the habitability of the earth. The kind of discipline-centric education that enabled us to industrialise the earth will not necessarily help us heal the damage caused by industrialization. (ibid., p. 2)

What is required – and urgently according to Martin (2006) – is the narrowing of what he terms the skills-wisdom gap. We will return to this issue in the final chapter.

Geography of Education as a Foundation Discipline The foundation disciplines of education have emerged at different times over the 250 or more years in which education has been evident as a field of study and training. It has been formatively associated with the training of teachers since the first chair of pedagogy at Halle, Germany, in 1779. From the late nineteenth century onwards, educational studies emerged as a graduate field of study and research. From the 1920s onwards it was represented by transatlantic efforts

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between Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and the Institute of Education, University of London. In comparative education, this was fostered from the 1930s by collaboration between Isaac Kandell in New York and Nicholas Hans in London; both multilingual polymaths and emigres from eastern Europe (Brock and Alexiadou, 2013). This and the other disciplines of educational studies flourished in the well-funded 1960s and early 1970s, becoming classic examples of Tony Becher’s academic tribes with their specialist journals and conferences for the initiated and faithful. Notable were history of education, sociology of education, economics of education, psychology of education and philosophy of education. The closest to a geography of education was comparative education, and Laadan Fletcher (1974) attempted, somewhat crudely, to equate it with the geography of education, referring to its ‘fundamentally geographical orientation’, contesting that ‘the study constitutes a geography of education’ (p. 353). The problem with this is that it does not, especially as comparative education remained, until recently, fixated with only one spatial scale of reference, the national. Nonetheless, comparative education is by Becher’s criteria, a ‘tribe’, there being now over forty national societies of comparative education, collectively forming the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES), which was founded in 1970 (Maseman et al., 2007). This continues to grow despite the overall decline in the foundation disciplines. This is due in no small part to the increasingly instrumental focus of teacher-training programmes on classroom management and the testing of pupil progress for purposes of ranking and selection. Indeed, both Hopper (1968) and Timmons (1988) identified the prime function of formal education systems as being mechanisms of selection. The advent of such international comparisons of purely academic achievement as TIMMS (Trends in International; Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) has globalized school curricula to such a degree that school curricula have been described as ‘global educational governance’ on the part of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (Meyer and Benavot, 2013). In such a conformist, technocratic climate, it is not surprising that the disciplines of education have suffered on the wider stage. This is to the detriment of educational research as indicated in ‘The Disciplines of Education in the UK: Confronting the Crisis’, which was published in 2009 in a special edition of the Oxford Review of Education (35:5), as well as in Furlong and Lawn’s (2010) Disciplines of Education: Their Role in the Future of Education Research. In both these publications, Chris Taylor contributed an article titled ‘Towards a

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Geography of Education’ (see Taylor, 2009), which was the first time that this field has been recognized alongside the others as a fellow member of the family. Unlike the others, though, it does not meet Becher’s indicators of an academic tribe because it does not have a specialist journal or an academic society. One of the prime functions of this book is to promote the profile of the geography of education.

The Emergence of a Geography of Education Almost all the literature in this field has appeared over the last forty-five years, with a significant part of it written by British academics. However, mention must be made of the substantive and formative contribution of several European authors, notably Maurice Debesse, Robert Geipel, Pierre Furter and especially Peter Meusburger. Debesse was from 1969 to 1978 the co-editor (with G. Mialaret) of eight volumes of Traite des Sciences Pedagogiques, that is to say, the foundation disciplines of education. One of the earlier publications included an article by Debesse himself – ‘Pour une geographie de l’education’ (1972) – in which he states that the idea of a geography of education is not new since he had argued for it at a conference of the French Comparative Education Society in 1958 (p. 401). France was, along with Germany, in the nineteenth century the location of the development of geography as a modern academic discipline. The subject figured prominently in the curriculum of the lycee, together with history in the first few years. They still remain symbiotic in French curricula today, and rightly so. As a result, governmental literature on education in France has long included the spatial analysis of formal educational provision, using the term ‘geography of ’ which does not happen in official documentation in the UK (see, for example, Direction de l’evaluation et de la prospective, geographie de l’ecole, Ministere de l’Education Nationale et de la Culture, 1993). The aforementioned Robert Geipel of the Technical University of Munich is best known for his work on aspects of the urban geography of education, of which an example is Schools, Space and Social Policy: Educational Provision for the Children of Migrant Workers in Munich (1986). He also, in 1973, extended a caution to researchers of education regarding the problem of political interference, with reference to significant spatial differences in provision and access as between the Lande of West Germany. Indeed, Geipel highlighted a very real problem for any researcher into the geographical issue of educational disparities, which is, namely, dependence on the cooperation of the authorities presiding over such irregularities. In this

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case, the authorities, once alerted to the object of the exercise, in effect took over the studies and excluded the original workers. Consequently, Geipel advocated individual research at a very detailed local level on a case study basis, in the hope that ‘new aspects of geographic theory will be developed ensuring the continued importance of the geography of education’ (Geipel, 1973, p. 4). Pierre Furter, a Swiss educator, published his Les Espaces de la Formation in 1983, which was part of the collection Villes, Regions et Societies put together by Michel Bassand and Joseph Csillaghy on perceived disparities in Switzerland at the time. Furter was concerned especially with spatial disparities in the development and quality of education, its territoriality, and implications for the maintenance of democratic politics in Switzerland. Peter Meusberger, from Austria, arguably the father of this field, began his interest in the geography of education when on the staff of the University of Innsbruck. At that time, he concentrated on regional educational patterns in Austria and Switzerland, whether knowingly or not, following the work of Marc-Antoine Jullien de Paris, who in 1816 coined the phrase ‘comparative education’ (Fraser, 1964). Since 1983, Peter Meusberger has developed a distinguished geographical career at the University of Heidelberg, being chair of Economic and Social Geography Department until 2007. Since then he has been a distinguished senior professor at Heidelberg, and in 2008 became the first geographer to become a member of the New Club of Paris. Throughout his career, aspects of the geography of education have remained foremost among his interests, and he now works on aspects of the ‘knowledge society’, a core concern of the New Club of Paris. A flow of projects and publications has emerged from this since 2008 (e.g. Meusburger, Funke and Wunder, 2009). The formal emergence of at least a nascent and recognized geography of education can reasonably be traced to the meeting of the International Geographical Union (IGU) in Toronto in 1972, when Gerry Hones of the University of Bath and Raymond Ryba of the University of Manchester presented a paper titled ‘Why Not a Geography of Education?’ They were building on Anderson and Bowman’s ‘The Diffusion of Schooling, Techniques and Educational Opportunities’ in their seminal work Education and Economic Development (1966), as well as Hagerstrand’s introductory chapter ‘Quantitative Techniques for the Spread of Information and Technology’ in his book with Kuklinski titled Information Systems for Regional Development (1971), and a chapter titled ‘Aspects of the Geography of Education’ in Coates and Rawstron (1971, pp. 243–80). The widely acclaimed sociology publication Born and Bred Unequal (Taylor and Ayres, 1969) may also have been an influence, but Ryba had

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already, in an internal publication of the University of Manchester (1968), posed the question: ‘The Geography of Education – a Neglected Field?’ (pp. 21–3), though this had limited visibility. The outcome of the Hones and Ryba initiative was that the IGU invited them to chair a Geography of Education Working Party within their ongoing Commission on Geographical Education. Between 1973 and 1981 they edited five mimeo ‘Bulletins’ on the geography of education that included contributions as varied as: ‘Regional Research on Education’ by Robert Geipel (1973); ‘Spatial Variations on Education Provision in Colombia’ by Alan Gilbert (1973); ‘A Geographer’s Contribution to Educational Planning in the Third World’ by Bill Gould (1981) and ‘A Review of the Geography of Education in Australia’ by Susanne Walker (1981). The fifth review in 1981 was the last. They had helped to generate a certain ‘head of steam’ but not enough to lead to the geography of education becoming a recognized foundation discipline of educational studies. Within the educational studies community itself, the almost coincident 1975 Conference of the Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) in Paris provided a platform for Ryba’s 1975 paper on ‘School and Community: Concepts of Territory and their Implications’, which led to an article on ‘Territorial Inequality in Education’ in 1976. That conference also provided an opportunity for the writer to present a paper titled ‘The Geography of Education: Aspects of the Emergence of a Sub-Discipline and Its Application to Studies of Educational Phenomena in the Third World’, as well as, with the encouragement of Maurice Debesse, an article in the journal of the Francophone Comparative Education Society (Brock, 1976a) and another in Compare (1976b), the journal of the then British Comparative Education Society, now British Association of International and Comparative Education (BAICE).

Marketization of Education, Information Flow and Geographies of Education The near coincidental incumbencies of Margaret Thatcher (1979–90) and Ronald Reagan (1981–9) witnessed the creation of circumstances for the marketization of public sector schooling on an unprecedented scale. It was also characterized by the operation of actual, rather than academic, geographies of education on widely different scales of political interaction: the local, national and intercontinental. The key issue at stake was that of school choice, in line with the neoliberal philosophies of Friedrich Hayek, concerning individualism,

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and Milton Friedman concerning privatization of services. For comparative education, this provided opportunities on different spatial scales, and highlighted the significance of political geography. Hayek’s celebrated article ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’ (1945) also extended the notion of education beyond that of the formal dimension, and especially schooling. Although the impetus for school choice in the public sector came from the USA, Thatcher proved more successful than Reagan in securing it on a national scale. This was because of the legacy of the Constitution of the USA, created in 1787 and ratified in 1788, in leaving public educational provision in the hands of the member states of the Union, and not making it a duty of the federal government. Consequently, in the 1980s some US states moved towards versions of school choice while others did not. Indeed, some school districts within individual states accepted school choice and some, like Massachusetts, did not (Griffin, 2001). Successive Thatcher administrations responsible for public education in England and Wales moved towards school choice, culminating in the Education Reform Act of 1988, followed by similar legislation in Scotland. Given the obvious spatial implications of these reforms, there was an immediate interest by a number of geographers, notably Bradford et al. (1988), Burdett (1988) and Bondi and Matthews (1988). Bondi (1991) went on to comment on the contrast between the USA and the UK in regard to the marketization of schooling. This theme was expanded by Finegold et al. (1993) in their book on the transatlantic market in education and training. They document a considerable flow of knowledge and ideas in both directions, though it is clear that the majority of it was from west to east. After the 1988 Education Act in England and Wales it was somewhat reversed. Donald Hirsch (1995) broadened the geographic and comparative scope of the analysis of the impact of school choice in Australia, England, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the USA. Meanwhile, a range of relationships between geography and education was becoming more apparent. Bradford’s work on locality and schooling had been presaged by that of Robson (1969), who took the issue of schooling on a microscale to illustrate the significance of extreme local milieux – individual street cultures – within a major city. This was a specialist geographical work on the significance of locality and culture in city structure; in particular Sunderland in North East England. The increasing polarization of public sector schools in England and Wales as a result of local markets was noted by Gibson and Asthana (2000). They claimed that there is ‘clear evidence that educational markets tend to exacerbate existing differences between schools in terms of both their performance and social status’ (p. 303). The issue, they say, is one of scale, and

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that ‘within local markets – which is, after all, the context within which school choice operates – social polarization is clearly present’ (p. 317). The question as to whether marketization of schools is in the public interest – as opposed to being in the interest of political ideology – was also raised by Woods et al. (1998), who went further to consider the additional effect of an academically selective school (grammar school) in any area. They concluded that ‘academic selection tends to be associated with greater levels of inequality between schools and of social class divisions in the competitive area’ (p. 208). Or as Hirsch (1995) had put it more obviously geographically, as well as succinctly: ‘how the association between “good” schools and “nice” areas might be diminished’ (p. 256). Taylor (2001) examined local markets in school choice from a more explicitly geographical viewpoint in three ways: (a) ‘as self-governing competition spaces; (b) as hierarchical competition spaces; (c) or as non-hierarchical competition spaces’ (p. 211), the key notion being the competition space. He concluded that ‘it has been shown that the current diversity of schools in the market place do not compete on one level playing field’ (ibid.). He followed this up with A Geography of the New Education Market (Taylor, 2002). An important scale-related aspect of neoliberalism in relation to educational reform in England is that of policy localization, in other words ‘localised production of neoliberal policy’ (Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson (2012, p. 640)), leading to the realization that ‘neoliberalism is not the same everywhere’ (ibid.) and therefore must be susceptible to analysis on both spatial and temporal scales. They focus on the New Labour initiative of ‘Extended Services’ from 2005 which ‘sought to broaden the role of education and ensure that by 2010 all primary schools included within their remit responsibility for providing/signposting before and after school childcare for working parents … and providing access to support which will enable parents better to raise their own children’ (p. 643). What they were able to demonstrate, inter alia, is that localization of policy production arises from information flows that are differentially interpreted by parents according to social class. Information flows are spatially dynamic and part and parcel of the aforementioned notion of education as a space-adjusting technique (Spencer and Thomas, 1969). This was evident not only in the range of scales employed, but also in the transatlantic dialogue, well before the influence of ICT. The concept of information flow was also evident in the work of Akin Mabogunje (1980) on The Development Process: A Spatial Perspective. He examines this at a number of scales, including that of the individual, who he terms the ‘handling unit’ of information for ‘being engaged in a continuous observation and evaluation of

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his environment’ and for being ‘involved in many-sided communication with his fellow men’ (p. 256). Mabogunje (1997) also referred to ‘the information revolution’ and its effect on geographical methodology (pp. 87–115): The methodology of a subject is, however, not just about facts and information. It is about the set of rules and procedures which defines the type of facts and data that can be collected and provides the framework within which these can be analysed and used to arrive at credible and valid knowledge about particular phenomena or topics. (p. 87)

In other words, geography is inevitably bound up with epistemology, ‘the theory of method or grounds of knowledge’ (The Little Oxford Dictionary, p. 183), and an important component of the philosophy of education.

Academic Geography Journals and Geographies of Education Specialist academic journals are tribal information flows in terms of the views of Becher (1989) and Sibley (1985); however, flows of information and knowledge are diverse, range across all three forms of education, and often involve activities and institutions beyond those of the formal system. That the plural term ‘geographies of education’ has entered the discourse is not surprising, since the discipline takes a wide range of forms that collectively comprise its identity. Regarding the tribal publications of academic geographers overall, Johnston (2003) found, in respect of their submissions to the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK that ‘most physical geographers place their research papers in specialized interdisciplinary journals and make relatively little use of geographical outlets: most human geographers, on the other hand, publish in geography journals’ (p. 133). Looking more precisely for publications on aspects of the geographies of education, the writer found in surveying the contents of several editions of four key UK journals of geography from the 1990s onwards (Geography, Geographical Journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Area) that the following four main categories were evident. Under the first category, ‘the nature, or identity, of geography’, can be included a significant number of publications that were concerned with spatial disparity from an epistemological perspective. Under the second, ‘geography of geographies’, fall publications about geographical learning in different politico-spatial contexts. Under the third, ‘children’s geographies’, can be included publications concerned with

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Table 1.2 Geographies and education in four journals since 1990 Type of Geography a) b) c) d)

The Nature of Geography Geography of Geographies Children’s Geographies Geography of Education

Area

Transactions

Geography

GJ

35 41 19 20

14 17 5 29

20 12 11 20

18 24 1 10

Examples of each of the four main categories would be: a) Castree, N. (2011), ‘The Future of Geography in English Universities’, Geographical Journal, 177 (4): pp. 294–9. b) Stannard, K. (2003), ‘Earth to Academia: On the Need to Reconnect University and School Geography’, Area, 35 (3): pp. 316–22. c) Dobson, J. and Stillwell, J. (2000), ‘Changing Home, Changing School: Towards a Research Agenda on Child Migration’, Area, 32 (4): pp. 395–402. d) Jazeel, T. and McFarlane, C. (2010), ‘The Limits of Responsibility: A Post-Colonial Politics of Academic Knowledge Production’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (1): pp. 109–24.

spatial perceptions and sociocultural circumstances in relation to children and young people, in which they learn, formally and informally. Under the fourth, ‘geography of education’, falls publications that are spatial and locational studies (or one of the two) of different aspects of educational phenomena. Clearly these categories overlap, but the main point is that there has been a substantial interest in, and output of, material in recent decades in selected specialist geographical publications that relate to the phenomenon of education. The selection of, and from, these four journals of academic geography does not of course mean that articles relating to geographies of education are confined to these journals. As subsequent references in this discourse will illustrate, articles in this field occur in a wide range of other specialist journals of academic geography and related social sciences, though rarely in journals of educational studies. Taylor (2009) and Symaco and Brock (2013) are rare examples of the latter. Children’s Geographies is a specialist journal of its own, indicating an active field within geographies of education. It is based in the University of Northampton Centre for Children and Youth (CCY).

Sub-Disciplines of Geography and the Geography of Education Another way of looking at the geography, or geographies, of education is to consider actual and potential treatment of educational themes within the various branches of the two disciplines, as illustrated in Figures 1.1 and 1.2.

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Physical Geography A number of aspects of physical geography have implications for the geography of education. Some are influential in their own right while others – and these are more in number – operate in association with other factors. Physical remoteness can be an issue whether in maritime or continental terms. This is well illustrated by the literature of education in small states, and implicitly in the title of one of the early examples of the genre: Scale, Isolation and Dependence (Brock, 1984). The majority of small states are maritime, but some are continental, even ‘land islands’, like Andorra and San Marino (Brock, 2016b). Remoteness can occur in association with whole countries, but it can also be an issue within much larger ones such as Australia, Canada and Russia. The former Soviet Union, considerably larger than today’s Russia, operated a highly centralized education system, but in the remoteness of Siberia, for example, outside of a few major cities, communities were clustered together in small towns and villages. In secondary schools, rolls were, and likely still are, small. The numbers of teachers in each were few, many doubling up on the subjects taught. This meant that, for example, individual sciences were not necessarily taught by graduates in, say, chemistry, physics or biology, and therefore the reality of the curriculum in practice was far from nationally or geographically uniform (Grant, 1969). Remoteness is not the same as distance. Locations do not have to be remote for distance to be a factor in education, for, as Hamnett and Butler (2011) have shown, distance plays a key role in reproducing educational inequality in East London. The maritime and the continental scales may combine, as in the Falkland Islands (Las Malvinas), which exhibit remoteness in three distinct ways. They are physically remote from Britain, whose territory it is; politically remote from their nearest neighbour, Argentina; and the two largest islands, East and West Falkland, exhibit a near-continental scale of remoteness in terms of schooling provision. Outside the capital, Stanley, on the eastern periphery of East Falkland, there are about fifty students of primary school age who learn with the help of itinerant teachers and by distance learning (Smith, 1989). Of course in advanced communities like these, the use of ICT can, to some degree, overcome remoteness and also facilitate education as a space-adjusting technique to a degree that Spencer and Thomas (1969) would not perhaps have envisaged. In less economically advanced communities like the delta region of Bangladesh, the physical environment can be devastating to schooling. In this region, every year the monsoon rains cause floods on a massive scale and literally wash away whole settlements and the schools, if there are any, in those

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settlements. After the monsoon, the people resettle but the physical landscape is not the same. They rebuild wherever they can, during which time the boys may be transported to school by boat. In some communities, the girls are not permitted to be in such proximity to boys in the boats, and so miss out on school until a firm community has been established again. So the geographical, this time a combination of physical, cultural and behavioural, contributes to female disadvantage in education (Brock and Cammish, 1997a). For many traditional indigenous peoples, the physical environment is in effect ‘the curriculum’. Their whole economy and culture, whether sedentary or nomadic, depends on a deep understanding of, and respect for, the physical environment, including the atmosphere and the sun. As Magga (2004) explains: For indigenous peoples, it is the knowledge of the interconnectedness of all that was, that is and that will be – the vast mosaic of life and spirit and land/water forms, of which we are an intricate part. It encompasses all that is known as Traditional Knowledge. (p. 7)

The International Working Group for Indigenous Peoples (IWGIA) was established in 1968 and operates from Copenhagen.

Biogeography Biogeography is the geography of living things, botanical and zoological. It clearly has significant implications for education with respect to learning, that is to say the knowledge acquisition of individuals. The Gaia principle (Lovelock, 1972) is fundamental to human and environmental sustainability. So, as far as the geography of education is concerned, spatial disparities in the incidence of provision for learning in this field is a significant issue. It has been mentioned earlier that traditional indigenous peoples are, through their informal education, acutely aware of the need for the understanding of, and respect for, their physical and ecological environment. Such people exist in a wide variety of natural environments – from tropical forests (Aikman, 1999) to sub-arctic climes (Keskitalo et al., 2014) – as illustrated by May and Aikman (2003), King and Scheilmann (2004) and Griffin (2014). Conversely, there is also scope for a geography of education concerning spatial disparity in the incidence of coverage, in the formal curricula of industrialized societies, of their own impact on the natural environment, including on climate change (Jalasiewicz et al., 2016).

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There have been efforts in many countries to create and sustain national parks for the benefit of fauna and flora alike, including of endangered species. There is the geography of field study centres to be examined, where students of school age and above can engage in first-hand environmental studies, including geography. The issue of fieldwork, however, is not limited to physical or biogeographical contexts, and constitutes a special niche within the spectrum of geographies of education that will be discussed following this discussion, first, of the sub-disciplines of geography and, then, the geographies of education. There have been some efforts to educate people on the importance of creating, and sustaining, micro-environments in urban areas for the survival of species vital to human survival, such as bees. As Aikman has shown in many of her works, the difference in the nature of linguistic usage in education between indigenous peoples and those colonizing them is a revealing indicator. See, for example, her 2009 article on ‘The Contradictory Languages of Fishing and Gold Panning in the Peruvian Amazon’. Another example of different interpretations of the use of the environment would be the clash between indigenous and colonizing economies in the Northern Territory of Australia (McLean, 2014). Here, in the Ord, the traditional pastoralism of the aboriginal population, based on the recognition of maintaining a balance in such water supply as exists, comes into conflict with the adjustment of space to construct a dam for irrigation purposes. McLean discusses this in terms of differential ‘water values’ in which those of the indigenous populations are sidelined and where there seems to be no reconciliation between education, geography and economy as is also the case between the two human groups.

Cultural and Social Geography Language is one of two key indicators of culture. The other is belief, often evident in some form of religion, ideology and identity. Education is culturally based and, in its formal and non-formal modes, politically delivered. Cultural geography is arguably the main home of the geography of education (Brock, 1992). Sociology is the study of human groups and their interaction at all levels from individual to global, with social geography providing its spatial and locational dimension. Learning is a key feature of human interaction from individual language acquisition of infants, especially from their mothers, to interaction within groups in family, school, religious, club and work environments to social media networks and the globalization of ICT. Teaching can also range from an individual parent, through formal education to non-formal workplace, leisure and on to informal

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internet learning where the instruction may not be direct but nonetheless has an origin: in effect a ‘teacher’. The media in general, whether centrally controlled or informally accessed, is an increasingly influential educator and also susceptible to geographical analysis. Whether formal or informal, differential access to languages, or forms of a language, is a significant component of the geography of education. The medium of instruction (MOI) in formal schooling varies considerably throughout the world, and may differ from the social language of the population. In London, probably the most multilingual capital in the world, Baker and Eversley (2000) found, even at the turn of the millennium, that there were already over 250 social languages spoken in the homes of the various communities present. A decade later, Von Ahn et al. (2010) found the largest minority to be Bengali/ Sylheti of the Bangladeshi community with nearly 50,000 social users, while French had risen to tenth place with over 13,000. The French parliament has a member solely representing French nationals in the UK. The linguistic landscape in London, and other major cities of the Western world, is always in flux and exhibits clustering. English speakers are numerically concentrated in the middle and outer suburbs, except in West London where so-called minority, especially Asian, communities are clustered. It is obvious that language will have educational implications that are geographically expressed, and this falls within geo-linguistics, which comprises (a) the geographical distribution of languages, and (b) linguistic geography, which is concerned with spatial variations within languages such as dialects and accents (see for e.g. Orton et al., 1978 and Upton and Widdowson, 2006). In addition to these, one may add ‘World Language Education’, a development in the USA to maximize the potential of bilingualism and multilingualism (Heining-Boynton and Redmond, 2014). The focus may be local, for example, in response to the influx and concentration of people whose mother tongue is not English, or international in response to the need to appreciate the cultures of people impacted by cultural colonialism: the export of education by diffusion. Beyond language as a cultural indicator, but often related, are social class, ethnicity and organized religion, all of which have geographical identities and educational implications that fall within cultural and social geography. Formal education, initially the earliest universities and then schools had a religious basis. The conflict between the Lutheran Reformation and the Roman Catholic Church has had lasting implications for the geography of education in Western Europe (Brock, 2010). Ethnicity, often confused with ‘race’, may include religious identity along with other traits such as ancestry, myth, homeland,

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ideology and symbolic systems such as conventional dress and cuisine. The term, ‘ethnic minorities’, is often used as a ‘catch-all’ with respect to educational issues, among others. Social class can cut across most communities, but, at the time of writing in 2015, resonates most in educational terms in England with the relative underperformance of white working-class males, with racism and gender also being influential factors (Gilborn, 2010). Bernstein (1971 and 1973) developed the theory of elaborate and restricted codes of English related respectively to middle and working classes in formal education. Teachers at that time, especially since most had experienced selective secondary schooling, were predominantly from the middle classes and, it was claimed, ‘talked above’ the level of many of their charges. The problem has been recognized since then, but clearly not sufficiently among boys to overcome the increasingly superior academic achievement of girls. This has generated a debate about whether single-sex schools are more beneficial to both genders than co-educational, which are now the norm in Western societies. Pahlke et al. (2014) found this not to be the case in the USA, and other studies are undecided. However, there are certainly countries where single-sex schools are prevalent at the secondary level such as Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. In the Islamic world, this is mostly the case, as well as in many developing countries where cultures are still strongly influenced by patriarchal traditions. There is obviously a gendered geography of education awaiting greater study, though well established in wider terms (Momsen and Kinnard, 1993 and Hanson and Pratt, 1995). Some of this relates to cost, since if girls and boys are to be schooled separately then there will have to be two buildings and two sets of staff. It may relate to religion, which becomes a direct issue when schools are predicated on particular faiths. In England, Anglican and Catholic denominations of Christianity have provided a significant proportion of state schools for over a century, and exhibit their respective geographical distributions Gay and Greenough (2000). This is now a contentious issue with regard to the rise in so-called ‘faith schools’ since the turn of the millennium (Allen and Vignoles, 2015), because, among other things, they modify actual and potential spatial patterns of access to schooling wherever they occur. Geographical identities of social class constitute an important component in a recent and influential study by Savage (2015), based on The Great British Class Survey (GBCS) carried out in 2013 by the BBC. Chapter 8 on ‘Class and Spatial Inequality in the UK’ is especially pertinent: The view from the educated media-dominating metropolis – quintessentially London – has more power in defining the deficiencies of other locations.

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27

London has become a magical and aestheticized city, its quality etched into its innovative-high-rise corporate blocks, such as the Gherkin, but with its aura extending to its murkier territories of the Hackney psycho-geography of Ian Sinclair or J.G. Ballard’s west London suburban Dystopia. (p. 262)

In addition to the national cultural dominance of London with its highly educated elite within, Savage is also able to illustrate the same internal dichotomy within other conurbations: The Manchester elite exemplifies this geography well, because this is the most segregated in class terms according to GBCS data of British cities. It has a pronounced geography focussed on a range of neighbourhoods exclusively to the south of the city centre. Firstly there is a huge north-south divide within the city. High end suburbs are located predominantly in the south of the city, where their feeder roads and rail networks lead to the university and hospital complexes of the Oxford Road corridor. (p. 274)

The way in which, in addition to the metropolis, elites elsewhere exhibit clear territorial identities, is ascribed in the analysis of the GBCS to a concentration of cultural capital, within which both formal and informal educational attributes are key factors, as in ‘Yorkshire’s own “Golden Triangle”, which lies between York, Leeds and Harrogate’ (p. 279). As well as sociology, social anthropology is also an important contributing discipline as illustrated by the celebrated anthropologist, Jack Goody (1975) in relation to the origins of formal education. From its beginning in Sumerian times, the school was created for the transmission of, first, scribal skills, then, more generally ‘literate’ skills and activities – which include not only the forms of knowledge that these skills develop and generate, but also the ways of knowing (‘cognitive skills’) that they encourage and require.  … In oral societies, however, the transmission of more abstract and developed forms of knowledge, like the Bagre myth of the LoDagaa, was often accomplished without the emphasis on exact repetition. (p. 1)

Much can still be learnt from predominantly informal education communities in the less economically developed regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, as to how to sustain environments and societies in the face of increasing pressures, both natural and human. Swatridge (1985) made a novel contribution in his visualization of education in terms of the South Pacific cargo cult. With reference to his research in Papua New Guinea he described the provision of formal education as ‘delivering the

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goods’. As an expatriate and teacher in the East Highlands Province, having read anthropological reports about the area, he indicates that he was concerned that ‘I would not be promising goods that I could not deliver’ (p. viii). In introducing his narrative, he states: I shall argue that the world view, the theology, the relationships in and between families and tribes, the economic norms and the notion of what constitutes knowledge among (some at least of) the peoples of Papua New Guinea, set the tone of their expectations of the outcomes of education. (p. ix )

Those expectations were ones that were supposed to lead directly to the acquisitions of tangible wealth and possessions, but as it turned out, in most cases, they did not, consequently resulting in a disaffection for formal education among the majority. Swatridge concludes perceptively: ‘We shall not ask whether there has been too much or too little education; but it is not unreasonable to ask whether there has been too much or too little schooling’ (p. 149). This study shows clearly that education is culturally embedded, but also that it has political and economic connotations and dimensions. Such dimensions can also be observed in terms of racial and cultural discrimination in education which can be so stark as to require particular groups to be educationally segregated by way of regulated spaces, as in Apartheid South Africa for many generations, or more subtly through the implementation as the medium of instruction of the language of the dominant ethnic group in any country.

Political and Economic Geography Political science is the study of power and administration. Economics is the study of systems of production and exchange. The necessarily symbiotic and fundamental relationship between the two is represented in the formal and full title of the educational institution known as The London School of Economics and Political Science, as well as the influential undergraduate programme at the University of Oxford: Politics Philosophy and Economics (PPE). Education has always been a matter of exchange between teaching and learning, but it is now also recognized as a knowledge business, a phrase coined in the context of ICT and globalization but equally true, though often unrealized, in different forms of traditional formal education. Education is a wealth creator but also comes at a financial cost whether met from public or private sources or a combination of the two, be it a public/private initiative (PPI) to build schools, or parents paying fees for private schooling while also paying taxes, which in part support state schooling.

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National boundaries and spaces have changed over the two-and-a-half millennia, during which territory has become politically controlled regulated space. This has often been the result of conflict, the most recent large-scale examples being associated with two world wars of the twentieth century and numerous smaller conflicts since (Paulson, 2011; O’Malley 2007). The creation of Yugoslavia following the First World War and its disintegration in the late twentieth century is a case in point. Following any such change there are new education systems put in place, operating within regulated spaces and boundaries that are often new. In the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, one of the emergent nations of the Balkans, the schooling system is divided into minute levels of scale. As Perry and Becker (2016) point out: An even more visible symbol of divided education is seen in the over 50 ‘two schools under one roof ’ in the Federation of BiH. These are schools where one school building is literally and starkly divided – according to wing, floor or shift – into a school for Croats and a school for Bosniaks. Initially seen as an interim solution to ensure minority returnees could enjoy access to a school building (rather than learning in informal schools in homes or cafes), the lack of a permanent long-term solution has meant that such stark symbols of divisions have now existed for well over a decade. (p. 155)

The spread of Nazi-controlled education in Europe created a temporary new and changing education area on a larger scale, which led, at the cessation of conflict, to the occupation of Germany by the four victorious powers, France, the Soviet Union, the UK and the USA, each of which instituted reforms in their own image. None of these reforms survived the end of occupation since the more powerful cultural basis of education in that country (as in others), re-asserted itself. More detailed discussion regarding post-war Germany and Japan occurs in Shibata (2005). The territorial areas of several other European countries changed after 1945, most notable being a significant shift of Poland towards the west. Even today, at the time of writing (2015) there are unresolved situations in Europe and Eurasia such as in Transnistria (Eastern Moldova), Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and the easternmost Oblasts in Ukraine  – Luhanzk and Donetsk. Administrative divisions of a country due to colonial linguistic legacy can have educational consequences as noted by Cammish and Brock (1997) in relation to Cameroon: In addition to indigenous cultural differences, there is the colonial legacy: Cameroon is divided into anglophone and francophone areas (Western and

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Geography of Education Eastern Cameroon respectively). The relative neglect of the western anglophone region over the last 20 years or so, has led to both males and females seeking Anglophone educational opportunities in Nigeria, Ghana and Sierra Leone. (p. 42)

At another level, there is the binary divide between private and public provision, whether at school or at the higher education level, each exhibiting locational and spatial patterns. For example, when direct grant grammar schools were discontinued in England and Wales in 1976, they had a choice of closing down, becoming a local authority comprehensive school, or a private school. This was a significant issue in North-West England because of the concentration of Roman Catholic direct grant schools there. Public provision of schooling within a nation may be mediated by internal political geography as with US states and Australia, and the provinces of Canada. At a lower level of influence, but still significant, are the local authorities of England, with other variations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales (Brock, 2014a). National policy in England since the turn of the millennium has introduced alternatives known as academies and so-called free schools whereby public money can be allocated to institutions that are unaccountable to their local communities and administrations. According to the Department of Education for England in July 2015: ‘ The average amount of state funding given (per pupil) to free schools in 2013–14 was £7,761, compared with a national figure for local authority schools of £4,767’ (The Guardian 25th August 2015, p. 33). The locations of academies, and especially free schools, obviously alter the geography of formal education, which is therefore in flux, complicating the issues of administration and school choice mentioned earlier (Allen, 2013). As former secretary of state for education Estelle Morris (2016) puts it: The education reforms of the past three decades have changed our school system from one that was community rooted – with local councils and neighbourhood schools – to one that barely takes geography into account. The rise of autonomy and independence, together with the growing role of the market, has shifted power, influence and authority to the individual school, its head-teacher and governors. The ties that used to bind local schools have become increasingly weak. (p. 35)

The political geography of education operates on a long gradient of scales from international to institutional. Global networks of international schools exist, but the continental scale only operates when it coincides with the national scale, as in Australia, though in that country the individual states have responsibility for public education within the national framework. Elsewhere, the national scale

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usually dominates but ranges, with over 200 global cases, from near-continental proportions, as in Russia, to microstates of only a few square miles like Monaco. The institutional level ( e.g. individual schools) has its own internal politics (Bray and Thomas, 1995) but is strongly influenced by the informal politics of the local milieu as shown by Robson (1969) with regard to Sunderland, and Griffin (2001) with regard to Cork, Springfield and Kingston-upon-Hull, in Ireland, Massachusetts and England respectively.

Population Geography This is demography in its spatial form. Demography has two main dimensions: population change and population structure. Population change depends on three factors: births, deaths and migrations. All have implications for the geography of education in different ways, for population structure can also change. The birth rate in any place changes over time. At the global level, the rise is already steep and some fear it will become exponential (Emmott, 2013). Birth rates first hit primary education provision for obvious reasons, which is why the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), formulated in 2000 in Dakar, concentrate on the issue of Education for All (EFA) at the level of basic education. This means gender parity, and a basic aspect of population structure is the relative proportion of males and females of different age groups. The target for gender parity at primary school level was 2015, and this was far from being met in many less developed countries. There are several reasons for this, some of which are spatial but most of which are cultural and economic, which in turn have their own geographical consequences. Boys in many such societies, where education is not free due to a lack of a sufficient tax base, are seen as a more positive investment in family survival and development. Boys and girls are seen as commodities with differential economic value. The annual Global Monitoring Reviews (GMR), produced under the auspices of UNESCO, provide statistical evidence of population change as it affects education, but enrolment rates are only part of the picture. Wastage, that is to say children leaving school at various times before completing compulsory primary schooling, is a lesser known indicator, but very significant. So also is partial and intermittent attendance, especially of girls, due to traditional family responsibilities. Another aspect of wastage can be attributed to health issues. In some subSaharan countries the incidence of HIV/AIDS is so high that when planning the future of schools it has to be assumed and estimated that a significant proportion of students and teachers will not survive for long.

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One element of population structure is the number and proportion of a population that experiences tertiary education. In the more economically advanced countries this is an indicator of national economic potential, but within nations there exist geographies of education that highlight disparities. Access to higher education can vary considerably depending on locational issues, with large cities and conurbations normally having a concentration of universities and other post-school provisions. Students migrate to college and university within countries, but increasingly also internationally. This phenomenon is a popular topic within the growing geographies of education (Waters, 2008 and 2012; Geddie 2015). For many more people than those fortunate enough to enjoy post-school education, the issue of migration is a fundamental one and has to do with distance. It ranges from travel from home to school, a phenomenon that Pooley et al. (2005) analysed with respect to Britain from the 1940s onwards. They found that, from National Travel Survey data, over the past thirty years or so, the mean distance travelled to school has increased by about 800 metres ‘but that it remains short at about 2.3 kilometres for children under 11 and 4.7 kilometres for children 11–16’ (p. 43). However, walking to school, especially for secondary school students in Britain is seen as a space for socializing and a degree of independence. Depending on whether there is school choice or not, distance can be a crucial factor in availability and performance as shown by Hamnett and Butler (2011) with regard to East London. Distance is even more crucial in the rural locations of the ‘marginalized majority’ (Brock, 2011) of the world’s population in rural subsistence situations, where much longer treks to school are involved through more demanding environments as in sub-Saharan Africa (Gould and Prothero, 1975). In such contexts, gender may also be a constraining factor, with girls in some cultures at risk of abuse and in others having to make the journey after strenuous daily domestic duties, arriving late and exhausted (Brock and Cammish, 1997a). In the modern world, an increasing amount of learning, formal and informal, is via the internet. Consequently, a new division of population structure is those who are online and those who are not. The majority of the latter are in less developed countries, but there are some in remote locations of industrialized nations. This is the digital divide. Even within those countries that are on the right side of the divide, there may be areas where broadband quality is extremely poor, whether for natural or man-made reasons. So, with regard to access to online learning, grades of digital divide constitute an aspect of population structure, just as in some other locations there simply are no schools. However, digital technology is advancing and in some areas of rural sub-Saharan Africa

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computers are available that are powered by the sun. This has led in turn to projects such as TESSA (Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa) that see the potential of untrained and unqualified local teachers, and train them within those cultures (Moon and Wolfenden, 2012).

Behavioural and Humanistic Geography Behavioural geography is ‘a psychological turn in human geography which emphasised the role of cognitive and decision-making variables as mediating the relationship between environment and spatial behaviour’ (Ley, 1975). In simple terms, it has to do with mental maps (Gould and White, 1993); that is to say, where people think they are, where they think other people or places are, and what it is like there and why. It therefore relates to the psychology of education, one of the sub-disciplines of educational studies, but this sub-discipline in practice is largely interested in how children learn in and out of school. Both behavioural and humanistic geography are concerned with cognitive practices in relation to environments, natural and man-made, including social and cultural aspects. They were pioneered by Tuan Yi-Fu (1976 and 1977), followed by Ley and Samuels (1978), and formed a central part of the ‘cultural turn’ in geography around the 1970s. This is crucial to geographical education, to all three forms of it – formal, non-formal and informal – but especially to informal education since it is more influential and widespread than the images human beings have of places. Such images are susceptible to imagination and emotion, as confessed by Rebekah Widdowfield (2000) prior to her undertaking research in the deprived ‘West End’ of Newcastle, UK. From its reputation, the West End had been demonized in my mind as a ‘no-go’ area and, until it came to doing my research, probably in common with many other residents of the city I had no desire or need to go there. (p. 203)

Having undertaken her research, Widdowfield advocated including the emotional dimension into research reports on aspects of geography so as to situate the knowledge gained. Pile (2010) sees this as a contribution of emotional geography to understanding affectual geography. Such images can be very influential in decision-making, from the relatively casual about holiday destinations to the very serious concerning foreign investment or even military invasions. The media, increasingly electronic and global in scope, do not necessarily assist geographical understanding as Gould

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and White pointed out over two decades ago. As they put it: ‘It is little wonder that men and women of intelligence and initiative are increasingly frustrated by bureaucratic institutions that throttle them with cords of rapid communication’ (p. 157). They refer to ‘patterns of ignorance, information and learning’ (pp. 119– 56), or in other words a geography of informal education. Learning from the media ranges from a deliberately partisan political soundbite on television news to a well–researched and balanced documentary on any place at any scale. The media includes creative writing in terms of both travellers’ tales and fiction. As Jackson (1989) put it: ‘Most of the work in humanistic geography and literature (Pocock, 1981) has shared an elitist view of culture and an obsessive interest in landscape’ (p. 20). While, in both genres, a more balanced and sophisticated coverage may have developed subsequently, they still represent a massively influential dimension of the geography of education that would reward more study and research. Spooner (2000) examines the sense of place with reference to the work of the poet Philip Larkin in relation to the city of Hull. The poet rarely mentioned the place specifically, yet some of his poems are ‘identifiably rooted in local experiences’ (p. 211). In the preface to Douglas Dunn’s (1982) A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull, Larkin shows a subtle understanding of the place as ‘a city that is in the world, yet sufficiently on the edge of it to have a different resonance’ (Spooner, p. 213). Other eminent writers have of course much more explicit and even emotional ties to their localities, such as Thomas Hardy (Wessex), Arnold Bennett (the Potteries) and William Wordsworth (the Lake District) and all have thereby contributed to behavioural geography, and perhaps even, inadvertently, the geography of education. Dittmer (2010) makes a distinctive contribution to what can be termed ‘fictive geography’, by examining geographical dimensions of comic books. Such publications, though mainly associated with children, are also presented for adults, including small comic strips in newspapers and magazines such as Private Eye. Dittmer concludes that comic book visuality, with inherent possibilities for plurivectoral narration and shifting temporalities, can provide geographers with the metaphoric tools to apprehend and communicate relationships of emergent causality that are central to recent political theory. (p. 223)

Dittmer adds that they have the ‘the ability to translate the spatiality of two dimensional images into four dimensional narratives’, and that ‘a comic strip is literally a map of time’ (ibid.). Images can relate also to imaginings, which can develop early in life as Welply (2015) shows in relation to ‘global imaginaries

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of children from immigrant backgrounds in primary schools in England and France’ (p. 430). She identifies a ‘utopian function’ at work: allowing children to transcend lines of national, ethnic or linguistic differentiation created around the construction of ‘Otherness’ in school. This utopian function, however, was defined differently in the French and English schools. (p. 430)

One may observe a utopian function in the images held by large numbers of adult migrants to Europe at the present time (2015–16) from hostile environments of different kinds in the Middle East and Africa, many of whom have visions of European countries that are misguided. How the imaginings of their children, once settled into the European school system, will compare with Welply’s analysis remains to be seen. They will, though, contribute to behavioural and humanistic geographies filtered through their educational experiences, formal and informal. Kruse (2003) examines imagination as a contribution to the cultural landscape, and specifically ‘the ways in which Strawberry Fields may be read as a site of pilgrimage and the spatial focus of a variety of discourses relating to John Lennon, the Beatles and contemporary cultural politics’ (p. 161). He relates this to the broader issue of music and the production of place in terms of both lyrics, and locations where music of any particular kind is concentrated such as Nashville, Tennessee. In the case of Liverpool and The Beatles, the homes of each of the four members, a museum, the Cavern Club – their ‘home venue’ as it were – and the daily ‘magical mystery tour’ available by bus, are now lasting components of the living geography of the city and its economy.

Historical Geography Historical geography is to do with landscapes of the past. While this does involve physical geography, for example, past environments over billions of years (Zalasiewicz and Williams, 2012), and the influence of humankind on modifying natural environments (Goudie, 1981), it is mainly a component of human geography. Since formal, non-formal and informal education have all developed in spatial and locational terms over millennia, this is a rich source for the geography of education to mine, describe and analyse. The boundary between ‘historical’ and ‘contemporary’ is a porous one, but there is such a thing as contemporary history which is normally reckoned to be the period still in living memory. For the UK, this could be seen as the period since about 1920. The elite journal History of Education recognized this by publishing a

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special edition in 2010, the lead article of which was ‘Education for Survival: An Historical Perspective’ (Aldrich, pp. 1–14). The history of education is one of the most strongly established of the disciplines of educational studies, since temporal scale is as important as spatial scale in the analysis of educational activity and provision. Though as Phillips (2002) has cautioned, periodization is a contested issue. Some themes in the historical geography of education cover millennia (Brock, 2010), others centuries (Brock, 2014a). Formal education is, by definition, politically delivered, with the national frame of reference still being the dominant scale despite globalization. Indeed it is with regard to schooling in particular that nations are strongly protective. In Europe, for example, significant progress has been made with the Bologna Process in regard to rationalizing tertiary education, but anything similar with respect to primary and secondary schooling is opposed at the national level. This has its origins in the rise of nation-states, initially in Europe which Dodgshon (1987) describes as a movement away from control over groups of people to control over territories containing people. This led to the rise of education systems not only in Europe but also elsewhere as colonialism progressed (Green, 1990). European colonialism spread rapidly to near global proportions as ‘territory became the geographical expression of political power’ (Storey, 2001, p. 3). This cultural imperialism has given rise to a near global pattern of formal schooling based on what Mallinson (1980) termed the ‘Western European idea of education’, a massive example of a form of educational export enabled by thousands of politicians, administrators, publishers and teachers acting in a relatively random way. Or as Meinig (1982) has it: What we commonly categorize as ‘modern history’ commences with the predatory spread of Europeans upon the lands of non-Europeans, and what we have commonly called ‘modernization’ refers to the relentless outward spread into world-wide dominance of a European derived cultural system. (p. 71)

History, like geography, is a composite discipline with prominent political, economic and social dimensions as far as education is concerned. With regard to the UK, and especially English literature, urban historical geography of education has been well represented, prominently through the work of Marsden. He covered nineteenth-century themes with his major work being on a national scale: Unequal Educational Provision in England and Wales: The Nineteenth Century Roots (1987). Most of his research was, however, concentrated on urban social environments and educational achievement (Marsden, 1977a), education and urban social geography (Marsden, 1977b) and travelling to school (Marsden,

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1980). The railway revolution of the mid–late nineteenth century in England also enabled the expansion and establishment of private boarding schools, often away from industrialized cities (Bamford, 1974). The educational landscape of most places is somewhat akin to a geological map. The contemporary surface is a mixture of past and present influences, in effect, educational inliers, outliers and periodic ‘eruptions’ of innovation. Schools and other institutions, as well as attitudes to education, may be more or less resistant to erosion, as it were. Reputations are often quickly outdated. That is why the historical geography of education can be very illuminating and instructive, and even thwart the policies and plans of contemporary politicians through what is termed inertia – the tendency of things, once located somewhere, to remain there. That is why the historical geography of education anywhere can often explain patterns of location, and even behaviour, evident in the present day. Ignorance of such residual geographies of education, or decisions to ignore them, can often lead to failure in solving contemporary problems.

Applied Geography This has to do with the spatial dimension of planning, in this case, of educational provision and dissemination. It operates from the planning of individual spaces within a school to the total number of buildings and open spaces of a school site, to the number and locations of schools and other educational institutions in settlements from small towns to conurbations, and across whole countries. It could be a process undertaken in stable social and political circumstances or it could be an emergency action for communities displaced by human conflict (Demirdjian, 2012) or natural disasters (Smawfield, 2013). It has immense potential for the geography of education as it is directly concerned with change in the built environment on the ground. An obvious example of the potential for maximizing the quality of educational planning is within the creation of a new formal education system. Such was the case with the celebrated educator Henry Morris when he became secretary of education (CEO) in Cambridgeshire, England, in 1922. Local education authorities did not exist in England until the 1902 Education Act when universal primary education was joined by highly selective secondary schools for a small percentage of the age group. It was then delayed by the First World War. Outside the city of Cambridge, the county was largely rural. Its human geography did not suit the highly selective legacy of 1902, and in any case Morris was a protagonist of universal and lifelong learning. So he began to establish a network of ‘village

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colleges’ that were in effect comprehensive and lifelong learning facilities. Each had a campus with, in addition to a school, a community hall, adult learning facilities, a mechanics workshop, a library, playing fields to be shared by all age groups and a Warden’s house. He promoted this pattern until retirement in 1954. He was, as Harry Ree (1973) proclaimed an ‘educator extraordinary’, a tribute echoed by Jeffs (1999). Morris’s concept of community education was virtually extinguished in England by the advent of nationwide selective schooling from 1944 and the demise of adult education as public provision from the 1980s and on into the twenty-first century. Another example would be the creation of universities and, where they have them, their campuses. In E. W. Gilbert’s booklet University Towns (1962) there is a map showing the number and distribution of universities in England and Wales (he was then professor of geography at Oxford). There were nineteen universities, including the University of Wales, which had four campuses in respective towns or cities. So one could say, geographically, there were twentytwo, plus again the colleges of the University of London with their separate locations, some of which were the size of universities. Gilbert’s booklet was the text of a lecture given at the University of Sussex in 1961, founded in that year and the first of a wave of new universities. They were examples of applied geography of education since they involved physical planning and spatial change. Some were totally new creations on new so-called ‘greenfield’ sites (e.g. Lancaster, Sussex, Essex and York). Some were former polytechnics relocated (e.g. Surrey from Battersea to Guildford, and Bath from city centre to Claverton Down), or expanded on site (Loughborough). One was an example of a university splitting into two (Durham into Durham and Newcastle). In every case, they not only constituted new and extended land use, but also engendered changes in their localities, physical, social and economic through the so-called ‘multiplier effect’. In university towns it is not only the spaces assigned to the formal educational role that are significant, but also other aspects or areas that have to do with the general well-being of students (Fleuret and Prugneau, 2015).

Fieldwork and Geographies of Education Fieldwork was mentioned briefly earlier within the section on biogeography, but the place of fieldwork in geography covers a range of wider applications and issues. According to Fuller (2012), Lonergan and Anderson (1988) define ‘the field’ as ‘any arena or zone within a subject where, outside the constraints of the four walls classroom setting, supervised learning can take place via first-hand

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experience’ (p. 7).This does not exclude the indoors. For example Naylor (2002) identifies museums and lecture halls, as well as outdoor field sites, as key spaces in nineteenth-century studies of the Cornish landscape. Such studies are involved in what he terms the components of the study of the natural history of Cornwall. This experience is presented in the following terms that are profoundly educational: ‘It is precisely through such an approach that we can gain better understandings of the formation of local knowledges as they operate within networks of wider ranging intellectual activities’ (p. 510). This is still, however, fieldwork seen conventionally in different geographical locations as a component of local knowledge and culture. Driver (2000) interprets it much more widely, not as a specific pedagogical exercise but as an organic and dynamic dimension of learning: If we think instead of geographical knowledge as constituted through a range of embodied practices – practices of travelling, dwelling, seeing, collecting, recording and narrating – the subject of fieldwork, its geography and its history, becomes more difficult to escape. In this context, the ‘field’ may be understood as a region which is always in the process of being constructed, and not just in the eye of the beholder; and ‘fieldwork’ as necessarily involving a variety of spatial practices – movement, performance, passages and encounters. The field in this sense is not just ‘there’; it is produced and re-produced, through both physical movement across a landscape and other sorts of cultural work in a variety of sites. (p. 267)

In this sense, fieldwork is contributing to informal education; an ongoing spatial experience. The journal Area clearly sees fieldwork as a key geographical contribution to education, devoting two special sections of the issue in successive years (44:1 in 2012 and 45:4 in 2013) comprising seven and then six articles, each with its own focus: ‘Exploring the Outdoors’ and ‘Field Methods in Closed Contexts’ respectively. Since fieldwork, as seen through the previous examples, has no bounds, it can be viewed as a particular aspect of the geography of education that has distinctive epistemological qualities that are part of the synergy between the two fields of study. Due to contemporary constraints of health and safety regulations, increasing costs, and school and university budget reductions, it may be under threat in countries such as England where it has a strong tradition. Such a threat is highlighted by Lambert and Reiss (2016): The place of fieldwork in both geography and science qualifications across the 14–19 age-range remains unclear, contested and sometimes under threat.

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Geography of Education Despite its benefits for student learning and motivation, anecdotal evidence suggests that fieldwork is perceived by some school managers as expendable: desirable but not a core requirement. (p. 28)

They proceed to make a strong argument for the greater recognition of fieldwork in terms of four dimensions (p. 30): conceptually (illustrating change through traces in the environment); cognitively (synthesizing multiple forms of data); procedurally (examining and interpreting variables); and social gains (collaboration, learning with and from each other). The significance of its inclusion in teacher education and training is also promoted. One reaction to this situation is the decision of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers in 2009 to moderate its traditional support of large-scale expeditions in favour of supporting more small-scale initiatives. Maddrell (2010) described this as meeting the need to ‘get out there more’ (p. 152).

Looking Ahead The purposes of this first chapter is fivefold: (a) to illustrate the synergy between geography and educational studies; (b) to identify the emergence of an explicit though latent geography of education; (c) to show the existence of a large number of publications bearing on aspects of the geography of education, some albeit unwittingly; (d) to illustrate actual and potential issues relating to the geography of education in all the sub-disciplines of geography, plus fieldwork; and (e) to provide, through the references, a substantial initial bibliography. Many of the issues introduced here will be revisited in more detail in the following chapters. Having established the synergy between geography and educational studies, the next step will be to present a theoretical discourse relating the two in terms of such notions as scale, place, space, surfaces, zones, clusters, flow, distance, environment and dissemination. Within the community of geographers, the essentially dynamic nature of landscapes has long been understood, but outside ‘the tribe’, as Becher would have it, geography is seen as largely static. The changing nature of the physical environment is accepted to some degree, especially through dramatic changes such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods, coastal erosion and desertification. This is probably because such events often have dire consequences for human communities. Yet, with the likely exception of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, other changes in the physical environment may well have been initiated, or at least exacerbated, by human

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action. The works of Spencer and Thomas (1969) and Goudie (1981) have already been mentioned, while the eminent Cambridge geographer A. T. Grove (2000) continued to express his longstanding concern about the, especially eastern, African environment wrought by humans, through violent conflict and desertification leading to its destruction. The title of the book to which he contributed on that occasion, The British Intellectual Engagement with Africa in the Twentieth Century, has by definition a resonance with both geography and education. The environment also includes the built environment of settlements, from isolated homes to massive conurbations, roads, railways and manufactured objects that move between them: cars, lorries and buses, as well as boats, ships and planes. Geography is dynamic in both human and physical terms as is the interaction between them that accommodates the virtual environment that operates from underground to extraterrestrial scales. So, there is also a cybernetic geography (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) that has immense implications from the local to the global in terms of information flow, learning, and the creation of a sustainable environment before it is too late (Rees et al., 2015) a key issue in Chapter 5 of this book.

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The Geography of Educational Reality

Introduction It is clear from the previous chapter that education is a space-adjusting technique based on learning and teaching. We are all learners, and, insofar as we influence others we are teachers as well, albeit often unwittingly. That is informal education at the individual level, but formal and non-formal learning take place at that level too. Since this learning is taking place all the time, differentially in myriad individuals, as the eminent geographer Nigel Thrift (1985) observed, ‘we know very little about what people know or don’t know’ (p. 397). He offered a typology of knowledge that provides a framework for beginning to understand education in spatial terms, as illustrated in Table 2.1. These forms of knowledge are, in different degrees, always in existence and in circulation in all types of human society. The first two forms approximate to informal education and are dominant in less developed societies where schools and other institutions of learning are absent or relatively few. The observation that practical knowledge is highly localized and organic is very significant for discussions further on in this book of human and environmental survival in areas most under threat from existential change – Barnett and Campbell (2014) illustrate this significance with regard to climate change and small Pacific Ocean island communities, and Powell and Dodds (2014) do so in terms of polar geopolitics. Thrift’s third form of knowledge has to do with formal and non-formal education provided, as he observes, over regulated territory – that is to say, subject to political geography at different scales. His distinction between institutions and technologies does not mean they are mutually exclusive, but through different forms and uses of ICT, social media included, technologies can educate outside of institutions. The fourth type of knowledge that he identifies is akin to epistemology and related therefore to the division of knowledge into subjects and disciplines. For some specialist

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Table 2.1 Thrift’s typology of knowledge Unconscious knowledge: Knowledge based on forgotten practices but recreated through the objective structures of human ecology. Practical knowledge: Informal but not unstructured knowledge acquired by watching and doing in highly particular contexts. This type of knowledge forms the massive central core of human thinking. It is: unarticulated; continuous and repetitive; highly localised and interactive in human terms; organic and metaphorical; based on the known world. Empirical knowledge: Built up from a rationalization of knowledge based on the need to provide explanations and the need to organize systematically. It is exercised within a co-ordinated and controlled learning process operated over regulated territory and planned periods of time and space from the experiences and events it describes. Transmission is through institutions and technologies in codified form. ‘Natural Philosophy’: Knowledge that attempts to unify a number of bodies of knowledge into one whole as knowledge about knowledge. It is time consuming, reflective and derived from the other three types. Source: Thrift, N. (1985), ‘Flies and Germs: A Geography of Knowledge’, in D. Gregory and J. Urry (Eds), Social Relations and Spatial Structures, p. 369, B asingstoke: Macmillan.

philosophers, the whole idea of ‘knowledge’ is a problem in itself (Ayer, 1956), but for our purposes Thrift’s typology suffices, especially as it is informed by his fundamentally geographical understanding. As this part of the discourse is perhaps more for educationists than geographers, it is important to illustrate here the nature of geography as it has changed considerably from a ‘sea change’ in the 1960s and 1970s.

Theoretical and Conceptual Issues The Nature of Geography Thrift’s contribution illustrates the value of theoretical and conceptual frameworks in addressing the geography of education. The fundamental geographical concepts of scale, space, place and networks can greatly assist the understanding of patterns of educational provision, activity and outcome. The majority of educationists, whether in administration, provision or research are unlikely to have appreciated the revolution in geography stemming from the 1960s or the cultural turn in the 1970s that the discipline shared with other social sciences and humanities. The Madingley Hall summer school of 1964, led by the then young Cambridge geographers Peter Haggett and Richard Chorley, proved to be

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a turning point in the development of the discipline. Indeed Goodson (1981), a sociologist, declared that geography had become an academic subject as a result! Madingley not only promoted what became known as ‘the new geography’, but also was concerned with the interface between geography in higher education and in schools. Rex Walford, to whose memory this book is dedicated, then a teacher trainer who later also became a Cambridge geographer, played a leading role in both education and geography camps. It is instructive to take the models of the new geography as proposed by Broek (1965), Haggett (1972) and Walford (1973) and, as this writer did some three decades ago (Brock, 1985), relate them to educational activity, as well as update them. First, though, key characteristics of the new geography, as applied to educational themes, should be taken on board, as shown in Table 2.2. School mapping, that is to say the cartographic representation of the location and distribution of schools, is basic to the administration of education in industrialized nations. In many less developed nations such information is not available to ministries of education, or it is well out of date. It is also basic to any reorganization of school provision such as the non-selective revolution of secondary schooling in England between about 1965 and 1975, as well as the early-twenty-first-century rash of academies and free schools. Educational surfaces are areas, usually within towns and cities, where a significant amount of educational activity is clustered, as in north Oxford and northwest Leeds, or they could be the campuses of universities, sometimes in greenfield sites such as Keele University and Lancaster University in England. The issue of educational contraction also needs to be mentioned because educational facilities do not necessarily expand. A significant example of this is the decline in the number of teacher-training colleges in England after 1974, a consequence of a falling birth rate, and the decision of England and Wales, Table 2.2 Basic geographical skills applied to educational themes Skill

Application example

Quantified data base

School mapping

Nomothetic models

Identification of generalized educational surfaces

Issue-based approach

Spatial implications of alternative policies of educational contraction

Behavioural dimension

Mental maps

Source: Brock, C. (1985), ‘Comparative Education and the Geographical Factor’, in K. Watson and R. Wilson, p 150, Contemporary Issues in Comparative Education, Beckenham: Croom Helm.

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in line with the McNair Report of 1944, to free universities from being responsible for validating such colleges within their designated territories. At the time, about 150 teacher-training colleges existed, but after 1974 many were abolished, some became part of new higher-education institutions – for example, Humberside Polytechnic became Humberside University and is now the University of Lincoln – and some others became part of the universities that had overseen them (the University of Leeds, for example, absorbed most of its associated colleges). Decline is also an issue in situations of natural or man-made disasters. Of course, educational expansion would also be an issue with geographical applications and consequences. Mental maps are important because they may guide the policies and decisions of people in authority. They may well also be simply inaccurate or blinded by bias or ideology. Somewhat related to the idea of mental maps is the notion of social cartography advanced in two works – Liebman and Paulston’s article in 1994 and Paulston’s book in 1996 titled Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change. In these works, social cartography was referred to as a spatial turn in comparative education alongside, though seemingly oblivious to each other, the cultural turn in human geography. Obviously, social cartography is not relevant only to educational issues. However, in the context of educational issues, one obvious contribution is in the construction of what Turnbull (1996) refers to as ‘knowledge spaces’ (p. 53). In this regard, he comments that ‘maps are surrogates of space’ (p. 53). He quotes Robinson and Petchenik (1976): As we experience space, and construct representations of it, we know that it will be continuous. Everything is somewhere, and no matter what other characteristics objects do not share, they always share relative location, that is spatiality; hence the desirability of equating knowledge with space, an intellectual space. This assumes an organization and a basis for predictability, which are shared by absolutely everyone. This proposition appears to be so fundamental that it is simply adopted a priori. (p. 4)

The ‘Madingley Men’, Chorley and Haggett (1967), point out that ‘it is characteristic that maps should be likened to language and scientific theories’ (pp. 48–9). The year after ‘Madingley’, Broek published an influential volume, Geography: Its Scope and Spirit (1965), in which he outlined what he termed the essential components of geography. This in effect was a model indicating that the core of geography is a concern with place, which is to say it concerns an area of land that may or may not be occupied by people. It can exist in factual form, or in the form of mental concepts.

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Application of Broek’s Model of the Essential Components of Geography to Education He begins with the assertion that cultural regions provide a better framework for geographical analysis than natural regions, because they are not to do with outdated determinism. Education is culturally based and therefore plays its part Table 2.3 Adaptation of Broek’s model of geography and its application to education Essential components

Observation

Cultural appraisal

Cultural reasons are better than natural regions because they favour possibilism over determinism. The regional concept ‘The region’ is an intellectual concept, and so has a position in time as well as in space. Aerial coherence Phenomena form a spatial ensemble with an internal consistency. Spatial interaction Spatial hierarchies within the core-periphery extremes, with messages, persons and goods. Localization

Significance of scale

The concept of change

Distributions

Abstract theory

Summary

Clustering with intensity of occurrence rather than mere distribution. Scale of investigation makes a difference to generalizations drawn from observations. Change is a general principle. Rates and directions of change matter. Diffusion influences rates of change. Plotting distributions is a means to an end. It is not the purpose of geography. It removes place and time from geography, whereas distributions come from nonrecurrent historical processes. The core of geography is a concern with place – a piece of land, a human group that occupies it – can exist or be mental concepts.

Education Education is culturally based and contributes to cultural regions. Education regions exist both within and without regulated space. Education surfaces.

Interaction between networks and institutional hierarchies. Education clusters within urban morphologies. Appropriation of education policy at the local level. Education and diffusion is part of temporal scale. School mapping.

Must not remove place and time from analysis of education. Education = places and communities joined by networks of information and knowledge.

Source: Adapted and extended by Brock from Broek, J. O. M (1965), Geography: Its Scope and Spirit, New York: Charles E. Merrill.

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in the regional concept in geography, which has its place in terms of both space and time. Within geographic space there is not only a spatial interaction between core and periphery in terms of people, goods and information, but also a tendency to cluster, which Broek terms localization. This is certainly true of education, as already mentioned earlier. It is at one end of a spectrum of scale that extends out from local to regional to national to international to global. He contends that the scale of investigation is crucial to any generalizations that can be made and that this must be true of the geography of education as well. The concept of change includes the notion of diffusion, which is the essence of information acquisition and learning. Broek is wary of merely plotting distributions of spatial phenomena, but concedes that they are a means to an end, though not in terms of abstract theory, which would also apply to the geography of education. Such theory, he contends, removes place and time from geography. Spatial and temporal scale must be involved in the analysis of educational activity and development, which are essentially non-recurrent phenomena. These expressions of modern dynamic geography can be applied to educational provision, activities and outcomes. It is appropriate to also consider the models of Haggatt and Walford and apply them to educational contexts.

Application of Haggett’s Model of Modern Geography to Educational Phenomena Peter Haggett (1972) presented the new geography as comprising: (a) spatial analysis; (b) ecological analysis; and (c) regional complex analysis. Each category was divided into theoretical and applied variants. So, for example, spatial analysis would include diffusion theory and urban problems; ecological analysis would include ecosystems and hazard appraisal; and regional complex analysis would include regional growth theory and regional planning. This model can be applied to educational phenomena and issues as in Table 2.3. Spatial analysis of education is a rich field for current and potential study. A basic dimension is the examination of patterns of location of educational provision and activities. Such patterns are not necessarily ideal or predictable. There is often a great deal of inertia involved, which is to say that institutions, once established, have a tendency to remain where they are. For example, the reasons for the location of England’s two Renaissance universities, Oxford and Cambridge, have no connection with the universities’s continued pre-eminence in the twenty-first century, except that the universities still signify wealth, power and privilege. In medieval times both Oxford and Cambridge were major

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markets for the prime industry of the day, wool. Their survival, albeit through the largely corrupt support of the Church of England, was boosted by the lack of an early university foundation in London and, subsequently, their relative proximity to London. So now, we have the so-called ‘silicon triangle’ of Oxford, Cambridge and London. At school level, we can see that spatial analysis may reveal far from ideal patterns of distribution in both rich and poor circumstances. As Johnson (1967) illustrated, the strong influence of competing Christian missions in West Africa bequeathed a dysfunctional distribution, which, together with the phenomenon of ‘ghost schools’ (schools that no longer exist but claim funds from the government), makes reaching the target of education for all extremely difficult. In the far richer environment of urban England, the post-millennium appearance of so-called ‘free schools’ amid the pattern of traditional primary provision also produces a potentially dysfunctional distribution overall (Waugh, 2015), again making planning extremely difficult. Spatial analysis can be applied to educational performance, as illustrated by one of the earlier contributions on the geography of education (Charlton et al., 1979), which examined disparities in GCE A Level performance in England and Wales across local authorities. Now, in the early twenty-first century, we have, in England, so-called ‘league tables’ of public sector schools, according to local authority areas, that likewise show considerable disparity. Spatial interpretation of such information can be misleading unless political, social and cultural factors are taken into account. For example, the local authorities of the cities of Kingston-upon-Hull and Nottingham are always at or near the bottom of the national league table of performance for England, because in both cases the majority of their middle-class suburbs are in adjoining local authorities, the East Riding of Yorkshire and the county of Nottinghamshire respectively, that are consequently much higher up the table. On a more progressive note, the dissemination of educational innovations, for example, through action-research projects, may involve networks of collaboration between schools and authorities. More recently, at the time of writing in November and December 2015, there has been a disclosure of, and considerable interest in, disparities in educational performance at the GCSE level across England. This was, somewhat sensationally, termed a North/South divide in the popular press and media, though Wheeler et al. (2006) had illustrated that the geography of education in England was spatially far more complex than that. So, while broadly true at the national scale, the actual pattern contained numerous exceptions. At the regional level, in general, the West Midlands exhibited a more positive profile than the East

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Midlands, while at the local authority level the Isle of Wight, Great Yarmouth and Thanet were among the poorest performing. These three are southern coastal local authorities, and on 1 November 2015, on the BBC News website, Sean Coughlan used the SchoolDash website to show that low performance in coastal local authorities was a near national phenomenon. This had earlier been noted by Tanya Ovenden-Hope of Plymouth University in her paper titled ‘Meeting the Challenges of School Improvements for Coastal Academies in England’, which was posted on the blog of the British Educational Research Association (BERA). She identified a range of common problems: transient populations with seasonal work; an intergenerational pattern of lack of employment; patterns of temporary accommodation; and cultures of isolation. In between the majority of coastal local authorities adversely affected are pockets of affluence with no problems, with some of them being in the north. According to Ovenden-Hope, it is apparent that high-tech industries cluster around universities and big-city start-up hubs rather than at the end of a coast road. So, not surprisingly, on the applied side of spatial analysis, Haggett’s ‘urban problems’ category finds more recent expression in the work of multidisciplinary agencies such as the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at the University of Newcastle. An example is Goddard and Vallance’s The University and the City (2013). At the school level, the Research Councils UK (RCUK) in 2015 funded twelve universities to work with selected schools in their cities to encourage and support collaborative research on local problems. Ecological analysis, Haggett’s second component of the internal structure of modern geography, finds educational expression in the location and work of agricultural colleges and field studies centres, both of which are involved in the conservation of crucial components of the landscape. Some such centres are of course in urban areas, including urban farms that have both economic and educational functions. Ecological analysis also includes the educational dimension of national parks, which is to inform visitors at various levels of things of significant geological, biogeographical and economic interest. This relates to the discussion in previous paragraphs of the significance of fieldwork in terms of the geography of education. Ecology is not limited to the so-called natural environment, since the influence of humankind has spread not only at the surface but also increasingly below and above it, leading to some of the existential threats to sustainable survival. See, for example, McKie (2016), ‘Plastic Now Pollutes Every Corner of Earth’. This is a comment on the geological dimensions of the Anthropocene, the era of natural history in which we have lived for about 250 years and massively contributed to atmospheric pollution and

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global warming through fossil fuel mining. This is leading us to face imminent threats from climate change. Regional complex analysis finds expression in educational institutions as growth points in a regional context. These growth points may include the development of networks as well as of educational zones, or surfaces, and their contribution to regional development. Here again, the work of CURDS at the University Table 2.4 Application of Haggett’s model to educational themes Internal structure for modern geography 1. Spatial analysis

a) Theoretical Spatial interaction theory

Diffusion theory Watershed development b) Applied Planning Urban problems

2. Ecological analysis

a) Theoretical Environmental structures

Potential applications to education Patterns of provision of educational provision, delivery and dissemination. Development of educational networks Catchments between systems, institutions and innovations.

Planning of education zones in cities and of higher education campuses. Locating agricultural colleges and other environmental institutions.

Ecosystems b) Applied Natural resources geography Conservation activities and forecasting climate change. Hazard appraisal 3. Regional complex analysis

a) Theoretical Regional growth theory

Inter-regional flow theory b) Applied Regional planning

Educational institutions, e.g. universities, and city regions multiplier effects.

Devolution of power and funding, e.g. the northern powerhouse in England.

Source: Haggett, P. (1972), Geography: A Modern Synthesis, New York and London: Harper Row, pp. 452–3 with Educational Application by Brock, C.

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of Newcastle – for example, the study by Goddard and Kempton (2011) on universities and regional growth – provides illustrations of the dynamic potential of the aforementioned education–geography synergy. This is a field that has global significance through, for example, the phenomenon of ‘education hubs’ that are growth nodes in the global network of cities involved in the knowledge business (Smith and Timberlake, 2002; Knight 2013). Hubs can also be regional in their prime role; for example, Beirut (Huybrechts, 2002), which was not long ago a battlefield, is now a precarious hub in a disintegrating region. Hubs have to do with global networking technologies, corporate service networks and communication grids in competing hierarchies (Sassen, 2002). They are regional complexes transcending and competing with nations in the marketization of education and knowledge at all scales from local to global. Table 2.4 seeks to illustrate the application of Haggett’s model of modern geography to educational themes.

Application of Walford’s Model of Dynamic Themes in Human Geography As indicated in the title of his model, Walford (1973) seeks to emphasize the dynamic nature of human geography, seeing it as the study of places where things are happening in a spatial sense, as well as the networks between them. His keyword is ‘activity’, which he assigns to three geographical concepts: (a) activity relating to points (i.e. places); (b) activity relating to lines (i.e. movement); and (c) activity relating to surfaces (i.e. areas). These are expressed as three circles of a Venn diagram (p. 105), and he adds two small separate circles for manufacturing processes and social problems, which both engage in all three activities. In the centre where the three circles overlap, he has the statement ‘building network patterns’. Activity along lines, when related to education, includes such activities as journeys to school, the delivery of educational decisions and materials, and international student migration. Diurnal journeys to school do not necessarily remain constant. They were revolutionized in British cities in the nineteenth century by the growth of urban and suburban railway networks (Marsden, 1980). They also change if there are particular reforms in the structure of school provision, such as the widespread change from a selective to a non-selective secondary school sector in the majority of English local authorities in the decade between 1965 and 1975. From the implementation of the 1944 Education Act by about 1947 until the distribution of Circular 10/65 by the Labour government to local authorities, the ‘eleven-plus’ selection procedure allocated about 25 per cent of boys and

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girls to academic (grammar) schools and the remainder to secondary modern or technical schools, though the percentage varied from about 15 per cent to about 35 per cent depending on how many grammar schools there were. Most of the grammar schools were already in place, but most of the secondary modern schools were new. With there being far fewer grammar schools than secondary modern schools, the journeys of many of the students at these grammar schools were longer and more likely to involve public transport. After 1965, in most local authorities, both types of school became comprehensive (non-selective) and so local catchment areas and the journeys of many students changed accordingly. This had multiplier effects, as small businesses, especially shops, gained or lost custom from passing students. Further political reforms in England such as the abolition of direct grant grammar schools in 1979 and the abolition of catchment areas to enable school choice, following the Education Act of 1988, led to more changes in the journeys to school. Areas of the world experiencing violent conflict exhibit disruption in the movement of students to school, which can range from spasmodic to semipermanent. When Israel in 2002 built a 75-km-long wall inside the West Bank, thus creating internally displaced Palestinians (Brock and Demirdjian, 2010), primary school children, who previously had only a short walk from home to school, had to now pass through checkpoints in the wall that were several kilometres apart. ‘Palestine Human Development Report 2004’ estimated that over 300 schools and 170,000 students were affected (Birzeit University, 2005). Countless hours of learning were lost through extra travel and through teachers being unable to reach their schools on time, if at all. There is also the case of Route 443, a road that passes through the West Bank territory of Palestine that Palestinians themselves are forbidden to use, or even walk across. ‘It connects 7 West Bank villages, but Palestinians who live near it are denied access, and forced to make long detours’ (Macintyre, 2008). Activity relating to points means activity at places of knowledge production and exchange that range from kindergartens and primary and secondary schools to further-education colleges and higher-education institutions (HEI). This is a matter of scale, and ranges from children’s bedrooms at home, individual tutors’ rooms and classrooms, and lecture rooms and laboratories, to non-formal education spaces such as churches, prisons, companies, military camps and informal spaces such as homes and internet cafes. Many of these are permanent locations, but others may be temporary or transitory, such as the locations where geography fieldwork happens, museums, art galleries and theatres. The geography of an individual classroom changes as classes come and go during any one day, since there are different students in different places and differential learning taking

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place as a result. Some classrooms are adjacent to outside distractions while others are not. Most are permanent but some are not, and all have different qualities in terms of facilitating learning. The geography of knowledge exchange is certainly dynamic, as illustrated on a larger scale from the massive increase in the influence of social media and the global–local link of ICT. The growth of online learning for formal qualifications connects with both points and lines and may involve even the most prestigious of institutions such as Harvard University. As indicated earlier with regard to Robson’s (1969) study in Sunderland, public education at the school level may well relate to and indicate highly localized attitudes, almost cultural traditions. As discovered by Griffin (2001), the mediation of market-oriented reforms relating to school choice tended to occur at the scale of individual schools. This may be a cultural matter that can be termed the milieu or locale, or it can be a strategic response or a combination of the two. For example, in the Kingston-upon-Hull case of her comparative study, Griffin found some head teachers of neighbouring schools to be collaborating in constraining market choice. This was simply strengthening the existing milieux of educational cultures. In one case, a head teacher was able to restrict the capacity of his school by placing computers throughout the classrooms so that they were deemed to be laboratories which, according to health and safety regulations, would then require that they have less children in each. In other words, a combination of local culture and administrative manipulation of internal space was able to subvert the marketization rationale of the national, and sometimes also the local, government by changing learning spaces. In a less contentious way, the individual ethos that many schools have developed over time can offer a very distinctive, even unique experience to generations of students. Activity relating to surfaces is concerned with a significant mass in spatial terms of educational activity resulting from clustering. In the same way that manufacturing industries may cluster in zones, or retail facilities in particular streets of towns and cities, so, in some locations, educational services may do the same. This can be illustrated by what geographers term urban sector analysis. For example, Brock (1985) was able to illustrate educational sectors in the cities of Leeds and Kingston-upon-Hull (p. 156). In Leeds, there was found to be a west–northwest zone between the major roads A 65 and A 660, within which was a clustering of high-status educational land use. Within this zone were located the majority of further and higher-education institutions, including two of the largest polytechnics and universities in the country, the most prestigious secondary schools, the teacher’s centre and the offices of the education authority. More recently, and in response to higher-education innovation, are the examples

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of extensive science parks and related corporate activities of Oxford and Cambridge, the latter being dubbed ‘Silicon Fen’. In 1985, Hall and Markusen published Silicon Landscapes that continue to expand with significant private and public investment on an even broader scale. Many years earlier, Smailes (1944) included the presence of a university as one of the indicators of city, as opposed to town, status in the ranking of settlements. Nowadays we recognize the dynamic contribution of higher education to the sustainability of cities (Moore et al., 2015). On a larger scale, Peter Hall, as professor of geography at the University of Reading, identified what he termed ‘the West London think belt’. This is a corridor either side of the M4 motorway from London to Bristol, which contains a concentration of high level educational and research activity, including: universities (Brunel, Reading, Oxford (2), Bath (2), and Bristol (2)); the concentration of Academic Research Councils in Swindon; The Defence Academy of the United Kingdom at Shrivenham; the Met Office at Bracknell (including The Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research); Harwell (The Harwell Innovation and Science Campus); The Grassland Research Institute at Hurley, Berkshire; and the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire. The two freestanding circles in Walford’s model, when applied to education, would include (a) social and cultural educational issues; and (b) economic relationships to educational provision. On the sociocultural side there is clearly a spatial dimension to the incidence of multicultural contexts. The earlier clustering of Commonwealth immigrants arriving in response to the post-war demand for labour in the 1960s and 1970s has to some extent remained with, for example, the outer west London concentration of Asians arriving via Heathrow Airport and the more inner suburban concentrations of West Indians, arriving via train from Southampton and Tilbury. There are other notable clusters such as Pakistani communities in Bradford, East African Asians in Leicester and even on a much smaller scale the Karens from Myanmar and Thailand in Sheffield and the Iraqi Kurds in West Hull. As a result, there have been complex and shifting patterns of urban demography, including the white British working class, that provide distinctive challenges to urban schooling in England. On the economic side there is the contemporary effect of British government policies on welfare – restrictions, to and capping of, benefits to poorer families – on localized migration. For example, Taylor (2015) reports that figures of eligibility for free school meals in the London boroughs in 2010 and 2015 show that the number of children eligible for free school meals has fallen sharply in inner London since 2010 leading to claims that thousands of poorer families have been forced out by rising costs and changes to the benefits system.

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On the other hand, an exploratory study in Manchester by Bragg et al. (2015) examining the effects of a particular tax imposed nationally in 2013 and known as the ‘Bedroom Tax’ found that those on benefits subjected to this tax (those not on benefits are not eligible) chose to stay where they were and bear the tax. The reasons given were to keep close to support networks of friends and family. The focus of the research was to ascertain the impacts of the tax on children and their education. It was carried out in 2014–15. Visible effects on children, and noted by both schools and parents, were: lack of warm clothing and sound footwear; insufficient food; inability to concentrate and learn at home as well as in school; lack of involvement in out-of-school activities; emotional stress; and lack of bedroom space at home, especially affecting older children. Schools were diverting some of their funds to such services as breakfasts, food banks and extra counselling. It is clear that a range of geographical features and factors are evident here. Figure 2.1 illustrates the application by the writer of Walford’s model of dynamic human geography to educational themes.

Figure 2.1 Walford’s model of dynamic themes in geography and its application to examples from education in a spatial perspective Source: Brock, C. (1985), Comparative Education and the Geographical Factor, in K. Watson and R. Wilson (eds), Contemporary Issues in Comparative Education, p. 154, Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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On the economic front, the multiplier effect of educational institutions has already been mentioned, but there is also an economic effect on the cost side. Budgets of sectors and institutions vary from place to place, including between local authorities within a large conurbation, especially London. This has been affected by the changing political geography of the metropolis from the creation of the London County Council (LCC) in 1888, of the Greater London Council (GLC) 1965–86, and the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA: 1965–90). In 1990, responsibility for compulsory schooling was passed to each of the twelve inner London boroughs that had been within ILEA, plus the City of London Corporation. Clearly, this series of political and spatial changes made the surfaces of educational concentration and activity extremely uncertain and complex. A further illustration of this came in relation to the implementation of school choice and the ease of so doing across borough boundaries within a massive urban complex. However, what happens within regulated spaces, even when they are changing as rapidly as this, is more to do with the political and economic geography of education rather than with the dynamic development of clustering or surfaces. The seminal Urban Social Segregation of Peach (1986) was de facto when related to Britain, but nonetheless significant in terms of schooling as Coard (1971) had pointedly illustrated in his book How the West Indian Child Is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System. This referred to a misuse of the then termed Educationally Sub-Normal (ESN) provision at that time and was therefore systemic, but the problem remains in the twenty-first century as argued by Richardson (2005). This problem is faced by many minority groups who tend to cluster for both economic and cultural reasons, rural as well as urban (Atkin, 2012).

Space, Place and Scale in the Geography of Education It is evident from the earlier discussion that the three concepts of space, place and scale are fundamental to the application of the related methodologies of spatial and locational analysis to the location and distribution of educational phenomena (Symaco and Brock, 2013). They are most obvious to us with respect to cartography, the production of maps, a basic tool of humankind from our days as hunter– gatherers (Harari, 2011). Indeed, Richard Dawkins (1998) has speculated that ‘the creation of maps – with their concepts of scale and space – may even have kickstarted the expansion and development of the human brain’, as quoted in Garfield (2012, p. 18). This is based on the observation by Dawkins of the sand maps of

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the earliest hunter-gatherers in prehistoric Africa, which he concludes by asking: ‘Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes failed to cross?’ (ibid., pp. 416–7). Such a conjecture makes for a very longstanding relationship between geography and knowledge, and brings to mind the issue of time and temporal scale. A relatively neglected dimension of the study of education is the issue of scale, temporal and spatial. Simplistic blocks of time are sometimes employed, such as ‘the eighteenth century’. Centennial boundaries are usually meaningless. Likewise in comparative education national units are often adopted. This overlooks the geography of educational reality on the ground, with its myriad spatial disparities. (Brock, 2014b, p. 134)

Space, place and time are inseparable, as both creative and academic writers have illustrated in their different ways. Philip Larkin in his poem ‘I Remember, I Remember’ was travelling with a friend when the train stopped at Coventry, and seemingly depressed, responded to his companion’s comment ‘Oh well it’s not the place’s fault’ by saying ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’ (Burnett, 2012). In more academic terms, Thrift proclaims a similar interest, as a ‘chrono-geographic perspective’ (Parkes and Thrift, 1980). Both mean simply that space and time cannot be separated. Gilbert (1962a, p. 496) quotes Heylin asserting this long ago as 1657 in his Cosmographie: Geography without History hath life and motion but very unstable and at random; but History without Geography, like a dead carkasse, hath neither life nor motion at all. (p. 19)

In more contemporary circumstances, as the Cambridge geographer Alan Baker (2003) put it: ‘I start as a geographer from the complementary premise that geography is not intelligible without history’ (p. ix). Furthermore, both are necessarily susceptible of analysis on account of scale: spatial scale and temporal scale. Recognition of all three, place, space and scale are necessary if studies in the geography of education are to have credibility; that is to say, context is key (Crossley and Watson, 2003). Among contemporary geographers, Thrift has probably made a more perceptive and telling contribution than most in relation to temporal scale in education in what he has termed ‘time geography’ (1977). This was followed up by Norton (1984), who stated that ‘temporal interests include cultural geography, innovation diffusion studies, time geography, arguments favouring a process–form approach and historical geography’ (p. 17). Thrift (1985) relates his space–time approach

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to Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, stating that ‘all knowledge is the result of the particular habitus used to generate practices and monitor, interpret, reconstruct and ultimately confirm them’ (p. 368). He continued and developed this approach with Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation (Pile and Thrift, 1995), which was described as ‘ground-breaking’ by Roy Porter (1985, p. 22) in his review with the perceptive title ‘Beyond the Speed of Thought’. Among comparative educationists, Phillips (1994 and 2002) has given more practical application to the temporal dimension than most, counselling against taking chronological blocks in time such as ‘the nineteenth century’. Instead, he recommended what he calls ‘periodization’; that is to say, seeking to identify periods of time that can genuinely accommodate comparison. These can take into account changes in the geography of the units being compared in terms of, say, economic geography and political geography. He termed them ‘determining periods’. Phillips is the foremost authority in the UK on education in Germany, and in his 1994 article organized his determining periods as shown in Table 2.5. Phillips qualified his selection as follows: ‘The broad periods which seem to emerge when the post-war educational development of the two countries with which I am concerned is analysed provide points of illuminating comparison as well as some interesting contrasts’ (p. 270). He then proposed five stages of direct comparison as follows: (1) reconstruction, 1944/5–1959; (2) consolidation, 1959–65; (3) expansion, 1965–mid 1970s; (4) reform initiatives, mid-1970s–late

Table 2.5 Determining periods for a comparison between Germany and England and Wales

Post-war Germany (p. 266) The Allies and education in Germany 1945–9. Two decades of non-reform 1946–66. The Great Coalition 1966–9. The SDP years and Bildungs-Boom 1969–82. Neo-conservatism the 1980s.

Post-war England and Wales (pp. 269–70) Reconstruction and secondary education for all 1944–59. Growth and consolidation 1959–65. Radical reorganization (comprehensivization) 1965–76. Reform debate and concerted action 1976–88. The Education Reform Act 1988 and subsequent Acts.

Education in the New Germany since 1990. Source: Adapted from Phillips, D. G. (1994), ‘Periodisation in Historical Approaches to Comparative Education: Some Considerations from the Examples of Germany and England and Wales’, British Journal of Educational Studies, 43 (3): pp. 261–72.

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1980s; (5) neo-conservative authority (late 1980s onwards). He also recognized that his analysis in terms of temporal scale was based on the spatial scale of the nation, whereas in both cases there would be differences if and when smaller scales were adopted. For example, in Germany the post-war period included: the initial educational inputs of the four occupying powers, the USA, the UK, France and the Soviet Union (Liddell, 1948); the division into West Germany and East Germany as separate nations; the variety of policies of the different lander of West Germany and lack of such as between the administrative divisions of East Germany (Hearnden, 1974); the realignment of East and West Germany after 1990 with further differences as between the lander of a unified Germany (Fuhr, 1995). As for England and Wales, there were significant differences as between local authorities throughout; the emasculation (and in some cases abolition) of local authorities after 1988; the independence of Wales from 2003; and the atomization of funding and control of schools since 2010. Some of these events of course occurred after the article by Phillips in 1994 and also his reconsideration of periodization in 2002. The caution that scale is subject to dynamic change whether temporal or spatial has to be borne in mind when considering models of the latter. Griffin

Figure 2.2 Spatial scales and factors affecting education in any location Source: Griffin, C. R. (2001), op. cit., p. 33.

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Table 2.6 Multilevel analysis: Griffin v Bray and Murray Thomas BRAY and MURRAY THOMAS (1995) World Regions/ Continents

Countries

States/Provinces Districts

Schools Classrooms Individuals

GRIFFIN (2001) Supranational space within which discourse influencing policy on educational provision disseminates. National units within which unitary or multiple systems of formal educational provision operate according to enacted policy. Sub-national units responsible for the provision of public education in different degrees of authority in different countries within which enacted policy is mediated. Local cultural milieu within which public education is delivered according to policy filtered down from national and regional levels, and further mediated at the point of provision by principals, management bodies and teams, interest groups and individuals all contributing to the milieu which is an organic combination of the residual and the dynamic.

Global/ International

National

Regional

Local/Locale

Source: Griffin, C. R. (2001), The Mediation of Market-Related Policies for the Provision of Second Level Education: An International Comparative Study of Selected Locations in England, Ireland and the USA, DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford, p. 25.

(2001) offered two graphical ways of illustrating scale in relation to education: The first was a comparison with the model of Bray and Murray Thomas (1995), and forms Table 2.6. This does not invalidate Bray and Murray Thomas’s model, which, in any case, is one face of a cube, but rather conflates them into four clearly geographical scales: local, regional, national and international/global. The last named accommodates the supranational connotation of ‘regional’, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as intra-national connotations such as ‘the US Midwest’ or ‘the southwest of England’. Griffin’s definitions of what is meant at each of the four levels of scale in terms of education are meaningful, especially that of the local, in terms of a cultural milieu that can mediate or even

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subvert official educational policies determined at a higher level and aimed at a wider geographical scale. The second of Griffin’s models brings in the factors bearing on educational phenomena and activities and applies them to the four scales – local, regional, national and international. It is one of the most sophisticated illustrations of spatial scale in relation to education yet developed, and, though originating in a doctoral thesis, is also published in Brock and Grifffin (2003, p. 245) as well as in Brock and Alexiadou (2013, p. 64).

Spatial Scales and Factors Affecting Education in Any Location The model appears to set the issues of spatial scale against the factors introduced as branches of geography and education in Chapter 1, as affecting educational provision and activity. Furthermore, the emphasis on the local milieu illustrates how these factors are so influential on the geography of educational reality: local economy, local politics, and local social and cultural environment. That is not to say that forces coming down, as it were, from higher levels at regional and national scales are not important. For example, there are different national cultures with regard to education, schooling in this case, in the three countries in Griffin’s comparative study: England, Ireland and the USA. The balance of these factors in each location is also significant. An example of this is the still very influential role of the Catholic Church in schooling in Cork in the Irish Republic as compared to there being only one secondary Catholic school between the two English local authorities Griffin visited, the city of Kingston-upon-Hull and the adjacent county of the East Riding of Yorkshire. In the case of the USA– Springfield School District, Massachusetts – the majority population is Puerto Rican, predominantly Catholic. At the core of the central milieu in the diagram is the individual school, its population and governance. In the English case this has become even more significant than when the research was conducted around the turn of the millennium because of the almost complete devolution of funding, and how it is used, to individual head teachers and their governing bodies direct from the national level in London. This is one of the indicators of the atomization of school administration in England. The significance of the local scale has long been recognized in the USA by the decision not to make public education the responsibility of the federal government, but that of the individual states and their school districts, both

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democratically governed. Indeed, as illustrated by Pangle and Pangle (1993), the fourth US president, James Madison, widely acknowledged to be the ‘Father of the Constitution’, was known to have the view that any democracy would, in practice, necessarily be confined to a locality rather than to a republic. Despite increasing efforts by some presidents and state governors over the last twentyfive years or so to gain some control over public education in the states of the Union, this has been resisted. Localization of schooling is part of the milieu. However, the milieu, in terms of scale of school districts, ranges from a handful of elementary schools and one junior high school in some districts, for example, Old Saybrook in Connecticut, to the whole of New York City in another. The same or similar culture may be present but the scale in absolute terms varies considerably. The early significance of schooling in the evolution of small settlements and districts in New England is illustrated by Daniels (1979) in his study of the foundation and establishment of towns in Connecticut. This is followed up in the next chapter on the development of education systems. The spatial and demographic scale of countries and territories incorporating systems of formal education varies enormously across the 200-odd examples, from the Pitcairn Islands (about fifty inhabitants) to the People’s Republic of China with over 1.35 billion (Brock and Alexiadou, 2013, p. 68). In terms of the percentage of the total number of nations the following categories may be illustrated as in Table 2.7. The picture illuminated in Table 2.7 is revealing in terms of its implications for the national scale in political terms being the prime index for international comparisons of education. Much variation is hidden within it. For example Russia has virtually double the area in terms of square kilometres as the next largest in area, Canada (17 million square km to Canada’s 9 million square km), Table 2.7 Countries of the world by number and percentage of the global population Population Over 1 billion 200–400 million 100–200 million 50–100 million 25–50 million 15–25 million 05–15 million 0–05 million

No. of countries

Percentage of global population

2 3 9 14 22 20 60 80

37 10 15 13 13 4 7 1

Source: Based on information from United Nations World Population Prospects (2102 Revision).

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but nearly five times the population (145 million to Canada’s 35 million), while Bangladesh (144,000 square km) has 160 million people at a density of 1,100 per square kilometre, a figure far in excess of any other country except one of the smallest, Singapore, with an area of only 700 square km and a population density of 8,000 per square km. The picture is further complicated by the nature and scale of the internal political geography of countries. Singapore is a unitary city–state where the provision and operation of education is simple in spatial terms. India, with 1.3 billion people and an area of 3.3 million square kilometres has a gradation of internal political geographical units from individual states (29) and union territories (7) through regions to divisions to districts and sub-districts to blocks, each of which has a role in educational provision and operation. And that is just the majority rural dimension. Urban areas in India range from metropolitan to municipal to individual towns. All this, for example, made the planning and implementation of the massive District Primary Education Project (DPEP), which aimed at provision of universal primary education, logistically and practically complex. The formal education systems are often described as ‘centralized’ or ‘decentralized’, but this is too crude a division. In practice, the picture is extremely varied from country to country. In the USA, as mentioned earlier, the system is a form of decentralization with the fifty states of the union each being responsible for public education provision within its territory so it is politically decentralized on that intra-national scale. In terms of economics, however, funding is approximately 45 per cent provided by state taxation, 45 per cent by local taxation and 10 per cent by federal grants. The national government can have considerable influence through the way that federal grants are utilized. It can also, through the US Supreme Court, override educational legislation in individual states as occurred in the intervention in the 1950s to prevent de jure segregation of schoolchildren on racial grounds. Responsibilities and sometimes funding are also split between federal and state, or provincial, governments as in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, India and many other countries. In some cases, this can be a real burden on the local level. For example, in Brazil, public primary provision has been the task of municipal (local) authorities, which in many parts of the country are extremely constrained in how much funding (if any) they can raise from local taxation. With the provision and cost of primary schooling always hit first and hardest by birth rates, the resulting picture is a patchwork of irregular and inadequate funding. This is the geography of educational reality, again most sharply defined at the local level. Such patterns can change over time, and sometimes quickly, in a more developed country where the amount of public funding is less of an issue, though

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nearly always still inadequate. In England and Wales, then England alone after the formation of the Welsh Assembly in 2003, there has been tension between national and local governments over the provision of public (i.e. state) schooling. This will be covered in more detail in the following chapter, but here only the economic dimension will be mentioned. After the creation of county councils in 1888 (Freeman, 1968) they were then, from 1902, given the responsibility of being local education authorities, so, from that year, funding of state schooling came from a combination of local and national taxation. The system became known as one that was ‘centrally organized and locally administered’. In general, the local authorities were left to administer national education Acts, with the 1944 Education Act being special because, for the first time in the history of the country, free secondary education for all became a reality. Some local authorities were controlled by the Conservative Party, some by the Labour Party and a few by other parties or coalitions. For a combination of political, economic and demographic reasons the pattern of school provision became a patchwork of systems, which was rendered increasingly centralized by the Education Reform Act of 1988. This and successive amending legislation has created an increasingly national system under the direct control of the central government. However, this itself for different reasons has led to an increasingly complex and atomized system of school provision and control. In effect, each state school in England has become a virtually separate little education system of its own, though subject to national processes of pupil assessment and inspection.

Aspects of the Regional Scale of Educational Activity The notion of a regional scale can be confusing as between regions within countries and regions comprising a number of countries. The former, as far as formal education is concerned, constitutes any subnational regulated spaces with some degree of authority for educational provision. In the USA there would be individual states, though these may sometimes be aggregated, for certain purposes such as accreditation, into wider notional and historical regions such as ‘the Midwest’ or ‘New England’. The latter, supranational regions, may be collectives with some kind of educational identity, though they may be more accurately described as regional networks, indeed overlapping networks such those of United Nations agencies, residual neo-colonial legacies such as those of France and the UK, and new neo-colonial outreach programmes such as that of the USA. Multilateral development agencies such as the World Bank Group, national

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aid agencies such as DfID of the UK and the USA Agency for International Development (USAID) of the also have their near global networks. Indeed Hayter (1971) described aid as imperialism, while Carnoy (1974) extended this specifically to education as cultural imperialism. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as the educational arm of the United Nations, based in Paris, has regional offices, of which there are nine though their remits vary from general oversight of UNESCO’s work, such as the Asia–Pacific regional office in Bangkok, to a more limited and specific oversight such as that of the Nairobi office for sciences in Africa. Below the regional or field offices are ‘cluster offices’ overseeing UNESCO’s efforts in groups of three or more countries in Africa (seventeen offices), Arab states (eight), Asia–Pacific (fourteen), Europe and North America (six), and Latin America and the Caribbean (eleven). Such regional or field offices are seen as important strategic centres for engendering initiatives that UNESCO reckons to be important on a global scale. Such concerns underpinned the seminal volumes by Carron and Ngoc (1980a,b) on Regional Disparities in Educational Development. The European Union (EU) is another supranational organization with internal regional interests as well as international development programmes. The internal dimension is overseen by the European Commission’s ‘Committee of the Regions’. The prime concern is to confront disparity between member states in economic and social terms. This involves ongoing monitoring and research to further its two apparently somewhat divergent aims of competitiveness and cohesion within the EU (European Union, 1994) The diversity with which it grapples can range from divergent patterns within member states, to between groups of member states, to issues relating to the accession of new member states (Corner, 2015a,b) and prognostications relating to the implications of additional states, such as Turkey, joining the EU. A supranational regional dimension of interest including education can be generated by a single nation in its own interest. A notable example is the cluster of Asia–Pacific organizations based in Hawaii, which, being a detached USA state located in the mid-Pacific, offers a prime strategic location. The East-West Center in Hawaii has a range of educational interests and activities extending from the US mainland and Latin America to South Asia, including the small island nations and territories of the South Pacific. Similarly, Russia maintains an educational interest, partly through linguistic and political legacy, in the other former members of the Soviet Union where there are substantial populations of ‘ethnic Russians’ (Ivanenko, 2014). The former colonies of France likewise

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form the basis of the Organization de la Francophonie, which has a significant number of members that were not part of the French Empire. Altogether, there are fifty-seven member states, and twenty-three with observer status. The total population numbers over 900 million, with 220 million being first-language French speakers. With its headquarters in Paris, there are four main offices in Addis Ababa, Brussels, New York and Geneva, plus regional centres in Lome (West Africa), Libreville (Central Africa) and Hanoi (Southeast Asia), plus two ‘regional antenna’ in Bucharest (Romania) and Port-au-Prince (Haiti) dealing with Eastern Europe and the Caribbean region respectively. A prime objective is to promote the French language, which is further supported by the network of Alliances Francaises: centres for the study of French. Altogether, this is a significant series of regional educational networks. Somewhat similar is the Commonwealth, mainly comprising former British colonies and serviced by the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. All except three members are former colonies: the UK itself, Mozambique and Rwanda. Although thirty-one members have a population of under 1.5 million each, and many are microstates, each member of the Commonwealth has equal status. With a population of 2.2 billion, half of which is in India, education and development are prime objectives. A conference of education ministers of the Commonwealth takes place every three years. Similar objectives are shared by The British Council, founded in 1934 as a child of the Great Depression to spread the English language and work through education and society to promote the expressive and creative arts. It now operates in over 100 countries, about half not being former colonies, linking schools and also institutions of further and higher education. The latter is the prime function of the Association of Commonwealth Universities, founded in 1913 as the world’s first international university network. There are now more than 500 institutional members promoting scholarship, research and the social responsibilities of universities, which includes contributing to the well-being of the places and regions in which they are located. These and other extra-national examples of educational activity comprise a massively complex and knotted web of interlocking regional networks that in effect represent the essentially nationalistic operations of the state through education.

Private Provision of Education in Spatial Perspective A somewhat neglected aspect of formal educational provision in related literature is that of the private sector. It exists in various forms in all countries even, in

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some cases, when it is not officially recognized. Given its almost complete independence from governmental control, the fact that it is not universal inevitably makes for distinctive patterns of spatial operation and location. Private provision at school-age level can be totally independent of the state or be some kind of supplementary provision, or even home schooling. The locational incidence of different forms of private provision varies considerably from country to country, ranging from networks to clusters to individual schools, and even homes. Although not under governmental control, private schooling is normally regulated by law, especially to ensure meeting certain standards of teaching capability, health and safety. The private sector of primary and secondary schooling in England is unusual among industrialized developed nations in at least two respects. First, its incidence in percentage terms of total school provision is unparalleled at about 8 per cent of students. Second, in its influence in terms of its output securing an even greater proportion of places at the elite universities, the key professions and the military is extraordinary in relation to comparable countries (Brock and Elstone, 2014). The term ‘public’ for what are totally private schools is of course absurd, but carries powerful inherited symbolism of superior social status in English culture. Such a powerful profile must have its own geographical dimension, and one that is complex. First, the private school sector is not unified. There is a ‘pecking order’ in the perception of that sector of the population that is able to afford the fees involved. At the top are the seven so-called ‘great public schools’ as defined in the Public Schools Act of 1868: Charterhouse (Surrey), Eton College (Berkshire), Harrow School (London), Rugby School (Midlands), Shrewsbury School (Midlands), Westminster School (London) and Winchester College (Hampshire).Their locations are idiosyncratic, depending on their foundations, but they are clearly in the south of the UK. With the emergence of a self-made business class in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth century, many new such schools were founded and the network widened. Some formed networks of their own such as the Woodard Group, which was established in 1848, with the foundation of its flagship school, Lancing College, as a ‘High Anglican’ enterprise. Today there are twenty-three member schools and seventeen affiliates. It includes both primary and secondary schools, some of which are in the state sector, with the whole overseen by the Woodard Corporation, which has in recent times sponsored some academy schools. As Bamford (1974) has shown, improved communications, and especially railways, became a factor in the nineteenth century regarding relative fortunes of private, especially boarding, schools. Urbanization led to more independent

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foundations in the growing cities, augmented much later by the abolition of direct grant grammar schools in 1975, a significant number of which chose independent status. There will obviously be a geography of private schools in most countries but not as distinctive in socio-economic and cultural terms as that in England. There are, for example, parochial schools in the USA, which are numerous. They are under religious auspices due to the separation of church and state in education law there. Most are Roman Catholic, and their location and distribution necessarily relates to that of people of that denomination in the USA, though not all Roman Catholics use them. Supplementary schooling is provided outside of the formal system by individuals or groups, whether individually out-of-school hours or collectively over the weekends. In the UK, and especially in England, this became visible with the decision of minority groups, such as those from the Caribbean, South Asia and the Middle East, to augment the opportunities for their children to progress, especially in mathematics and English (McLean, 1985). Some minority groups were more concerned to offer supplementary schooling for religious reasons, especially those in Islamic communities in the UK, where the learning of particular forms of Arabic is essential. Clearly, the locational and spatial patterns of supplementary schools relate to the communities concerned, but they tend also to be variable over time. Such schools still exist in some places in the UK, but more recently the phenomenon has taken on massive proportions in some East Asian countries as the global race for places at the top of the pupil attainment league tables has intensified. Such countries have again, at the time of writing (OECD, 2015), topped the world league tables in terms of scores in mathematics and science. While this is reported in terms of the relative efficacy of school systems, vast numbers of pupils in these countries attend ‘cram’ schools during out-of-school hours. Sometimes daily or weekly ‘cram’ school hours exceed those of formal schools. Mark Bray of the University of Hong Kong refers to this phenomenon as ‘the shadow education system’ (Bray, 2010; 2011). It is not, of course, absent from other parts of the world, and its implications for formal educational policy and planning have been highlighted by the Network of Experts in Social Sciences of Education and Training NESSE (2011), with regard to the European Union. NESSE commissioned Mark Bray to write their report. Their concern, and that of others, about ‘shadow education’, is that it has implications about the reality of the totality of knowledge transfer, a totality that contains numerous spatial and locational issues. Homeschooling is permitted in some countries provided that the parents can exhibit teaching skills that are equivalent to those in institutionalized

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contexts. The geography of this tends to be extremely disparate, but in the USA, the country with a stronger homeschooling profile than most, there are some indicators. Overall, there are about two million homeschooled children in the USA, which is 3.4 per cent of the total of school-age children. Homeschooling is more prevalent in some states than others, with religious reasons being the most prominent factor, as in North Carolina. This is one of four main reasons given – by about 70 per cent of homeschooling families. The nature of the school environment in terms of safety, antisocial behaviour and facilities are also considered, at about 85 per cent. Certain special needs are another concern at 37 per cent, and the need to travel with the family is also an issue for a minority. Some homeschoolers recognize the need for certain areas of the curriculum that they, as parents, may not be able to provide, most notably foreign languages and sciences. In some locations, for example, in North Carolina, they have grouped together to take over an available building for one day a week for these subjects to be resourced and covered. This also addresses the need for children to socialize, but only with others from like social, racial or religious backgrounds. The geographical patterns of homeschooling are therefore variable in both spatial and temporal terms. Kraftl (2013) examines aspects of homeschooling in the UK from geographical perspectives, pointing out that this practice constitutes multiple alternative educational spaces and not merely the home itself, referring to ‘the spatial practices and discourses of those in home-schooling’ (p. 441). He includes an element of behavioural geography in references to the emotional dimension as a significant component, and argues through his research that ‘home-schoolers paid close attention to the immanence of learning: the idea that the banal materialities and disorderly mess of everyday environments are suffused with learning potential’ (p. 448). This is an example of the primacy of informal education as it proceeds throughout life, in this case involving intergenerational variants.

The Issue of Small National Scale It is clear from Table 2.7 that the range of population between the countries of the world is extreme. This is also true of their spatial scale. In terms of area by square kilometres the top four countries in the world are: Russia (17  million), Canada (9 million), China (9.5 million) and USA (9.5 million). The bottom four are: Gibraltar (6 square km), Pitcairn (5 square km), Monaco (2 square km) and Vatican City (0.5  square km). Many of the smaller political units are territories

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rather than countries and some are still dependent territories, or colonies. Several of the smallest are in Europe where there is a range of small polities, some in the European Union (Corner, 2015a,b) and some outside it (Brock, 2016b). The development of national systems of education from a historical–geographical perspective is the theme of the following chapter, but so many of them are small, and therefore highly localized, that we can introduce here some spatial issues of small states relating to education (Symaco and Brock, 2013 and 2015). Degrees of localization can also apply to the national scale of public provision. Table 2.8 clearly shows that nearly half of the nations of the world are demographically small. Many of them are former colonies of imperial European powers, originating in the days of their maritime empires, sometimes only as coaling stations. About half are members of the Commonwealth, the club consisting mainly of most former British colonies. There is a growing literature on small states originating with ecological or economic issues (see Fosberg, 1963 and Selwyn, 1975) but that also developed in the field of education from the 1980s (Brock, 1980 and 1984; Thomas and Postlethwaite, 1984) onwards. The most common threshold for the designation of a small state is a population of three million. On this basis, Martin and Bray (2011) recognized eightynine small states and territories, distributed among the world’s major regions as indicated in Table 2.8. They did not include any micro-territories with less than 1,000 inhabitants. The population threshold of three million is only one of several indicators of national/territorial smallness. Others are land area, degree of economic concentration (dependence on one or two sources of income) and degree of completeness of the education system. The first is obviously spatial

Table 2.8 Matrix of small states and territories by population and region

Region Africa Arab States Atlantic Caribbean Europe Indian Ocean South Pacific Asia Total

1–100k

100–250k

250k–1 million

1–2 million

2–3 million

Total

0 0 5 8 7 1 11 0 32

1 0 0 6 1 0 6 0 14

3 2 1 5 5 2 3 3 24

5 0 0 1 1 0 0 1 8

2 2 0 1 4 1 0 1 11

11 4 6 21 18 4 20 5 89

Source: Martin, M. and Bray, M. (Eds) (2011), Tertiary Education in Small States: Planning in the Context of Globalisation, Paris, UNESCO/IIEP, pp. 26–7.

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and the second to do with economic geography. Brock (1980) also classified the tropical examples into locational categories: (a) the oceanic context (e.g. the Seychelles); (b) the landlocked context (e.g. Lesotho); (c) the littoral context (e.g. the Gambia). The same classification could also apply to European examples, such as Malta, Liechtenstein and Monaco, respectively. Oceanic examples are either single island states like Nauru or archipelago states like Tonga. This variety of contexts makes for a range of educational situations that are not found to the same degree in larger countries, except if they have islands, and archipelagos within them, such as the Outer Hebrides in Scotland (Bell and Grant, 1977), and nearly all of the Philippines (Symaco, 2013). Archipelago states can have special educational disparities, some relating to gender, as in the case of Vanuatu (Brock and Cammish, 1977a, pp. 79–87). Most small island states tend to be very idiosyncratic in educational terms. This is due to their colonial experiences that often involved immigration, forced and otherwise, from a variety of sources. Brock (1980) compared Trinidad and Tobago, Mauritius and Fiji in terms of (a) religious and ethnic identity, and (b) religious affiliation, and relationships with educational provision. These three nations are hubs within their regions, but much smaller island nations and territories can also exhibit such variety. Even the British Virgin Islands with only about 25,000 people has primary schools provided by most of the major Christian denominations and some others besides. Within the larger urban hubs of the tropical island zones, such as Suva in Fiji, and Port of Spain, in Trinidad and Tobago, immigration from within the region and outside has given rise to a complex web of connections involving race, ethnicity and religion as illustrated by Clark (1973) in relation to San Fernando, Trinidad, and replicated by Goodenough (1976) for Port of Spain. In addition to the local mix of those of African, European and South Asian descent are immigrants from nearly all the smaller territories of the Caribbean region. Goodenough recognized two divisions within the Creole class, an upper and a lower. The former were associated with university education and Presbyterianism and the latter with a threshold of secondary schooling and Roman Catholicism. Below them were the majority Afro-Caribbean mass of the population with primary education only, and associated with Anglicanism. In addition were the Hindu, Muslim, Chinese and European origin communities with their distinctive profiles in educational terms and a considerable number of those of mixed race. Each of these groups exhibited distinctive locational patterns contributing to the urban morphology. Such a human kaleidoscope also occurs in metropolitan cities, but is intensified in the primate settlements of small states. Such primate cities or

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towns often contain a larger proportion of the national population of small states and territories than do their counterparts in large states. For example, in the Eastern Caribbean where in Trinidad and Tobago the primate city Port of Spain has about one-sixth of the population, the proportion in Antigua (St John’s) is about a quarter; in St Lucia (Castries) over one-third; in Grenada (St George’s) one-third; and in Barbados (Bridgetown) about 40 per cent. This means a higher concentration of educational services, especially the most prestigious, in one location, in small states as compared to larger ones. The larger scale and more diversified economy of Trinidad enables other smaller hubs to develop such as San Fernando, whereas the much smaller territories mentioned earlier have no ‘second city’ as such. Indeed the eminent American geographer David Lowenthal once described the country, Barbados, as a city with sugar growing in the suburbs. More pertinent to the geography of education he also commented, with regard to that small island nation, that ‘almost everyone is accessible to the dissemination of ideas as well as of goods and services’ (Lowenthal, 1957, p. 495). Some of the small states of the Caribbean have had notable success in intellectual, academic and professional terms. St Lucia has two Nobel laureates, the economist Sir Arthur Lewis and the poet Derek Walcott, while Grenada and Barbados have been notable for producing a disproportionate amount of professional talent that has served the entire Anglophone Caribbean and in some cases the UK as well (Brock, Howard and Mason, 2014). The Grenadian physician and politician Baron David Pitt of Hampstead, one-time chair of the Greater London Council and president of the British Medical Association, and the Barbadian lawyer and academic Sir Roy Marshall, the first West Indian to be vice chancellor of a UK university, are notable examples. However they, and many others, also represent a feature of small states, which is the emigration of educated talent. On the other hand, one of the advantages of compact small states is the ability to effect educational development and reform in a short time span. Most small states of the Commonwealth achieved universal primary education over a century ago while some of their larger counterparts have still not reached this key target of the Millennium Development Goals in the early twenty-first century. Small states are also able to effect educational reform swiftly, and, where they exist in a regional grouping, can also exhibit international collaboration. In this sense, they can act as laboratories of educational reform and dissemination of positive outcomes (Crossley, Bray and Packer, 2011). In so doing, they have moved on from the establishment of regional institutions of higher education, such as the University of the West Indies (1948) and the University of the South

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Pacific (1968) to more subtle and widespread dissemination agencies, combining as the United Nations Office of the High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and the Small Island Developing States (UN-OHRLLS) established in 2001. The Small Island Developing States (SIDS) component was established in 1992 (Crossley and Sprague, 2013) and held its third Conference in 2014 in Samoa focussing on the issue of partnership, more than 300 examples of which were recorded. Within the three main tropical island zones, SIDS is supported by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), the Pacific Island Forum and the Indian Ocean Commission. The Pacific dimension of SIDS is described by Crossley, Hancock and Sprague (2014) in distinctively geographical terms as ‘a space where the international community can learn much from this distinctive region’ (p. 15). Sprague (2015) follows up on this with a discourse on the collective work of small states, and especially SIDS, with respect to ‘Education for Sustainable Development’ (ESD). She cites the example of cross-regional educational activity in the South Pacific: Work supported by the University of the South Pacific, a regional university serving 12 member countries, has brought Pacific thinking and practice of ESD to the international stage through the publication of a three book series (Furivai, 2010; Koya, Nabobo-Baba and Teadero, 2010; Nabobo-Baba, Koya and Teadero, 2010). Similar to the Caribbean region, Pacific ESD finds strength in informal and non-formal approaches. (p. 54)

Such an approach supports the notion of ‘educational spaces’ as well as ‘core/ periphery relationships’ in education. As Brock (1988) also illustrated, the families of small states are certainly not ‘beyond the fringe’, with much that can be learnt from the periphery.

Notions of an ‘Education Space’ and ‘Core/Periphery’ The term ‘education space’, is less geographically precise than that of an ‘education surface’ as outlined in the writer’s adaptation of Walford’s model earlier. The term ‘surface’ in human geography implies a significant degree of locational concentration, or clustering. The notion of an educational space is more expansive and variable, as used by Lawn and Novoa (2002). They refer in their title to Fabricating Europe, which is as may be, but there is a reality to the notion of a ‘European Education Space’. It is simply that this type of space is not necessarily regulated in the sense of being bounded with a political frontier. The

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EU has both internal frontiers between contiguous nation-states, and an overall frontier facing the outside world. Within the EU ‘space’ there are some education agreements and regulations, but not at the stage of compulsory schooling. Instead, they relate mostly to further and higher education. Nonetheless, there is still considerable common ground arising from Mallinson’s ‘Western European Idea of Education’ (1980) An obvious example of a European education space could be the total area to which the Bologna Agreement and Process applies, though ‘process’ implies accurately that it is a work in progress. Geographically, that is fine because human geography is dynamic and accommodates change, and the space to which ‘Bologna’ applies is far in excess of that of the EU. Within an education space, whether regulated or not, the location and distribution of educational facilities, operations and influences is necessarily uneven. There are places where facilities and activities are concentrated to different degrees and others where they are sparse. Where this relationship is significantly divergent the notions of core and periphery come into play. In practice of course there are numerous cores and peripheries within an educational space whether it is a regulated space or not, and with different and sometimes overlapping gradients of scale between them. This can be true even at the space of an individual school or classroom, the most common and one of the smallest of educational spaces. Udoku (2016) begins her discussion with the well-known but unattributed saying that ‘a school is two students sitting under a tree’ (p. 196). Her theme is ‘Spaces for 21st Century Learning’ in relation to the realization that there are now spatial and locational issues in educational provision, delivery and activity: ‘Today the classroom, now the “learning space,” and the school “community hub”, are central to studentbased learning and constructively aligned learning’ (ibid.). The progressive move from the received learning of students in rows of desks within a classroom to a more enquiry-based group effort with negotiated outcomes is clearly based on a fundamental change in the physical learning environment. This has not, however, been sustained everywhere for both political and resource reasons, though the advent of digital technologies has added an almost infinite space for learning of a different kind. Learning spaces, like classrooms of the past, are still going to be the most important requirement. In the developed and emerging world alike, children need quiet, accessible, physical places where they can learn. For those with limited wherewithal and resources throughout the world, particularly the poor, the traditional classroom is either non-existent or hard to get to. In the emerging world, the physical classroom has yet to be built in remote areas, whilst in

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With the prime objectives of formal systems of provision being what they are – control systems and training for employment – such a factory-oriented approach may well see the traditional classroom space for learning prevailing at least as far as schools are concerned. Even in an individual classroom there is a core/periphery issue well understood by teachers. It may not be just a question of the proverbial ‘naughty ones in the back row’, but rather a section of the class that gains more attention than others as was shown to be the case in favour of boys in the USA (Sadker and Sadker, 2010). There, as with studies of this phenomenon in England decades before, the tendency for teachers to give more attention to boys is often unintended, and partly to do with boys demanding attention more vigorously in co-educational classrooms. Now, of course, there is the issue of adolescent male underachievement (Younger, 2015), one of the reasons for which is the increased success of a greater proportion of girls since societal norms changed to favour equal opportunities for them. The situation is not quite the same as between single-sex and co-educational schools which, in any case, necessarily exhibit different geographies at the scale of the classroom, though disparate within each. As one progresses through the scales, from local to global, on Griffin’s model, (Fig. 2.2), a range of wider core–periphery situations becomes apparent. The archetypal Victorian primary school in England was arranged around a core area, giving the head teacher a vantage point from which to observe problems and maintain order. Such a spatial arrangement is rare nowadays, but in all schools some kind of core/periphery situation exists and can be modified. Any extension to the physical facility changes the spatial setting, as does any change to the land belonging to the school outside the core buildings. In England, as a result of the 1988 Education Reform Act and its aftermath, state schools had the possibility of selling off part or all of their land used for playing fields. Where this took place, the core/periphery relationship was spatially changed, with associated educational consequences such as a decline in outdoor sports and competition within and between schools. As indicated earlier, the issue of school choice has resulted in a review of the traditional spatial application of individual catchment areas for schools. This has become in England a fraught issue for parents and administrators, especially in large urban areas. Where a

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school is reckoned to be ‘good’ in the perception of parents, and thereby receives a disproportionately high number of applications, the price of houses in its now notional catchment area increases. This leads to a clustering of financially better off families and a kind of de facto segregation by socio-economic class. At the time of writing (2015) a newly formed academy school, sponsored by the University of Birmingham, had devised a spatial mode of selection that aims to counter this trend. The school is in a nodal position in Selly Oak, within the suburbs of this large city and has decided to select 50 per cent of its intake of eleven-yearolds on the basis of proximity, socio-economic profile, ethnicity and academic ability. The other 50 per cent will be selected on the basis of the same four indices from schools related to three other nodes in the suburbs of Birmingham; Small Heath, Hall Green and the Jewellery Quarter. This is being carried out with the co-operation of the Birmingham City Council, even though academy schools are no longer under local authority auspices and therefore run counter to central government policy (Sean Coughlin, BBC Education Correspondent, BBC News, 26 May 2015). Even beyond the individual school, with or without attempts such as the aforementioned to engender a greater degree of fairness into secondary school selection in England, there is the rural/urban dichotomy which is a kind of patchwork core/periphery issue according to the settlement pattern, the level of development and the phenomenon of urbanization, that is to say, the migration of people from rural to urban locations. In the less developed countries especially, education can be both a push and a pull factor in decisions that result in urbanization. Bell (1980) comments with reference to Uganda that ‘the movement of students from home area to be educated represents for many the first significant break with the extended family and may be regarded as perhaps the initial stage in their life-cycle of migration’ (p. 88). In such countries, gender may also play a part as mostly patriarchal societies have traditionally seen education as an investment in boys. In a different context of rapid industrialization this was an issue in nineteenthcentury England, with urbanization being a key factor in the universalization of primary schooling from 1870 (Brock, 2014b), and attempts were made by the initial national Board of Education, established in 1902, to introduce a separate curriculum for schools in rural areas. Similar efforts were made in parts of Canada and the USA. With the exception of additional content related to the local rural context, this institutionalized curricular dichotomy did not come to pass. Nonetheless, rural-urban dichotomy in educational terms is still a near universal phenomenon, with rural areas and their populations generally being

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disadvantaged in various ways. For example, Chankseliani (2013a,b) examined the disadvantages faced by rural communities in Georgia with respect to access to higher education and support for those who made it. She found that urban applicants to universities had, in general, higher achievements in the entrance examinations, gained most of the places in the more prestigious universities and gained better quality provision than their rural counterparts. There was also an economic dimension in that: ‘Exacerbating this injustice is the fact that rural residents in Georgia earn half of the average urban income’ (2013b, p. 311). While innovation is normally seen as taking place at the urban core, and especially in large metropolitan cities, there is evidence that peripheral areas can also be innovative, including in education. Such evidence has been commented on in well-developed societies, such as the European periphery (Zygiaris, 2012), as well as in less developed areas such as East Africa (Hirt and Johnson (2011)). Indeed, it may be that remoteness from core centres may even engender innovation out of necessity, neglect or mere opportunity. A curious and likely unique case is that of Akademgorodok, established in the former Soviet Union in 1957. The brainchild of mathematician Mikhail Lavrentiev and then president Nikita Krushchev, the ‘Academy Town’ was conceived as a way of huddling the country’s sharpest scientific minds together in one place away from the distractions of Moscow, to work on fundamental research. Sited deep in the forest 30km south of Novosibirsk city, it was built as a woodland campus for Novosbirsk State University along with 15 institutes for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, ranging from nuclear physics and geology to cytology and genetics. At its peak it had accommodation for up to 65,000 scientists. (Wainwright, 2016, p. 16)

While this was not only relatively peripheral geographically ‘it was blissfully distanced from the ideological meddling of the central party apparatus’ (ibid.). But with freedoms being curtailed in the 1970s and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, Academgorodok became a neglected backwater. Now in the new millennium it has been revived by President Putin as a cradle of innovation (ibid., p. 17). It is now no longer politically peripheral, but its location assists innovation that is relatively free and enjoys a degree of international capitalist sponsorship. As Canevaro (1984) puts it: ‘Situations often thought of as geographically or historically peripheral to the education system can provide the stimulus for innovation. The element of innovation or renovation, as a result of education … often comes from education on the periphery’ (p. 315).

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Universities, as the pinnacle of national systems of education, might be seen as elements of the centre rather than the periphery, but as Altbach (1978) pointed out, ‘Centres and peripheries exist in national university systems, and the concept has relevance beyond purely international comparisons’ (p. 158). Within ‘first world’ nations, there may be just a few universities representing the core such as Oxford, Cambridge and some of the London colleges in England, but within the ‘peripheral’ remainder there are other nodal centres of import, such as Manchester and Bristol. So there are in reality overlapping complexes of core–periphery patterns. Universities in the so-called ‘third world’ may be peripheral on the global scale but they too have their own core–periphery gradients nationally and in some cases even regionally. Several Third World nations function as ‘regional centre’ and are, in a sense, mediators between the ‘international’ universities in the industrialized nations and the bulk of peripheral institutions in the Third World. Institutions such as the University of Cairo, the University of Delhi, the University of Buenos Aires, the National University of Mexico and, to some extent the American University in Beirut have trained large numbers of students from other countries in their region. The worldwide distinction between centre and periphery is itself complicated by local, regional and international nuances. (ibid., p. 160)

The notion of core and periphery has resonance with those of place and space, but with any overall space the internal diversity is represented more by notions of nodes and networks as evidenced in the experiment of the University of Birmingham school mentioned earlier. Nodes and networks have long been in existence as far as various educational activities are concerned, but have become more precise in the context of cybernetics. Absolute distance, and its relationship to travel time, have been overtaken by instant communication of information and knowledge even though the ‘electronic distance’ travelled is immensely greater, an issue for further comment in Chapter 5.

Concluding Comments The initial chapter of this book was concerned with the synergy, and indeed similarity, between human geography and educational studies. This led to the issue of the geography of education, both as a member of the family of educational foundations and also as a sub-discipline within geography. This chapter has examined the situation from the standpoint of geography itself and

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has taken a more theoretical approach. The nature of modern – post 1960s – geography is not widely appreciated by those, the majority, who have not studied it beyond the years of compulsory schooling. That is to say, no geography after the age of about fifteen when in any case it may have become an option for many, set against the option of history. This is a massive curricular mistake, since geography and history are fundamentally interlinked in the space/time context. The writer routinely, before speaking about the geography of education, asks the following question to an audience of students and academics: Who has studied geography beyond the age of fifteen? It is rare to get an affirmative response of more than 10 per cent of such an audience, and even among them, anyone who has any idea of the nature and identity of geography in the twenty-first century is in an even smaller minority. Education has to do with the acquisition of knowledge, and the seminal work of Nigel Thrift was discussed in order to view his typology of knowledge. This showed clearly that most of what we are concerned with here is a combination of empirical knowledge and practical knowledge. These may be, albeit somewhat crudely, equated with formal and non-formal education respectively. In order to apply the key concepts and components of modern geography to educational phenomena, the human geography models of Broek (1965), Hagget (1972) and Walford (1973) were discussed. Tables and diagrams were presented to illustrate this writer’s application of each of them forming Tables 2.3 and 2.4 and Figure 2.1. Such an application enabled a discussion of the geographical concepts of space, place and scale in relation to analysing educational phenomena (Griffin, 2001) from which the significance of examining education at the most local of scales became evident (Figure 2.2 and Table 2.6). This is where the geography of educational reality may become more apparent. The educational profiles of small, especially island, states were thereby shown to be of potential relevance to larger, more powerful nations, along with the notion of innovation at the periphery as well as at the core of any educational space. However, because the most powerful of the influences bearing upon the provision and operation of formal and non-formal education is the political, we will now move to a consideration of the emergence and development of educational systems from an historical–geographical perspective, one of networks leading to regulated spaces, their internal inconsistency and their external overlap through transnational migration and other forms of interconnection.

3

Aspects of the Geographies of Education Systems

Spatial Aspects of The Emergence of Education Systems The conventional view of education is that of national systems, with platitudes put forward by governments as to their attributes. Non-formal and informal education are overlooked, but in fact they are where the majority of learning takes place, as we shall see in Chapter 4. Nonetheless, national systems and their regulated spaces are important, mainly for reasons of politics and power. What official education systems purport to be like in their authorized descriptions, and how they actually operate, are two different things, and the reasons are largely geographical and historical. These systems are known as such because they operate within an officially regulated space. But the question that should be asked is this: Within that space is it just state-provided education that counts? Should not the totality of public, private and public–private partnership operations and learning be regarded as ‘the system’? If the latter is the case, then a much more complex spatial and locational pattern becomes evident, to say nothing of such issues as rural–urban dichotomy, internal and external migration and disparities of outcomes. Without the spatial analysis of all components of such systems, educational reality cannot be known. There is a great deal of residual legacy in education systems, providing immense opportunities for more research in the historical geography of education. The origins and development of official education systems, as we know them today in a near global format, exhibit a range of locational and spatial factors and features that include, or derive from, residual educational landscapes. They have a very geographical history that has much to do with the three urban revolutions that have been catalysts in the story of human development. Some would see a fourth urban revolution in the contemporary emergence of major cities as hubs in a new knowledge era. What we observe depends on the nature

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of the microscope through which we view these urban revolutions in terms of temporal and spatial scales. Education advanced from the informal teaching and learning of hunting and gathering societies when the first urban revolution created sedentary societies in West Asia that were based on cultivation of plants and the pastoralism [Peake and Fleure (1927–56 – 10 volumes)]. Such urban origins occurred also in the New World (Adams, 1966) in a different time scale. In both continents, early towns developed from some of the first villages to become centres of production and exchange. A related factor engendered by the luxury of ‘time to think’ was that of organized religion, especially significant being the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Towns became centres of religious organization and socio-economic administration, with hinterlands. Some became city states, as in Classical Greece, small areas of regulated space with notional frontiers, though unstable and difficult to defend, and with their own polytheistic religion. It is in these early urban settings that the roots of organized learning, teaching and epistemology took hold under the tripartite interest groups: the religious or philosophical; the merchants; and the political elite (Peake and Fleure, 1927, vol. 4: Of Priests and Kings). The city states of Classical Greece operated an extensive colonialism from the Sea of Azov in the east to the southern Iberian Peninsula in the west, as mapped and described by Smith, C. T. (1967, pp. 35–6). Their trading activities also extended into Central and North-Western Europe, and with them went educational activity. The Roman conquest of classical Greece extended to much greater territorial control south of the Danube and west of the Rhine and extended even to what is now England on the north-west periphery. For nearly half a millennium the territorial stability of the Roman Empire enabled selective formal education to develop, especially after the conversion of the emperor to Christianity in the early fourth century AD. Key settlements became nodes in an informational network. As the Roman Empire declined much of classical and particularly Greek literature and science was preserved in the Arab World to be transmitted to the west in the later Middle Ages, but advances in the T’ang dynasty also reached the west, slowly and hesitantly through the intermediary of the Arab trading world in the Indian Ocean. (ibid., p .146)

While much of Europe surrendered to barbarism, the Arab World, energized by the birth of the prophet Muhammed in 517 AD and the onset of Islam, further extended its educational influence through urban foundations in the Eastern

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Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and then across the Western Mediterranean into the Iberian Peninsula (Hamden, 1962). Meantime, in the far north-western periphery, Christian learning was preserved in what is now north-eastern England, south-western Scotland and Ireland. The core–periphery and nodes and networks phenomena discussed earlier were playing a key role in laying foundations from which wider, more regulated, spatial systems of education could develop. In Dodgshon’s (1987) terms, social evolution was occurring, in part through organized learning, but his spatial order had yet to acquire secure organized spaces within which systemic educational delivery could operate. Such opportunity was, however, only afforded to a minority of privileged and highly selected individuals, almost entirely male.

Geographies of Education from the Second to Third Urban Revolutions The development of such educational opportunities was enabled by the relative peace of the early medieval period in Western and Northern Europe. This environment was conducive to considerable increase in economic activity, and the establishment of numerous towns and cities as nodes in trading and informational networks (Russell, 1972). Some nodes became substantial cities like those of the Hanseatic League, a trading bloc extending from London in the west to Novgorod in the east. Elsewhere, as some centres became major nodes, their spheres of influence extended. Most notable among these was Paris, a former Roman node at the heart of the basin of the Ile de France and main crossing point of the river Seine. The extension of the sphere of influence of Paris, politically as well as economically, was a major factor in the early establishment of France as a national space. This was, in effect, the western area of the tripartite division of the empire of Charles the Great after his death in 814 AD. The middle section became a kind of ‘shatter zone’ from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, comprising numerous small unstable states, while the eastern area became the ‘German Realm’, comprising about 300 mini states. It was the relative political security of early medieval Europe that enabled wealth creation in urban nodes and the patronage of highly selective Renaissance centres of higher education, as well as prestigious schools for boys. Lawson and Gordon (2002) suggest that the seeds of Renaissance universities were sown as early as in the time of Charles the Great, as exemplified especially by the king’s ‘school’ at Aachen. In the event it was the greater wealth created in medieval city states in northern

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Italy and Flanders that enabled the patronage of artists and scholars. Such patronage was playfully recognized a millennium later by D. H. Lawrence in his famous phrase ‘culture has her roots in the deep dung of cash’. He was writing of the endowment by the pharmaceutical company Boots of the then University College Nottingham which, like all universities today, is the heir to the flowering under patronage of Renaissance universities around the beginning of the second millennium: Bologna (c. 1090), Paris (c. 1150), Oxford (c. 1170) and Cambridge (c. 1210). The English locations were due to their being centres of wealth from the wool trade. The early universities of Germany were founded about two centuries or more later – for example, Heidelberg was founded in 1386, Cologne in 1388, Wittenberg in 1502 and Marburg in 1527. They were often part of the apparatus of a micro-state built around a nodal city and the patronage of aristocracy. According to Pounds (1979, p. 116): ‘Such cities were the repositories of the accumulated wealth of the continent. They were the seats of bishops and the centres of learning and administration.’ Redfield and Singer (1954), with regard to the wave of urbanization across central and northern Germany at this time, distinguish between ‘central place cities’ and ‘gateway cities’. The former were well established as ‘sacred centres’ within established political space, while the latter were initially colonizing outposts. Gateway cities, termed ‘beachheads’ by Galtung (1971), turned into central places with the advance of urban colonization, stimulated by the invention of printing, the press having been invented in Guttenberg in 1440. Gateway or pioneer towns, through forest clearance and the colonization of their hinterlands became central places, and, in new political circumstances established central places became gateways. Different commodities and their flows provided very different spheres of influence. Education, broadly defined in commodity terms is particularly susceptible to technical change and the aforementioned development of printing in fifteenth century German cities greatly redefined their horizons. (Brock, 1992, pp. 74–5)

One such pioneer central place, Wittenberg, located in the ‘micro-state’ of Saxony, was to have an epoch-making influence when, in 1517, Martin Luther in effect triggered the Protestant Reformation with his public dispute with the Pope over the sale of indulgencies. He also proceeded to translate the Bible into the language of the vernacular, German, on the basis of which a system of popular schooling was generated, largely through the agency of his colleague Philip Melancthon. This constituted an educational challenge to the Roman Catholic

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Church at ‘five levels of scale and authority: Continental (the Pope), Imperial (the Emperor), Provincial (the local Prince), Municipal (the City Fathers) and Local (small town and village communities)’ (Brock, 2010, p. 298). It was a major contributor to the Reformation which was to create broader spatial divides across much of Europe and influence the nature of systems of formal education as they arose more than 300 years later. Indeed, while by that time England and France had acquired spatial order in terms of national territorial stability, Prussia, by then a leader among German states, had embarked on a spatial hierarchy of schooling, linking core and periphery, in a way described by Dodgshon (1987) as follows: The common solution was to territorialise the system, conferring a similar slice of the responsibilities on each segment. In other words whilst we can talk about control functions being differentiated, and whilst this emphasised the distinction between core and periphery, the different spheres of control that emerged tended to organize space on the principle of segmentation rather than of differentiation. (p. 354)

The units of spatial administration of educational functions established in the Prussian state system from 1817 were at four levels, nesting within each province as follows: (a) Commune (a school district); (b) Circle (area under a primary school inspector – usually a member of the clergy); (c) County (directorate HQ for primary schooling); (d) Province (provincial board, secondary schools, primary-teacher training and public examinations) (Brock, 1992, p. 100). Prussia

Figure 3.1 Early states and the political integration of space Source: Dodgshon, R. A. (1987), The European Past: Social Evolution and the Spatial Order. Basingstoke, Macmillan, p. 136.

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exhibited an internal spatial rationale for public educational administration and provision that was an exemplar. Since Germany, then the German Empire, did not become a unified state until 1871 and from then onwards experienced five transformations until its present form in 1990, it is appropriate to turn elsewhere for the first unified national systems to emerge from the ‘Western European Idea of Education’ that had evolved under the joint influences of Graeco–Roman and Christian legacy. Organized schooling did of course also develop in other civilizations such as in Aztec Mexico, the Indus Valley and China, but did not lead to today’s near global model. In terms of spatial order underlying the origins of such a system, there would appear to be two leading national candidates, France and the USA, arising from their respective revolutions in the late eighteenth century. The Constitution of the USA, in 1788, applying to the first thirteen states comprising the Union, and the French Revolution of 1789 are key indicators. However, as the French system as such really depended on the subsequent actions of Napoleon from 1802, and the fact that France has experienced some of the myriad upheavals in the political geography of mainland Europe in the twentieth century, our first of two case studies of systems from a geographical perspective will be that of the USA, where the story is one of spatial expansion rather than of successive upheavals in terms of political geography. Furthermore, the single French national education system is extraordinarily disparate in spatial and locational terms. It comprises: (a) 101 departments 96 in Metropolitan France and 5 overseas (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Mayotte and Reunion); (b) 5 ‘overseas collectives’ (French Polynesia, St Barthelomy, St Martin, St Pierre and Miguelon and Wallis and Fortuna); (c) one sui generis collectivity (New Caledonia); (d) one overseas territory (French Southern and Antarctic Lands). Known in total as ‘The French Republic’, this must be the only truly national system, with global cultural outreach. Consequently, the second education system to be examined will be that of England even though it is not a nation, but a country within the UK, a nation of four countries.

The Spatial Development of the Education System of the United States of America It may seem curious to begin with a system that from the outset was not in practice national, but federal, but that was in effect the result of a national

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decision. From the beginning the federal dimension was minimal and has gained significant traction only since the institution of a US secretary of state for education as recently as 1979. Since then the federal government has made efforts to influence educational policy and practice mainly by financial incentives leading to additional income; however, still about 90 per cent of the funding of public education comes from individual states and their school districts. The Constitution remains unchanged as regards education as it still holds that public education is a matter for each of the fifty states of the Union and their local school districts. This highly localized approach, praised, as we have seen earlier, for its democratic potential by Madison, who was one of the founding fathers, stems from the nature of the colonization of the area by the first settlers from England in the early seventeenth century who, in effect, became part of the local ecosystem (Ryba, 1972). The first colony was in Virginia in 1607 with an Anglican ethos. The second in Massachusetts in 1610 was Puritan and involved compulsory elementary schooling. Before either, of course, the indigenous American Indian populations had their own forms of education that, as already mentioned earlier (King and Scheilmann, 2004), operated teaching and learning in a non-formal manner in keeping with their survival and that of their natural environments. McPartland, M. (1979) follows this human ecological approach with reference to early Massachusetts in terms of adjusting such educational traditions as had obtained in the home locations of the immigrants to the realities of the colonization of a new land. Central to that colonization process was the establishment of towns, which meant in this context secured and regulated spaces, not only the urban settlements within them. By 1629 the Massachusetts Bay Company was founded based at Boston, which was in effect a late Renaissance gateway city. Thus, within the temporal scale of a mere quarter century a localized system of community schooling had been established in newly cleared town areas which were, and still are, regulated spaces acting as school districts. Also transplanted was a long-standing European pattern of university foundations in cities through what geographers term a ‘gateway city’, in this case Boston. Harvard University, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature and named after the English cleric John Harvard, thus began as a Renaissance university. Boston today, with its unparalleled cluster of university institutions, continues the spirit of knowledge creation and dissemination with the latest information technology methods, just as did the medieval German universities through the earliest printing presses.

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Meantime, within and beyond Massachusetts, the British colonization of New England continued much the same way, but on a smaller scale, as had occurred in the urban colonization of Northern Europe. Even though the settlement outposts, or towns, were tiny by comparison, educational establishment was a key component. It was very communal, as what were known as ‘societies’ populated the area of each town which would in fact be mainly rural within its designated boundaries. Given the area to be covered, spatial and locational issues governed the operation of schooling as described by Daniels (1979). In the first few decades of the eighteenth century, many societies had just one or two schools and almost all of the school locations were rotated. Pomfret First Society voted to have the schools in session eight weeks at the North, seven at the west, seven at the south and four at Wappaquasset … as the population of the colony increased the number of schools per society increased accordingly, and by the mid eighteenth century all but the lightly populated societies stopped rotating their schools and instead established many permanent ones to serve the various areas. (p. 109)

All decisions regarding educational location and provision were made at annual open democratic town meetings, including those regarding buildings and staffing. Meantime, as what Altbach and Kelly (1978) term ‘Internal Colonialism’ proceeded, the indigenous populations being exterminated or subjected. Sometimes education was extended to the American Indians in what Iverson (1978) described as ‘the civilization and assimilation’ of Native Americans through schooling.

Territorial Expansion and Education in the USA To some extent the westwards expansion of colonial settlement can be seen to follow a similar pattern as that seen earlier in Europe – what the geographer Meinig (1972) termed ‘cultural regional evolution’. He postulated four stages to this process in the USA: (a) initial transplant of culture, (b) a new regional culture, (c) differentiation of regional culture through networks of information, (d) dissolution of regional culture in terms of national culture. Within this, however, the basic blueprint of educational provision prevailed. As King (1965) described it: With the organization and settlement spread the ‘little red schoolhouse’ of the coastal tradition, though it was often a crude log hut. Despite immeasurable hardships and an inevitable preoccupation with practicalities rather than formal

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learning, the western spread of America was signalled by the arrival of the store, the courthouse and the school familiar to Franklin and to the Massachusetts settler before him. (p. 23)

King also alludes to the remarkable fact that, despite the massive scale of western expansion, beyond the immediate control of central authority, the land remained, in general, a public space and education within it was locally controlled. Nonetheless, it was, after independence and the Constitution, known as the ‘public domain of the United States’, and as settlements spread ever westwards the federal authorities assigned areas of this space to railroad companies, other entrepreneurs and military veterans. There were also, from 1802, land grants for educational purposes based on a federal ordinance of 1785. ‘It was decreed that “section sixteen” of each township established in the Northwest Territory (i.e. present-day Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin) be earmarked for the use of schools, and that one town in each land district be reserved for the use of a seminary of learning’ (Knight, 1885). A ‘seminary of learning’ had no religious connotations and can best be described in modern terms as a teachers college. Some of these institutions went on to become ‘Land Grant Universities’, mostly via federal legislation in 1862 and 1890. There are in 2015 over 100 in all, located throughout the USA and Associated Territories (e.g. the federal headquarters, the District of Columbia; and overseas locations such as Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and North Marianas). Many have become the leading public university in their states – for example, Michigan State University and Pennsylvania State University – while a few are private universities such as Cornell. As the westward colonization overtook territory held by other nations, the same individual state and district pattern of public education was established. In the Caribbean the USA also has what today are termed ‘Unincorporated Territories’: Puerto Rico, ceded by Spain in 1898 following conflict, and The United States Virgin Islands, purchased in 1916 from Denmark. In both cases migration and settlement are open between them and the mainland USA. In the case of Puerto Rico, this has contributed significantly to the clusters of Spanish speakers in the towns and cities of the Northeast mainland such as Springfield, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut (Sacks, 2011). Although over the entire USA there are more Puerto Ricans than in the island itself (4–5 million as opposed to 3.8 million), in these two cities, and others, they constitute the majority of the Hispanic population. In Springfield almost the entire central school district is Puerto Rican (Griffin, 2001). Such concentrations, together with

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the fashion of Puerto Rican families to migrate frequently to and from Puerto Rico itself, lead to distinctive educational challenges to individual schools and school districts in the USA (Belfield, 2008).

Parochial, Private and Marketization of Education It is clear that the combination of migration both into and within the USA, as it has developed from pre-independence days, together with a consistent retention of the initial local democratic control of education, have been distinctive geographical features involving place, space and scale. However, they have been modified to some degree by the incidence of both parochial and private education. The former operates at school level whereby those who wish their children to experience a religiously oriented education can opt, at minimal expense, to send them to a parochial school. These are mostly provided under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Church, which has its own geographical spaces, nodes and networks, though usually within state boundaries. Private schooling, both secular and religious, also exists, though proportionately not nearly to the degree of the private school sector in England. The most established and prestigious private schools are in New England, such as Taft near Waterbury, Connecticut. As mentioned earlier, marketization of education, especially in the form of school choice, had its origins in the USA, but, due to the retention of local democracy in public education, proved more difficult to introduce there on a national scale than in England. Some states of the Union and their school districts have not embraced this trend, but others have done so in different forms and to different degrees. School choice is fundamentally geographical in nature and in consequences. It is no coincidence that the first state to take steps in this direction was Massachusetts, which modelled its Education Reform Act of 1993 on aspects of the 1988 Education Reform Act of England and Wales (Griffin, 2001). However, two indigenous reforms at this time, with significant spatial consequences, were the introduction of charter schools and the right of parents to choose schools outside of the school districts in which they live. The establishment of a charter school involved, in this state, an application from an interest group to the Massachusetts State Education Department, not to the school district. Such an application could also be made by the superintendent of a school district, as it happened in Springfield, MA, where the central school district was almost entirely Puerto Rican in population. There, around the turn of the millennium, the superintendent encouraged the establishment of several charter schools in order to provide competition and place pressure on the five

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public high schools to improve their performance (Griffin, 2001). They did, and the supposition was that, as tended to be the case, the charter schools would wither away once the initial interest group no longer needed them. In this case there were also consequences for the parochial schools and the one private high school in the city. All this change created not only a different and dynamic pattern of educational land use, but also changes in the journeys of children to school with their aforementioned economic multiplier consequences. As transient charter schools have come and gone, there has since been a significant development in the form of one-line charter schools in the USA, with, according to the University of Washington Center on Reinventing Education, about 200,000 enrolled overall. They are known as ‘visual schools’ or ‘cyber schools’. By definition they have no physical location and in theory no constraints. One such school in Pennsylvania has over 10,000 full-time students. The clienteles for such schools are mainly rural students, students with health issues and students from mobile families. Another key issue, that of requiring school districts to permit choice across their borders, came up against the fundamental tradition in the USA of local control. At the time of the 1993 Act, Massachusetts had over 300 school districts, and about 120 elected to participate in what was known as the ‘School Choice Receiving Scheme’. The remainder had invoked their local democratic right to keep their borders closed: ‘Withdrawal from the school choice programme can only occur when a school committee has held a public hearing on this issue, followed by a school committee resolution to withdraw from the school choice programme’ (Griffin, 2001, p. 317). Such a meeting is reminiscent of the meetings mentioned earlier in the establishment of schools within towns in the phase of initial colonization with respect to neighbouring Connecticut (Daniels, 1979), and illustrates the enduring place of local democracy in American public schooling. The spatial pattern of school districts that opted in or out of the cross-border scheme across the state of Massachusetts shows clear patterns of social class and ethnic differentiation where, in general, the affluent and the majority Caucasian areas opted out. Across the USA there are distinctive geographies of education within school districts, within each state and beyond. The ‘beyond’ dimension applies not only to the incorporated and unincorporated territories outside of the fifty states of the Union, but also to the global outreach and influence of ‘American’ education (Ogden and Brenna, 2014). Such outreach occurs both within the USA with international student inflow, and globally through overseas migration of students, the international influence of aspects of American education delivered through ICT

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(Holloway and Valentine, 2001) and the rapidly growing global significance of the English language.

Geographies of Post-School Education in the USA Post-school education in the USA comprises mainly community colleges, liberal arts colleges and universities. Community colleges are somewhat similar to the Further Education sector in England. However, they normally come under the jurisdiction of the state of the Union in which they are located, and therefore subject to the electors of that state, whereas the Further Education sector in England was removed from the local authorities as a result of the 1988 Education Reform Act and is under a national level of jurisdiction, financing and control. Liberal arts colleges in the USA are in effect small universities. A few even carry that title. Most are for female students though coeducation is increasing. They are largely concerned with undergraduate studies in the liberal arts and sciences and follow a broad curriculum often associated with public services such as law, medicine and administration. Most are independent and privately funded, but a few are affiliated to larger universities. Their geographical distribution is strongly concentrated in the north-eastern states, from Pennsylvania to Maine, with a smaller cluster in mid-western states such as Ohio and Indiana. They are high status, which is associated with their early foundation ranging from Bowdoin College, Maine, in 1794, Amherst College, Connecticut, in 1821, Wesleyan University, Connecticut, in 1831, and Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, in 1832. The association of private funding and status is also characteristic of part of the university sector in the USA. Like the early liberal arts colleges, the most prestigious, known collectively as the ‘Ivy League’, are clustered in the northeast of the country. The eight members mostly have very early foundations, with seven being founded before the independence of the country: Harvard (1636), Yale (1701), University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Dartmouth (1769), and Cornell (1865). These are all private universities, and occupy 25 of the top 100 places in the 2015 world university rankings. While recognizing their academic and research excellence, this achievement has much to do with funding. The geographical distribution of private universities in the USA is eastern and mid-western, but, apart from the Ivy League, not so tightly clustered in the north-east. With the majority of Americans enjoying higher education, the distribution of public universities is near universal, mostly coming under the jurisdiction of

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the individual states. A distinctive spatial aspect of upper school, post-school and higher education is the ability to accept grades (credits) gained in a lower institution. So in many cases, some grades gained in high school are recognized in colleges and universities. Also, it may be possible to gain some master’s credits while undertaking a bachelor’s programme. This may be termed ‘qualification flow’, but does not necessarily extend beyond any given state, a restriction that may also apply to qualified teacher status. There is a geography of recognition of qualifications in the USA that is complex and researching this issue would be rewarding.

The Spatial Development of the Education Systems of the United Kingdom: With Special Reference to England This section will focus on England, but first the situation of its being only a part of the nation, the UK, must be introduced. The largest public education school system in the UK, that of England and Wales (England only since 2003), post-dates that of the USA by about 150 years in terms of the fundamental institution of publicly funded universal schooling, not available until the 1944 Education Act. Likewise, the chaotic manner in which it has come about is represented by a range of highly idiosyncratic spatial factors (Brock, 2014b). This is because, unlike the case of the USA where education, initially in the form of schooling in the local community, maintained that underlying culture as the nation expanded, the area now known as the UK exhibited divisive differences from the outset. The reason is profoundly geographical from a number of spatial perspectives. The first is the physical and cultural context, comprising two large islands and a large number of smaller ones. The larger of the two main islands is Britain, and the other is Ireland. Most of the smaller islands are part of Britain, but some are politically independent, namely the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands. The political territory of Northern Ireland is not part of Britain, but is part of the nation ‘The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ (UK). Great Britain comprises England, Scotland and Wales. These have become known in, comparative education, as ‘the home Internationals’ (Raffe et al., 1999). This writer has suggested that the UK could more accurately be termed ‘the disunited kingdom’ (see ‘The Disunited Kingdom’ in Brock, 2014c, p. 1). There are four main national systems at present – the ones of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – plus the separate systems of the Crown

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dependencies, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. Scotland has always, at least since the early twelfth century, had its own education system despite becoming a joint kingdom with England in 1603, leading to the Act of Union in 1707. Ireland became part of the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, providing some educational independence, though not completely until 1922 when it became free, though divided into The Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland – see Corner, 2015a) and the Province of Northern Ireland. Wales remained with England until the formation of the Welsh Assembly in 2003, after which it became educationally independent. So the historical and political geography of education in what is now properly called The British and Irish Islands is extremely complex as compared with its former colony, the USA. Even this is not all. The UK still has colonies, now somewhat euphemistically titled ‘British Overseas Territories’ (BOTS), in the Caribbean, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and the Mediterranean (Fisher et al., 2014). Their systems of education operate independently, but with significant support from the UK. Some, such as the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar and Tristan da Cunha, rely on the UK for postschool education by short-term migration, as do the Crown dependencies for university provision. So while the national unit of the UK has an educational range of near global extent, unlike France it does not constitute, or operate as, a unified national system.

Cultural Geography and Education in the UK Education is culturally based, and whereas the USA has acquired extraordinary cultural diversity subsequent to the formative model of public schooling, the UK’s disunity in education is based on a cultural diversity that pre-dates the formation of schooling and education systems as such. This is a spatially significant difference. In terms of the formative cultural geography of education, there are distinctive differences within the current UK. They relate to the two main indicators of language and religion. Prior to the invasion by the Romans in 43 AD of what they called Britannia, the culture of Britain and Ireland had become Celtic, with two main branches of Celtic languages predominant. In what became Scotland and Ireland there was a Goidelic Gaelic, while in what became England and Wales there was a Brythonic Gaelic. (Bell and Grant, 1977). In due course, the area eventually controlled by the Romans became England, in which Celtic language and culture declined and disappeared, except in Cornwall, the extreme southwest of Britannia. Subsequent Germanic invasions and immigration introduced

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a form of Saxon language that became Old English, with the additional infusion of Nordic languages and French, also arising from invasions. The survival of Gaelic in education and society is strongest in Wales, where it is growing and has a considerable role in contemporary education (Laugharne, 2014). There are significant concentrations of speakers of Welsh as a first language in North and West Wales, with there being Welsh medium schools, some of which are also in South Wales. In Scotland, Gaelic remains in some of the outer islands and in some cities, notably Glasgow (Hancock, 2014), and a Gaelic-medium tertiary college operates in the islands of Skye and Islay. In Northern Ireland, the Irish language is associated mainly with the Catholic community, many of whom relate to the Republic to the south (Gallagher, 2014, Hansson, 2014). Geo-linguistics is therefore significant in relation to the differential survival of the Celtic languages in locational terms. The UK Government has conferred ‘recognized minority status’ on Scotland, Wales and Cornwall in respect of Celtic cultures. As in the USA, more recent cultural and linguistic diversity, though considerable, has had to fit the systems of education in the UK that were already in place when immigration began to become significant. However, the national systems in question had emerged largely separately with distinctive differences between their formative processes and patterns. For the purpose of discussing the spatial implications of educational system development, we will take the case of the education system of England due to it being the largest education system in the UK.

Spatial Aspects of the Emergence of the Education System of England At the turn of the nineteenth century, some two hundred years after the foundation of the earliest town school districts in what were the American colonies of Britain, then the proto-USA, schooling in England was still in the hands of the religious. Two Christian charities, The National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales and The British and Foreign School Society, had been founded to promote elementary schooling. Then, as Dent (1982) has described it: In 1833 the House of Commons was induced to grant the sum of £20,000 to assist the National and British societies to build schools. This grant was repeated the following year, and in 1839 was increased to £30,000. In that year the Government created an Education Committee of the Privy Council to supervise the distribution of what had become an annual grant, and the newly

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Where elementary schools were already operative depended on the local, mainly rural, clergy of the Established (Anglican) Church. Some priests founded schools, others did not, and so the geographical distribution was extremely disparate and unstable. By this time the urbanization associated with the industrial revolution was well under way, creating vast new urban swathes of what rapidly became insanitary slums. The Anglican Church created primary schools in response, but a greater impact was made in such areas by the Roman Catholic Church. By the Education Act of 1870 making primary education provision in England and Wales universal, only approximately half the school-age population had such provision. That Act gave responsibility for creating universal access to local school boards that were secular, though the denominations attempted to control some of them (Smith, 2009). Today, both churches still provide, in association with the state, a minor, though significant, proportion of the public (i.e. state) schools in England (Gay and Greenough, 2000). Both churches divide the entire territory of England into dioceses, most of which are of very long standing and could, in that sense, be said to the first regulated education spaces in the country. No such secular education spaces, except those of local boards, were formed until the creation of local education authorities in 1902. As the areas of dioceses and of the local authorities do not coincide, this makes the political geography of school administration in England somewhat complex. On the creation of the Welsh Assembly in 2003, responsibility for state school provision became separate from that in England (Power, 2014). At the turn of the twentieth century, the population of England still included a considerable number of rural inhabitants. Rural–urban dichotomy is one of the basic geographical distinctions in educational provision, and with public (state) secondary education being highly selective the Secondary School Regulations of 1908 pondered the notion of differential provision: In such (rural) areas the board may recognise a Secondary School with 15 instead of 16 as the normal leaving age and a correspondingly shorter period of normal school-life. This concession is only made where a consideration of local circumstances shows that it will be a distinct educational advantage to the district, and that a longer school-life is not, under actual conditions, possible. (p. 95)

This was an attempt to relate formal education to local economy and in effect deny high achieving rural pupils access to higher education.

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Local authorities and their territories still exist in England, though there have been numerous reforms to their regulated spaces and boundaries over the past 100-plus years. Education Acts subsequent to 1902 have also led to developments in the types of schools provided and therefore the catchment areas involved. Most influential have been the Acts of 1944 and 1988, and some of the spatial implications of both are still with us today. The 1944 Act was notable in that it created for the first time in England and Wales universal secondary schooling to the age of 15. However, the nature of this schooling had complex geographical consequences because three different types of secondary school were designated: grammar schools, secondary modern schools and technical schools (not all local authorities, though, offered technical schools throughout their areas). State grammar schools, which were selective based on an examination at 11+, only accepted between about 15 and 35 per cent of the age group, with this percentage depending on the number and size of existing grammar schools in each localauthority area. Rapidly expanding suburban growth from the 1920s onwards often included additional grammar schools, while in market towns and rural areas there were significantly fewer. This would now be termed a ‘postcode lottery’. The secondary modern schools were mostly new, arising from the 1944 Act, though a minority of authorities had offered non-selective secondary schooling in so-called central schools since the 1920s. Consequently, no two local-education authorities exhibited the same geographical pattern of secondary schooling, which contrasts significantly with the widespread operation of school districts and states in the USA where a greater degree of conformity obtains, although not uniform. Furthermore, in England, since the 1988 Education Reform Act, local authorities have been increasingly sidelined by a progression of Acts of legislation that have greatly reduced their role. The decision as to whether a state school remains in local-authority control now rests largely with each school, but other categories of status have been introduced in the twenty-first century, namely ‘academies’ and ‘free schools’. Both are free of local-authority control but are still state schools funded by public money, and answerable only to the secretary of state for education in London. The geography of education arising from this is one of immense diversity and disparity. Academies may be individual schools, or they may be members of a chain of academies that are not necessarily contiguous and may be spatially scattered. They may or may not be schools of the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church. The outcome is a strange combination of clustering and atomization, which necessarily has a local focus on the site of each school but where schools are not necessarily related primarily to the community in which they are located (Morris, 2016). In areas

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of ethnic minority group concentration, there may be free schools operating only for children from parents of a particular culture or faith. As a result of these essentially market-oriented reforms, many state schools in England have become increasingly exclusive on grounds of social class, ethnicity and religion. In December 2015 the cross-faith Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life issued a report on religion and schools in England. The Observer editorial of 6th December 2015 (p. 38) highlights a challenge from people of faith to the government, indicating that the policies of the latter are more damaging inter alia than those of the former. It states: ‘Religious segregation is the most common type of selection in the school system and it goes hand in hand with lower ethnic and socio-economic diversity’ (ibid.). That this is an issue of selection within the system is often overlooked, as are its spatial implications. It also has to do with locational inertia. ‘The Commission’s report shows people of faith taking the lead in advocating a more modern progressive approach to religion in British schools’ (ibid.). The use of the term ‘British’ here is a common geographical error since ‘the government’ is responsible only for schools in England. Religion is not the only factor that complicates selection for entry to primary and secondary state schools in England. There are over 400 permutations of entry requirements facing parents throughout the country. The resulting pattern of enrolments now evident since school choice became a fundamental and active issue has resulted in some interesting outcomes. According to the BBC News website of 5th December 2015, only 46 per cent of schools have more applications than places. This is partly for demographic reasons, especially in large urban areas. Spare places may be due to out-migration from the area in which a school is located, or an ageing population that is not moving. This is common because younger adults with school-age children cannot find places to live due to their parents living longer and remaining in their homes for life, or as long as possible. In other places distance between home and school is a key element in the allocation rules of most places, with a maximum cut-off distance for oversubscribed primary schools of 2.3 kilometres and for over-subscribed secondary schools of 4.8 kilometres. The problem becomes most acute in the conurbations where several local-authority areas exist within each of them, with crossboundary applications possible. In this context, London has the largest problem. For example, in the London boroughs of Kensington and Chelsea, Greenwich and Lewisham, over 80 per cent of schools are affected by cross-border applications. Unlike the USA, the UK, and especially England, has a large and influential sector of private schooling, serving about 8 per cent of the school-age population

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(Brock and Elstone, 2014). Although regulated in terms of health and safety these schools are otherwise free to offer whatever they wish to their clients. While England has about 60 per cent of private secondary schools in the UK, Scotland has about 30 per cent, Wales about 6 per cent and Northern Ireland 4 per cent. In most cases they are located in the more affluent areas, with a significant number in small towns and rural locations. In small town locations such as Bloxham, Oundle, Uppingham and Warminster a boarding school can be a very significant component of economic geography, producing a multiplier effect in terms of local employment and consumption. In larger urban areas they are more likely to be day schools, the number significantly boosted by the abolition of direct grant grammar schools in 1976, many of which became independent, and of the Assisted Places Scheme, which operated from 1980 to 1997. This scheme used public money for the academically able to take up places in private schools. Private schools now have their own ‘bursary schemes’ which widen their catchment geographically and socially (Brock and Elstone, 2014). Bradford and Burdett (1989) noted a spatial polarization of private education in England, as evidenced by what they termed ‘the educational consumption cleavage’ (p. 47) This resulted in an increased North–South divide, as defined by a line from the Wash to the Severn estuary. They noted that ‘the North and the South are clearly differentially oriented to private education, even allowing for class composition’ (p. 49). There are, of course, intra-regional variations within both North and South, with Greater London, while showing a strong concentration of independent schools, also exhibiting sharp variations within. Central and South-Western London boroughs have significantly greater concentrations of private schools than do Eastern and South-Eastern boroughs.

Geographies of Post-School Education in England Since 2010, Further and Higher Education in England have been removed from the Ministry of Education and placed instead in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Skills. It reflects the default political view that formal education is provided primarily to help drive economic growth, and public funding is delivered largely to this end. The Further Education sector comprises Sixth Form Colleges and Further Education (FE) Colleges. The former number about seventy and are located in those local authorities that chose to establish them rather than to have post-16 education in conventional secondary schools. The geographical distribution of such colleges is therefore disparate. By contrast FE colleges exist in large towns and

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in cities throughout the country, but were removed from local-authority control following the 1988 Education Reform Act. They are particularly significant as places for a so-called second-chance education and training for those less academically successful at 16+ and for mature students of all ages seeking a return to education after such life-experiences as redundancy, a change of career and, in the case of women, child-rearing. They are also places for mature refugees and other international immigrants seeking skills, including English, to enhance their employment prospects. Many FE colleges have franchise agreements with universities that are not necessarily local to them so as to provide opportunities for pre-degree programmes that would ultimately lead to graduate status. The geography of such franchises is extremely complex, overlapping, disparate and changeable. Greater research would make them more understood. In some cases universities have adopted a regional policy in this regard, such as the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at the University of Newcastle Goddard et al. (2012). Following the Autumn 2015 budget of the UK Government, funding for the FE sector is to be reduced, which may mean closure for many Sixth-Form Colleges and less ability on the part of FE colleges to meet the challenges of preparing people for employment opportunities. Both possibilities will alter the geography of this sector in terms of location, programmes of training, and knowledge and skills (poorer outcomes can be expected). This is probably the most complex and under-researched sector in terms of changing geographies of education in England. Universities in England (now over 130 in number and growing) compete for status and support through their record on publications in elite journals, quality of research and amount of research funding gained from both public and private sources. This has not significantly changed the prime locations of universities, but has led to shifting spatial patterns in terms of funding and status. Such internecine competition has led English universities to form distinctive groups or ‘clubs’ known as ‘mission groups’. Here is a list of these groups: (a) ‘The Russell Group’ of 20+ universities that are mainly in England, but with representatives from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. This is an elite group committed to the highest levels of academic excellence and research; (b) ‘The Million + Group’, mainly comprising universities created since 1992; (c) ‘University Alliance’, a group with a balanced portfolio of research, teaching, enterprise and innovation; (d) ‘The Cathedrals Group’ of about 15 UK wide universities with strong Anglican, Roman Catholic and Methodist affiliations. Each of these groups has its own spatial pattern of networks, but there tend also to be less formal local or regional groupings based on relative proximity that

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approximate to educational surfaces. This is a far cry from when Gilbert (1962b) wrote his paper on the geography of universities in England and Wales – there were just nineteen discrete institutions then. Again, in stark contrast to the USA with its large number of mostly elite private universities, in England there is only one genuine example of a private university, Buckingham, founded in 1976, and even this university is not elite. In 2012 three other institutions were granted degree-giving status, but they are virtually mono-technical and therefore not universities in the full sense of the term. In addition to the networks of franchises operated by universities, some have established branch campuses within their own regional outreach. A good example is University College Suffolk (UCS), established jointly in 2007 by the University of East Anglia (Norwich) and the University of Essex (Colchester) with campuses in Bury St Edmunds, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft and Ipswich. UCS offers a wide range of non-science undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. One issue of science and technology is that it requires special and expensive premises and equipment that cannot be afforded in subsidiary locations. This in itself could be a theme for research in the field of geography of tertiary education in England. In summary, it could reasonably be suggested that the education system of England now comprises a considerable number of networks and nodes rather than an aggregation of regulated spaces. Past efforts to create such spaces have been overtaken by the rise of a competitive, as opposed to a cooperative, ethic. The 200 or so other systems of education in the world exhibit a range of formats – from the highly centralized to the highly decentralized.

Towards a Typology of Education Systems All national systems of formal education have selection as their prime function (Hopper, 1968, Timmons, 1988). Hopper recognizes two main types of selection: (a) particularistic and (b) universalistic. He then divided each into two modes of selection: particularistic into aristocratic (an individualistic mode) and paternalistic (a collectivistic mode); and universalistic into meritocratic (an individualistic mode) and communistic (a collectivistic mode) (pp. 159–60). Each of these has socio-spatial implications, for example: aristocratic mode/ private schooling, such as the so-called ‘public schools’ of England; paternalistic/ selective mode – academic schooling such as the grammar schools of England; meritocratic/technocratic mode binary schooling such as the Gymnasium/

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Realschule dichotomy in Germany; communistic/non-selective schooling mode, such as the comprehensive school in England. Hopper’s use of the term ‘communistic’ does not imply politicized versions of communism, but is closer to socialism. In reality, elements of all four can exist within one system within the overall function of selection, but the balance between them is the telling factor. More general subsidiary functions of all education systems follow: political and social control; contributing to the economy; and in urban societies especially, a custodial function in respect of the school-age population. The examples of the USA and England show how very different systems of education can be. Yet at a simple level all such systems in the world appear to be broadly similar. They are generally made up of primary, secondary and tertiary stages of provision, with curricula that are also broadly similar. In some cases where the religious factor is strong, it can dominate, as in theocratic Iran, but in general this is not the case. The expanding influence of the OECD and its PISA tests and rankings is encouraging conformity of curricula (Meyer and Benavot, 2013), and this in turn influences administration and provision. Nonetheless, there are in fact considerable variations as between national systems in terms of spatial patterns at sub-national level, as well as in supranational groupings involving education. At sub-national level there may be states, as in the USA, or provinces, as in Canada (Mulcahy et al., 2014), which are largely independent in respect of education, but ultimately responsible to the federal government. The same applies to the states in Brazil (De Castro, 2004). In some countries, as in France (Lucas, 1986), the nation, including its educational component, developed by aggregation. These are all examples of federal systems of education in which the central government has a greater or lesser degree of influence. In India, for example, the state of Orissa rejected the federal government policy of English and Hindi as the media of instruction in formal schooling, favouring Oriya over Hindi. With India having hundreds of minority languages, this is not an isolated case (Benedikter, 2009). In Canada each province has its own regulations, agreed upon by the federal government, concerning the balance between the use of English and French in formal education. In the former Soviet Union, and indeed in present-day Russia, there are over 150 languages across the many communities, leading to a range of agreements on the official medium of instruction and the use of minority languages at different stages in formal education. These, and many other examples across the world, reveal to complex geo-linguistic patterns within formal systems of education, and to various degrees of recognition and use of social languages (Williams, 1991). As with many countries, federal or otherwise, there are necessary uses of the social language by teachers with, especially

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young, pupils in order to enable all children to learn and not be disadvantaged. Examples of this are in the Caribbean nations of Dominica and Saint Lucia where a French patois is common at home, but English is the compulsory medium of instruction in schools (Esnard, 2014). As is often the case on the ground, at the local scale of operation, the geography of educational reality as regards language is somewhat different from the official picture as outlined in descriptions and reports of education systems. In other words, the cultural geography of education may be stronger than the political geography of education, and contributes more to the geography of educational reality. Where the political geography converges to some extent with language is where a particular language has come to be a lingua franca of certain educational activities and measurements of progress and status. A prime example is the selection of English as the medium through which certain academic activities must be conducted and their outcomes published. Such is the case with the world ranking of universities where high-level research and publication in English is often a requirement for inclusion. This is particularly strong in science and technology, but also in the social sciences, where the journals are those selected by organizations in the USA, and the funding bodies mostly also operate in English. This is therefore more political than cultural. The recognition and utilization of such international tables as PISA and international university rankings make them in effect part of the national education systems in question, at least in operational terms. Education systems are also sometimes described as  centralized or decentralized, meaning in simple terms that authority, decision-making and regulation lie either with central government or with local authorities of some kind. In reality it is not as simple as that. In addition to the federal or local issue, there is the question of what is being decentralized or centralized. Situations occur where curriculum is centralized but financial responsibility is not, or vice versa. In the Chile of Pinochet (1973–90) for example, responsibility for school provision was decentralized to districts, but enforced on the ground by the central government, which included military agencies (Aedo-Richmond et al., 1981). As governments throughout the world, and especially in less developed countries, find it more difficult to provide and control formal education, new accommodations are being sought between national and local responsibility. In Brazil, for example, De Castro (2004) states: From a political institutional point of view and considering the autonomy of the federated entities, we can say that Brazil has 5,645 municipal educational systems, that can integrate (or not) with their respective state systems, and 26

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state systems, in addition to the Federal District. In any one territory, schools and students of both state and municipal systems can live together with autonomy to define the curriculum, teacher education and careers, didactical resources, scholar organization and planning. This complex system encompasses 50 million students, over 200,000 public and private schools and 2 million teachers working in basic education. (p. 97)

It would seem that in Brazil provision at the preschool level is a municipal responsibility, funding is a joint municipal and state responsibility, and evaluation a federal responsibility. Thus in preschool education alone three spatial scales are involved. There is a great deal of de facto decentralization anyway. Similar situations occur on a smaller overall scale in other countries in the region, leading to considerable disparities at all scales and levels. As a reaction to this level of disparity, geographical included, Ecuador, from 2007, has embarked on radical reforms that, according to Estereles and Bramwell (2015), have in effect reclaimed a unified system for the nation so that education has been reconceptualised as a human right and a public service, the national annual budget for pre-university education tripled from US$1094.6 in 2006 to US$2,908.4 million in 2012, universal school enrolment for children aged between 5 and 15 years of age has almost been achieved, the public school system has recovered some of its lost prestige and has grown at the expense of private schools, and a very ambitious plan of transformation of the quality of educational services is on its way. (p. 329)

Such a reclamation, achieved by the immense political will of the last two presidents of the country, is not the trend in the wider world. Near global neo-liberal market policies involving various forms of decentralization have in general prevailed. In sharp contrast to the consolidation of education within a unified national space is the extraordinary situation in the Israel–Palestine area. The former is a recognized state while the latter is not. Together they form a historic space that both dispute, but with quite different languages, cultures and education systems. In addition, Israel places constraints on Palestinian movement by constructing barriers, as mentioned earlier, and also by building its own Jewish settlements on Palestinian land, which Handel (2014) terms ‘gated communities’. Meantime, the Palestinians maintain their own security within the interstices. Furthermore, Palestine comprises two discrete spaces, the West Bank and Gaza, with Israeli territory between them. Gaza is at least one space, while the West Bank is what Handel (2014) describes as not just an aggregate of 124 ‘legal’ gated communities, but rather a single contiguous gated community, gating in turn, Palestinian ‘Islands’ within it. (p. 504)

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Schooling is provided discretely within each Israeli gated community and each Palestinian ‘island’ or ‘land cell’. The Israeli gated communities are connected by secure Israeli-only roads which in effect form a network controlling all space within the West Bank and enabling mobility. Such a situation inevitably and severely constrains the space and connections along lines needed by Palestinians to improve their education in all – primary, secondary and tertiary. In a recent memoir Ghada Karmi (2015) reviewed by Avi Shaim (2015), having returned from the UK to work for her Palestinian homeland, ‘saw nothing to lift her spirits’ (p. 8). Shaim continues: The worst blot on the landscape was the so-called ‘security barrier’ that the Israelis are building on the West Bank in flagrant violation of international law. … In the Gaza Strip, Karmi saw nothing but a spectrum of despair.

The educational consequences of these spatial aberrations are dire in the extreme, and they include the destruction of schools, deaths of numerous pupils, students, teachers and academics. The stranglehold on international educational intercourse, including migration is also operating. Nicolai (2007), referred to the situation in occupied Palestinian territory as Fragmented Foundations. This is a prime example of ‘education under attack’.

Education Under Attack In addition to the ever-changing spatial patterns of educational provision within regulated spaces, education is also under physical attack on a more localized basis. Major global conflict may have been deferred by the impact of two world wars, though a growing regional conflict is currently evident in and around the Middle East and North Africa(MENA) cultural region. Within and beyond this region, there has developed the phenomenon of more localized physical attacks on various aspects of education, which collectively is known as ‘education under attack’. This has come to be defined by the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (2014) as threats of deliberate use of force against students, teachers, academics, education trade union members and government officials, aid workers and other education staff, and against schools, universities and other educational institutions carried out for political, military, ideological, sectarian, ethnic or religious reasons. (Title Page)

The use of the term ‘threats’ is curious since the numerous incidents of death and destruction documented since the first volume of Education Under Attack

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Table 3.1 Selected examples of education under attack Colombia: Some 140 schoolteachers were murdered and more than 1000 schoolteachers received death threats, increasing in 2013. Children were recruited from school by armed groups and there continued to be reports of public security forces using schools for military purposes, despite legal curbs (p. 124). Pakistan: There were a reported 838 or more attacks on schools during 2009–12, more than any other country, leaving hundreds of schools destroyed. Militants recruited children from schools and madrassas, some to be suicide bombers. There were also targeted killings of teachers and academics (p. 168). Somalia: Islamic militants recruited large numbers of children from schools and abducted girls for forced marriage to fighters. Suicide bombings targeting students took a very heavy toll, and schools and universities were used as military bases for fighting (p. 178). Source: Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack (2014), Education Under Attack 2014, New York.

(O’Malley, 2007) were, and are, realities. In that first volume, attacks in about a quarter of the countries of the world were recorded. Subsequent volumes in 2010 and 2014, undertaken by the aforementioned Global Coalition, with Brendan O’Malley as lead researcher, detail 32 and 30 countries respectively. This does not indicate a reduction in attacks, but rather an editorial policy to focus on countries most affected. In terms of the geography of education this has significance at two main scales of observation, the local and the regional. Local examples are necessarily too numerous to mention here, but obviously impact severely on the geography of educational reality in the locations where they have occurred. This is illustrated in Table 3.1 by quoting from the summaries that precede the reports for each country in the 2014 Global Coalition Report. Moving to the global and national scales, and based only on the countries selected for inclusion in the 2010 and 2014 publications of Education Under Attack by the Global Coalition, one can see many of the countries concerned remaining, but with significant additions, namely: Bahrain, Central African Republic, Cote d’Ivoire, Egypt, Mali, Russia, South Sudan, Syria, Turkey and Yemen. No doubt the ongoing geography of ‘education under attack’ will continue to exhibit both continuity and change and to be a cautionary reminder of the realities obscured by the superficiality of routine descriptions of education systems.

Private Education Expansion Another dynamic phenomenon with significant spatial implications is the issue of the rapid growth of private education, increasingly common in the less

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developed countries of the world where tax revenues and international aid are inadequate to meet formal educational demand. In many such countries this has always been the case and may be accompanied by a lack of knowledge in the Ministry of Education as to which schools are actually functioning, and how. This was the case in Sierra Leone, once the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Sub-Saharan education, though largely due to the first African university, Fourah Bay College (once a college of the University of Durham) and the elite Bo School (OfforiAttah, 2015). Decades of post-independence corruption, and then civil war, led to a breakdown of the education system, and during attempts made to revive it in the 1990s it was found that over 100 ‘schools’ that were receiving public funding no longer existed, having become so-called ‘ghost schools’, and a similar number were operating on the basis of, in effect private, local community or tribal chief support, but apparently unknown to central authority (Brock, 1994). Although this is may well have been an extreme case it is not alone and is a salutary reminder not to rely on official statistics about educational provision in any country. Creating a simple schools map can be a significant geographical resource assisting further reform and development. Another contribution to the changing geography of education is the development of private provision of schooling for the poor, with the knowledge of the official system that is unable to meet the demand. James Tooley has long advocated this as a better way of providing schooling anyway (Tooley and Dixon, 2005 and Tooley, 2015). It can extend to private schools themselves reaching out to communities beyond their own clientele, as in India (Day-Ashley, 2005). The geography of private provision for schooling in less developed countries is an area that would reward further research and publication, although there has already been published several major works debating the pros and cons of this phenomenon, such as Srivastava (2013) and Srivastava and Walford (2007). Without a full analysis of how public and private, especially elementary, schooling in the less developed regions of the world respectively operate in spatial terms, a full picture of schooling remains unclear. The same applies to private provision of higher education in the so-called developing world. This is rapidly expanding in Latin America especially, a region that differs from other components of ‘the South’ in having a long tradition of formal education beginning with its earlier universities founded from the sixteenth century in areas under Spanish colonial rule. In all, thirty universities were founded from Lima and Mexico City in 1551 to Managua in 1812. By contrast, in the Portuguese colony of Brazil, universities, as opposed to seminaries, did not develop until the nineteenth century. Now, in the early twenty-first century more than a third of Brazilian universities are private

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(Salto, 2014). This phenomenon is apparent in other ‘BRIC’ countries, especially India (Powar, 2015) and China (Kai Yu and Ertl, 2013). As the economies develop, the knowledge and technological sectors need more appropriately skilled labour. However, the best of the well-established public universities still tend to be favoured, and there are signs that there is a slowing down of the private universities phenomenon, albeit unevenly (Levy, 2010).

Geographies of Cross-Border Education Further issues that complicate the spatial orientation of the tertiary sector of education systems are branch campuses, cross-border programmes and on-line provision. All these take the range of activity beyond the national scale, introducing new locations, networks and surfaces. Branch campuses, also termed overseas campuses or programmes, can be in a second industrialized country, as in the case of several from the USA in London: Syracuse, Tufts, Brigham Young and Florida State, among others. Some British, Australian and European universities have branch campuses overseas, such as: Nottingham in Ningbo, China, and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; the Sorbonne in Abu Dhabi; Australia’s Monash University in Malaysia and Wollongong University in Dubai. According to Li Zhang et al. (2014) there are now over 200 branch campuses worldwide, and there are a total of 12 international branch campuses established by 5 factordriven economies – including India, Iran, Philippines, and Venezuela. All the factor-driven economies establish their branch campuses in innovation-driven economies. United Arab Emirates (UAE) is the biggest importer, hosting eight of such international branch campuses, while India becomes the biggest factordriven exporting economy, having 9 branch campuses worldwide, mainly in UAE. (p. 8)

The example of the UAE brings to attention the growing phenomena of education hubs (Knight, 2013). While all major cities might claim to be education hubs of some kind (Morley and Robins, 1995 and Sassen, 2002), these are new concentrations of tertiary activity developed as part of a diversification of the local economy to include the knowledge business. Several of the other ‘Gulf states’ are also involved: Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, created Knowledge Village in 2003 and more recently the Dubai Education City. These linked initiatives aim to attract foreign branch campuses to offer education and training to international students

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who will be job ready for the bourgeoning service and knowledge economy in the Gulf states. Foreign education institutions and companies are located in an economic free zone with attractive financial and tax benefits. Qatar has taken a different approach, inviting and sponsoring six American institutions and one UK university to offer their full degree programs and qualifications to Qatari students and regional students. … The Global School House Project in Singapore is well known and has attracted a number of foreign universities and international students in order to position itself as a regional education hub for both education and research. (Knight, 2010, p. 20)

Singapore, described by Chang and Lee (2003) as a modern ‘Renaissance City’, has, in addition to its general educational excellence, established itself as a very distinctive hub: a ‘global city for the arts’. They contend that the intersection of geography and the arts reveals multiple spatialities. Just as the arts create new landscapes of culture, leisure and identity, geographical processes of globalization and the search for place values have also engendered new forms of artistic expressions. It is these multiple geographies of the arts that are the focus of our paper. Using Singapore as a case study we explore the landscapes and terrains that the arts occupy. Challenging conventional notions of arts spaces as only being physical spaces occupied by the arts, we propose to investigate the social environments and the creative landscapes of the arts as well. (p. 128)

They go on to illustrate how the government in Singapore has played its part in enabling suitable spaces and facilities to develop within the city, but also how a conflict between the global and the local, partly in cultural terms, leads to multiple meanings in the attempts to realize such a special educational and creative hub. Olds (2007) shows how the attraction of Singapore to universities in other countries has established it as a truly global education hub. Knight (2013) meantime offers a brief typology of education hubs: the overarching ‘regional education hub’; the ‘student hub’; the ‘education and training hub’; the ‘knowledge and innovation hub’, and concludes that ‘further work is needed in analysing this complex and important new development in cross-border education (p. 21). Cross-border education is not just a matter of education hubs. It is much more widespread than that and takes various forms, both public and private (Lane and Kinser, 2008). It can be developed on a continental or regional public basis involving, inter alia, mutual recognition of qualifications, as with the Bologna Process in Europe (European Commission, 2015) and a number of initiatives in Central America (Svensen, 2013). The

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Bologna Process was initiated in 1999 with twenty-nine member countries and had expanded by 2015 to include forty-seven countries including Russia and Turkey that are predominantly Asian in spatial terms. It also includes Greenland through its connections with Denmark. According to Hoell et al. (2009), the process was suffering ‘Bologna fatigue’ due to the slow process of rationalization and recognition of qualifications, and needs greater political will. At present the cultural geography of education is resisting the political in several countries. In Costa Rica, a country with a population of 5 million, there are five public universities and 18 private. More significantly it is the home of a consortium of regional universities. There are examples of the internationalization of higher education that reach their extreme in the form of the University of California Los Angeles Center for Global Education. This has a global outreach for students reading for its qualifications and also for its own students to study in all other continents. It is not alone in that such opportunities are apparent in all regions of the world. Middlehurst (2015) refers to this as a process of denationalization of institutions as they ‘reframe the scope of their vision, structures and strategies beyond the national scale’ (p. 4). In so doing they are part of the ‘knowledge business’, a feature of economic geography: Global networks are not just proliferating among institutions; they also cross sectors to engage new partners and leverage partnership assets to achieve benefits for businesses, citizens and universities. ‘Triple-helix’ innovation systems are one example where traditionally separated innovation sources have come together – product development in industry, policy-making in government, and creation and dissemination of knowledge in academia – to facilitate development of new organizational designs, new knowledge products, and services. (ibid., p. 4)

The internationalization of higher education has become such an influential issue as to have the prime centre of the study of tertiary education, The Centre for International Higher Education at Boston College, Massachusetts, USA, devote two entire issues of its journal to this theme (Issue 78 in Spring 2014 and Issue 83 in November 2015). The forty articles overall are wide-ranging, not all having key geographical significance, but those that are most obviously spatial are: ‘Internationalizing Students in the Home Country – The Netherlands’ (Van Gaalen and Gielesen [2014]); ‘Internationalizing Research in Saudi Arabia: Purchasing Questionable Privilege’ (Ahmed, 2014); and ‘Internationalization of Japanese Universities: Learning from the CAMPUS Asia Experience’ (Horie [2014]) in Issue 78 and in Issue 83: ‘The Future of the Internationalization of Higher Education in Europe’ (de Wit and Hunter); ‘Ensuring Equality in Higher

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Education Partnerships Involving Unequal Universities in Divergent Contexts’ (Hagenmeier) and ‘India’s Emergence as a Regional Education Hub’ (Khare). Some institutions are not seeking to operate outside their national borders, or be part of a hub, but rather to receive increasing numbers of undergraduate students from other countries. An increasing number of British school leavers are migrating to Europe to undertake undergraduate as well as postgraduate programmes. According to the Guardian Weekend magazine of 3rd October 2015: Over the past fortnight approximately half a million new undergraduates have embarked on student life across the UK. … But just as they begin to settle into lectures thousands more British students are already into their studies at universities across mainland Europe. … According to Study Portals, a search platform for undergraduate and postgraduate courses, there is now a ‘critical mass’ of English-taught programmes on offer across non-English-speaking Europe. Its database now lists around 1,800 such courses for undergraduates alone. You can chose psychology at Groningen, art management in Lithuania, even medicine in Plovdiv, a former industrial town in Bulgaria with a population of 340,000. (p. 64)

The University of Groningen, dating from the early seventeenth century and one of the oldest in the Netherlands, offers about 25 bachelor’s programmes in the medium of English and over 100 master’s likewise. It attracts increasing numbers from the UK due to much lower fees as well as having a global outreach system for all courses. It ranks high in the world league table and offers a truly multinational and multicultural experience in curricular and extra-curricular experiences alike. Further discussion of international student migration follows. Knight (2005) proposed a sixfold typology of cross-border higher education based on the type of institutions involved: (a) recognized higher education institutions (i.e. part of the home national education system whether public, private or religious); (b) non-recognized higher education institutions (i.e. private and for profit); (c) commercial company higher education institutions (i.e. companies and international conglomerates); (d) corporate higher education institutions (i.e. providing education and training for their employees); (e) networks and affiliations (i.e. complex arrangements for academic, financial, legal and accreditation gain); (f) virtual higher education institutions (on-line providers which may or may not be recognized). Many of these are what Knight refers to as ‘new providers’ who represent the massive expansion of global post-school services and which can be divided into ‘programs on the move’ and ‘providers on the move’. Stambach (2012), by contrast, put forward a twofold model of the

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free market in higher education that, she contends, ‘appear to sit in opposition’: (a) the ‘global market-place’ and (b) the ‘global commons’: The first stresses the commercial value of the exchange of people and products. The second emphasizes the open exchange of knowledge, goods, and information  –  of natural and social resources, most useful when shared. Proponents of both models spar over how best to regulate cross-border higher education – to structure international trade in education services. Disagreement arises because ideas about the free market, upon which both models turn, rest upon different yet related understandings of wealth, freedom and the public. (p. 8)

All this is part of the internationalization of higher education which questions the standard description of the tertiary sector in most countries. Should not the students of any country who study abroad, and what they study, be included in the record of the higher education sector of their home country as well as in that of the host country? Likewise, the product of the tertiary sector of one country that finds its way to others could be seen as a part of the system of either, or any, of the countries concerned. This is part of the geography of education in both giving and receiving countries and the spaces and networks they share. We can see from the previous discourse that although a crude typology of education systems may be possible, there are probably no pure forms of Hopper’s modes of selection, rather only greater or lesser variants of each. This does not invalidate his theory. Furthermore, no national or territorial systems are static or sealed. There is a great deal of human migration involved at all levels, as people seek what they consider the best educational opportunities available to them, their families and communities.

Historical Geographies of Educational Migration Educational migration is clearly part of any system and at a range of scales. Cross-national migration is one of them as shown by the discussion of education hubs and cross-border higher education earlier. Such physical migrations are neither new nor confined to students. They involve teachers as well, as illustrated by the study of ‘academic pilgrims’ by Van de Bunt-Kokhuis (1996) in which she examined the movements of academics of different status within the European Union, including through a number of official schemes to encourage and fund such cross-fertilization of experiences and ideas. She followed this up with the article ‘Academic Pilgrims: Faculty Mobility in the Virtual World’ (Van de

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Bunt-Kokhuis, 2001), thus illustrating that educational migration has long since ceased to be purely physical. Migration of scholars is very long standing. As already mentioned, during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ in Europe, Christian Scholars and their Arab (later Islamic) counterparts travelled widely to meet and discuss philosophical and scientific issues of the day. These were in effect early conferences, a regular feature of international academic life today. They occurred even in difficult circumstances such as between Israeli and Palestinian academics. During the ‘age of Enlightenment’ from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a great deal of interaction between leading scientists, which was paralleled by ‘The Grand Tour’. This was a more relaxed intellectual tour undertaken by wealthy – mainly Protestant – young men, often Oxbridge graduates, which followed a set itinerary to take in locations and discussions relating to Classical and Renaissance European culture. It was a feature for about 200 years from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, when the advent of rail travel opened up the opportunity to the nouveau-riche to undertake a less exclusive and geographically more wide-ranging version. Pioneer travel agencies organized such trips led by Thomas Cook, hence the soubriquet ‘Cook’s Tour’ that survives today. Travels of an educational nature figured in the work of such pioneers as the anthropologist Mary Kingsley and the founding father of university geography in Britain, Halford Mackinder (Kearns, 1997). Both were imperialists, not surprisingly in the late nineteenth century, but as Kearns points out this involved a level of subjectivity not at ease with their professional occupations. Another important dimension of British colonialism that influenced education was the operations of trading companies. Ogborn (2002) explored the significance of ‘power, knowledge and ritual’ in the writings of the English East India Company. He shows how writing travels which concentrates on the production, carriage and use of texts as material objects can foreground the active and collective making of global geographies as a contested enterprise involving multiple agents in a variety of sites. (p. 155)

Ogborn (2000) includes in an earlier analysis the geographical significance of the ships that necessarily conveyed the writings. He sees the ship as three spaces  – ‘as a material space, as an accounting space and as a political space’ (p. 161)  – and as an early agent of globalization. The historical dimension of educational dissemination has attracted other contemporary geographers. For example, Taylor et al. (2008) mapped activities in science through urban networks from

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the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries, identifying in the process four progressive networks: A primate network centred on Padua and northern Italy in the sixteenth century expands across the Alps to become a polycentric network in the seventeenth century, which in turn dissipates into a weak polycentric network in the eighteenth century. The nineteenth century marks a huge change of scale as a primate network centred on Berlin and dominated by German-speaking universities. (p. 391)

They deal with structures of knowledge as well as core–periphery issues, urban networks of science and the spatial dynamics of the career paths of leading scientists. They point out that during the time span in question ‘scientists’ were not a coherent group of specialists, but rather included clerics, medics and general men of letters. Joseph Priestley and Henry Cavendish come to mind in that regard, being reputedly the discoverers of oxygen and hydrogen respectively. Taylor and his colleagues present four substantial tables of scientists’ movements through places from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. They show the leading node in each case followed by about twenty subsidiary nodes. Abstracting from their data the main node and just the following three subsidiaries, the progression is as follows: sixteenth century (Padua + Montpellier, Rome and Bologna); seventeenth century (London + Leiden, Padua and Jena); eighteenth century (Paris + Berlin, Leiden and Gottingen); nineteenth century (Berlin + Munich, Gottingen and Heidelberg). They note the relative absence of leading British nodes in the nineteenth century, which was the time when the nation’s global power was at its greatest, commenting that ‘it was not in Oxford and Cambridge that new practical technologies were created, rather the great cities of northern Britain such as Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow were the vibrant cities underpinning British hegemony’ (p. 23 ). Although these cities had, or gained, universities in the nineteenth century, the inference is that such institutions had ceased to be the only nodes of knowledge creation and dissemination. The authors even state: If the model is extrapolated it suggests that in the current century this successful net’s organization will dissipate; we might argue that this is happening as scientific research leaves the university for new corporate masters in another qualitative change in the nature of scientific practice. (p. 22)

Such a situation was foreshadowed by the European Commission (1994), in which ‘islands of innovation’ were identified as key locations in the ‘geographical

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patterns of RTD (Research and Technological Development) activity in the Community’ (p. 100), which are highly concentrated in comparatively few ‘Islands of Innovation’. These islands are relatively small, mostly urban areas, with a dense network of enterprises and research laboratories interacting in the development of new products and processes of production. A limited number of such islands in the Community stand out from the rest: Greater London, Rotterdam/Amsterdam, Isle de France, The Ruhr area, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Munich, Lyon/Grenoble, Turin and Milan. (ibid., p. 101)

The late twentieth century and the early twenty-first centuries thus far have seen symbiotic relationships between universities and corporations in the form of science parks such as the so-called ‘Silicon Fen’ in Cambridge (Ibrahim, 1998) and the Oxfordshire Biotechnology Sector (Smith et al., 2000), both examples of the changing nature of the geographic space of many universities in the more advanced economies. The spatial land use of both universities gained in complexity and area over this period, while most of Gilbert’s (1961) other English universities were being born. This was part of the development of an international hierarchy of spaces of knowledge production, which was due to both expand and intensify with the advent of global air travel during the second half of the twentieth century and with the physical migration of established scholars and researchers. With regard to the UK and the ongoing focus of scientific research in harness with commercial enterprise, the increasing focus on London is illustrated by the construction of a research and development hub on disused railway land adjacent to King’s Cross and St Pancras railway stations. According to the Financial Times (on-line) in December 2013 this, the Francis Crick Institute, is ‘the standard-bearer of London’s scientific ambitions’ and ‘the biggest bio-medical research centre under construction in the world’. It is jointly funded by the government, medical research charities and three universities: Imperial, University College, London, and King’s College, London. It is a prime example of the commercialization of research and development and will be a global hub, already attracting the top talent from around the world from 2015. Commercialization of higher education and research is even evident in contemporary Russia with the revival of the aforementioned Akademgorodok, about which Wainwright (2016) writes after visiting the new Akadem park: ‘We tour the building, dropping in on some of the 300 companies working on everything from nano-ceramics to motion graphics for the American entertainment industry’ (p. 17). Migration can occur, and on a massive scale, without movements of population at all, but instead though conflict and occupation. A prime example

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of this is in twentieth-century Europe, when the First World War affected not only Germany but virtually the whole continent. Following the 1914–18 war German borders were adjusted and its colonies in Africa and elsewhere taken over by other powers with, for example, German East Africa becoming the British colony Tanzania, and German South-West Africa becoming Namibia, mandated to the Republic of South Africa by Britain, both in due course becoming independent nations. In Europe itself, during the Second World War there was the temporary and shifting education space of Nazi Germany and its occupied extensions. Following that conflict many boundary changes were agreed among the victorious powers, the most dramatic probably being a significant westwards shift of Poland. Also within the reduced Germany itself, the territory was divided temporarily between the four victorious powers France, Russia, the UK and the USA. Within its occupied area each of these sought to reform German formal education in its own image, though the UK did this to a lesser degree. After Germany was reconstituted as a democratic nation the education system reverted to its long-established form except in the Soviet-occupied zone which became a new nation, East Germany, with a Soviet-oriented education system. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, East and West Germany were united and the education system of the West was introduced to the East. There were many boundary changes in central Europe as well, with millions of people in effect migrating without moving. Japan, having occupied much of China and Korea in the mid-twentieth century, was also defeated and occupied, this time by the USA. Shibata (2005) conducted a comparative study of education in the US zone of post-war Germany and Japan after 1945.

Contemporary International Student Migration This is one of the aspects of geographies of education that has attracted the attention of contemporary geographers more than most, and is a rapidly growing sub-field. At least five factors are responsible for this: (a) the aforementioned advent and expansion of global air travel; (b) the massification of higher education; (c) the development of this sector as a leading feature of the knowledge business; (d)  the global disparities in the quality and availability of higher education and (e) the growth of higher-degree availability and expectation for career enhancement and subsequent employment. While international migration in relation to higher education constitutes most, it must also be noted that it also occurs to a significant degree at school

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age. This is of two main types: (a) within the state school sector, whether part of routine family migration (as within the European Union) or as refugees; (b) within the private school network, where in England there has been a growth in numbers enrolling from overseas (Henry, 2009) especially from East and South-East Asia, Eurasia and the Middle East. Approximately half of the UK’s private boarding schools actively market overseas, with some looking to relatively new locations, such as Badminton School’s focus on Eastern Europe, Russia and Kazakhstan. Another aspect of this is the growth of networks of international schools, some of which are global in their outreach. An early example of this was the establishment of United World Colleges in 1962, initially with Atlantic College in South Wales, and associated with the foundation of the International Baccalaureate (IB). The International School Community (ISC), through its research department, highlights the significance of the medium of English as an attraction, and estimates that there will likely be over 6,000 such schools worldwide by 2025. Some UK private schools have established branch campuses, such as Harrow School in Thailand, Wellington College in China and Brighton College in the United Arab Emirates. Research into international schooling of various types has, as a prime centre in the UK, the Centre for the Study of Education in an International Context at the University of Bath, developed by Dr Mary Hayden, its current director, and Professor Jeff Thompson, founding editor of its journal, The Journal of Research in International Education (see Hayden et al., 2007 and Hayden and Thompson, 2008). Their interests include all education sectors from primary to tertiary. Significant as migration of students and institutions may be at school level, it is international student migration at tertiary level that has attracted more attention from academic geographers, and contributes more to the nascent literature of geographies of education. Continuing the theme of nodes and networks Hoyler and Jöns (2008) use the term ‘global knowledge networks’. They mapped the top 500 universities in the ‘Shanghai Ranking’ of 2006 and found a massive divide between the universities of the ‘global North’ and those of the ‘Global south’ in terms of nodes of attraction. Within the overall picture four clusters were evident: (a) North America, with nodes around New York and Boston; (b) Western Europe, with nodes around Paris and London; (c) East Asia, with nodes around Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai; and (d) South-East Australia, with Sydney as the main node. They summarize the situation as follows: Knowledge and education factor into the formation of global networks through clusters of world-class universities, the international circulation of faculty and students, and scientific collaborations. (p. 361)

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The final point is reinforced by the increasing incidence of international co-authorship of articles, chapters and books which contribute significantly to the development of theory in this area of geography. Observation has already been made of the uneven patterns of flows of international students between countries along the interlocking and overlapping networks involved. The historical development of nodes and networks mentioned earlier were largely between established urban centres of learning in a modernizing Europe and its colonial bridgeheads. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, students from less developed countries have become increasingly more involved in such migrations. Perkins and Neumayer (2014) seek to ‘not only demonstrate important differences in the determinants of international student mobility between developed and developing countries, but also between different sub-groupings of developing countries’ (p. 246). Using UNESCO data and a quantitative approach they cover a larger sample than previous studies, claiming a near ‘global sample of both source and destination countries’ (p. 247). They found that the number and quality (according to international league tables) in the destination country was not a significant factor, but that considerably more influential are levels of income in destination countries, together with relational ties created by colonial linkages, common language and pre-existing migrant stocks. (p. 247)

They present comprehensive illustrations in both cartographic and tabular forms of the flows and patterns of both incoming and outgoing students. SubSaharan Africa stands out as, with the exception of the Republic of South Africa, the least involved of the major regions. Contrasting 1999 with 2009 they show a number of significant differences but fewer similarities. The flow from China to the USA is the most substantial in both years, rising from 46, 949 to 124, 225. Other flows still in the top ten across that decade were: India to the USA China to Japan, Republic of Korea to the USA, Japan to the USA. Morocco to France is only just outside at eleventh in 2009. In so far as less developed countries are concerned, there are none in the top twenty from Latin America to the USA, but Malaysia – now only questionably in that category – showed significant flows to Australia in both 1999 and 2009. This study says more about nearest neighbour factors such as significant flows from Belarus to Russia, Kazakhstan to Russia and Slovakia to the Czech Republic than it does about migration of students from the less developed countries, which make up the majority, in respect of which the authors recommend more detailed research. Such flows as exist from the ‘Global South’ are mainly from the elite

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of developing countries and often contribute to a ‘brain drain’. Looking in the other direction, there are considerable international flows of students from industrialized countries, as examined by Findlay et al. (2012), who study UK students travelling to six national overseas destinations. They see this as part of the increasing competition for global talent, and seek to describe and analyse student mobility as a process linking three life-stage arenas (school, university and labourmarket outcomes) rather than a ‘one-off ’ migration ‘event’. Our focus is on understanding the differentiation of educational structures in relation to each of these three spatial arenas in order to interpret the meanings attached to ISM. By implication these ‘spaces’ operate at different scales, with universities, for example, occupying institutional spaces nested within the geopolitical territories of state and trans-state systems. (pp. 119–20)

The broad context of ISM is that of increasing imbalance and differentiation between national systems containing universities, which is accompanied and represented by the changing position of institutions on the perceived international hierarchy. This relates to some degree to the tendency for transnational research flows to develop into lasting relationships, as Geddie (2013) has shown in connection with science and engineering research students. This may be illustrated by the decision of the University of Warwick in England to have one of its pro-vice-chancellors responsible for transnational education. Given that the current vice chancellor of the university is the geographer Nigel Thrift, a significant contributor to the literature of the geography of education, this is perhaps not surprising. There is a clear behavioural dimension at work behind decisions as to where to migrate to, with the enhancement of individual cultural capital being one of the key objectives. Such aspiration of inter-generational upward social mobility is typical of the middle classes, and especially where this social stratum is expanding, as in China (Waters, 2006). Such inter-generational drive is evident at pre-university level, including the aforementioned migration to elite schools whether within or between countries. Findlay et al. (2012) constructed a model with four dimensions: society, politics, economy and culture within which they illustrate different flows, for example, the progression from elite (often private) schools to world class universities and on to international careers. This can be exemplified by the inclusion of a ‘Harvard experience’ within the progressive profile of leading UK politicians and businessmen and women. Such an analysis is instructional in that it illustrates spatial dimensions within educational

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experience – a core component of geographies of education. It also illustrates the growing internationalization of higher education as the aspirant middle classes of many nations seek to acquire a cutting edge through mobility. As with the mobility noted earlier in relation to private schools, that involving higher education students can exhibit new and particular nodes and movements. A case in point is that of migration between Hong Kong and Canada examined by Waters (2006), who points out that it may not only be students involved but, as she puts it, ‘a link between parental choice, class status and social mobility’ (p. 179). There is also the wider context, the return of Hong Kong to China from the UK in 1997: a significant change in political geography, though student migration to Canada had been well established by then. For rather obvious reasons the desired locus of destination has been Vancouver, and within that the bourgeoning suburb of Richmond, the location of the international airport, and where 60 per cent of the population are immigrants. There, younger Chinese students can follow their older siblings and friends into universities having already covered the transnational stage of migration, though others still make the full journey. Another, more recent trend based on middle class aspiration through higher education is that between Central Asia and the West Asia (Ahmed, 2013), Kazakhstan in particular (Mukhtarova, 2013), a country that has been free from Soviet rule for over two decades, is the beneficiary of immense mineral wealth, and has a rapidly growing middle class. This means a stronger cultural capital that can be further enhanced by international higher educational experience, as illustrated by Holloway et al. (2012). They highlight the issues of gender and family life in the migration process, demonstrating that ‘class is experienced in significantly different ways by young men and women in the context of locally specific forms of heterosexuality, forms which in our case study reflect the cultural importance of Islam’ (p. 278). Growth of higher educational opportunity within an emergent country, allied to its greater physical accessibility, inevitably devalues a personal profile that becomes relatively commonplace. Enhancing that profile can be achieved by international migration, and for some, a period of overseas employment. On returning home females will be in a better position to find a well-paid husband while still maintaining their own enhanced status and the requirements of religion. The situation of the quarter of the population of Kazakhstan that are ethnic Russians will mostly not have this additional consideration. The wider global context of gender within transnational educational mobility was examined by Jöns (2011) with respect to academic researchers in the late twentieth century in Europe. It was found that while the mobility of females was

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still significantly less than that of their male counterparts, it was nonetheless increasing. This contrasted with information on researchers early in their career, which showed greater gender parity. There was also found to be significant differences depending on the country of origin, with female researchers from Denmark, Portugal, France and Spain having the most positive profiles and with Germany having the most negative. Overall, there were found to be fewer transnational female researchers in the natural sciences, and they were less likely to be hosts. The study by Jöns was based on a project funded by the German Research Council and led by Peter Meusberger, one of the most prominent and longstanding protagonists of geographies of education.

Concluding Comments This chapter has been concerned with education systems that, on a superficial descriptive level, give the impression that they are indicators of what actually happens on a national scale. While their prime objectives are clear – personal selection (on various pretexts), social and political control, and contributors to national economic growth – when subjected to a greater range of scales of observation they are extremely variable within, porous without, and changeable. With their origins being in the nation-state formations of industrializing Europe, they exhibit considerable contrast in terms of the degree and nature of centralization involved in their evolution. In Europe, the home of the ‘Western European Idea of Education’ (Mallinson, 1980) that now provides the near global paradigm, pre-national development and spread of formal education occurred in and through urban centres of trade and authority (political and religious) and their spheres of influence rather than within formal regulated territories. The earliest system of schooling as such was developed in Prussia following the popularization of education through the German vernacular in the Lutheran Reformation. Thereafter individual nation-states developed public schooling as a necessary element of their cohesion, identity, industrialization and economic growth. The origins and growth of the education system of the USA were predicated on the earlier development of schooling in the pioneer colonization that formed the thirteen British colonies in North America. Of necessity this began with the schools of individual and largely independent townships and this degree of local influence became grounded in the formation of school districts as the fundamental cultural geographical and unit of provision and funding. The Constitution of an independent USA respected this by excluding federal control,

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leaving public education as the responsibility of individual states of the Union. This is still the case, and contrasts strongly with the situation in the UK with its four component national systems. In England, which is the largest of these national systems, no public system at all was evident until the late nineteenth century when compulsory primary schooling for all was gradually implemented, and secondary education for all was not instituted until the mid-twentieth century. Curiously, it may seem that the neo-liberal culture of competition generated in the USA in the mid-twentieth century has taken hold most fundamentally in education in England, with local education authorities now virtually sidelined by an atomization of school provision answerable individually and only to the national authority in London. Between, and indeed within, these two highly contrasting national situations it is clear that, at least with regard to schooling, the geography of educational reality can only be observed at the local scale of individual schools, communities and post-school institutions. This matter of scale is profoundly geographical, as per Walford’s (1975) model of spaces, lines and points, within, along and at which educational provision and activity actually occurs as a space-saving operation. This combination can be seen most strikingly in the extraordinary situation in the Palestinian West Bank which, like the whole of Palestine, also including Gaza, is not yet an internationally recognized state. In that part of Palestine, the neighbouring state of Israel has established numerous illegal settlements that are in effect land islands, or secure ‘gated communities’, where schooling, inter alia, takes place. These communities are linked together by roads, available only to Israeli citizens, that also connect to the main, legal, area of Israel. Such ‘private’ roads, and sometimes walls as well, imprison the Palestinians within their own fragmented mini enclaves. Each of these numerous micro areas, Palestinian and Israeli, is an educational microcosm in which information is imparted respectively through Islamic and Jewish cultural norms. Yet even these educational spaces, Palestine and Israel, also exhibit the other main characteristic of so-called national systems of education, that related to inward and outward migration. Migration of educational influences and activities pre-date the emergence of national systems from pre-historic links between European and Asian educators and have continued on into the twenty-first century. Indeed, they are increasing at school, and especially at higher education levels, as a feature of globalization that has both cultural and economic dimensions. As has also been illustrated earlier it is possible for people to ‘migrate’ without actually moving if national areas and borders change. The political history of Europe is replete with examples such as the westward

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shift of Poland as a result of the Second World War and the temporary division of Germany into East and West. Indeed, within the western area there were immediately after 1945 for several years three areas operated by occupying powers – the British, French and American authorities sought to reform formal education in their own images. It is therefore clear that national education systems are, and rarely have been, discrete, geographically or otherwise. The twin cultural and political character of educational identity and provision is becoming increasingly geographically complex, as is the gendered dimension. As indicated at the beginning of this discourse, the provision of formal education, within and between regulated spaces, is in any case only one of three forms of education, the formal. The majority of what people learn comes from the other two, non-formal and informal. Consequently, the following chapter will consider selected geographies of education arising from, and associated with, these two forms of learning.

4

Geographies of Non-Formal and Informal Education

Introduction Definitions of the three forms of education are offered in Table 1.1 In the learning experience of most individuals all three forms make a contribution, but a significant difference of formal education is that it is time-bound, though differentially between its three sectors, primary, secondary and tertiary. The majority of the world’s population has some experience of primary schooling, though millions still do not. The Millennium Development Goals of 2015 for universal primary schooling and gender parity at that level have not been met, with sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia as the main regions with deficiencies in this regard. Nonetheless, primary age children in such circumstances, and especially in indigenous communities, experience non-formal and informal education as, in different ways, we all do, through family, community and media. The significant and contemporary incidence of geographies of education, evident in the publications of professional geographers, has been largely to do with non-formal and informal aspects of learning and teaching. It has also mostly been concerned with the experiences of children and young people, as well as with student migration, which is of course between formal education institutions. Non-formal education, which is organized but largely outside the mainstream formal institutions of an official system of primary, secondary and tertiary learning, takes place in a wide variety of contexts, some of which are, to some degree at least, institutionalized. Prime examples are the military, companies and other work-related contexts, places of entertainment, and religious bodies. The particular field of acquisition of knowledge and skills in the workplace is massive and under-researched as compared with formal education. The contribution of

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McMorran (2012) is a relatively rare occurrence. Based on a case study in Japan using participant observation, he concludes: Given that work comprises a major part of most adult lives, it is imperative that geographers better understand not only where people work and what they say about their jobs, but also the unspoken aspects of work and work-paces that are difficult to address in interviews, surveys and other methods that are removed from the workplace context and its practices. If geographers want to better understand how place impacts labour geographies, they need to experience the everyday practices of labour in place.

This is becoming increasingly important as people become more mobile, taking a succession of jobs in different locations and for different periods of time. Given that a very significant proportion of learning takes place in workrelated contexts throughout the world, all that can be offered here is simply that in scale it ranges in spatial terms from a small family business to a global-scale corporation. The variety of educational structures, procedures and networks inherent across this spectrum offers a challenge to those involved in geographies of education in terms of research, dissemination and publication in the field of largely adult education. Education for adults can also be more loosely organized and as such is often seen as a challenge to various forms of status quo preferred by those in positions of power and authority, or as Lalage Bown (1986) put it: ‘adult education versus the state’ (p. 63). As she points out, this was certainly true of the experience of emergent initiatives in late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century Britain.

Aspects of Historical Geography and Non-Formal Education in Britain Bown commences her account of this conflict with reference to the emergence of what were termed ‘corresponding societies’ ‘dedicated to political reform and operating through discussion, lectures and the circulation of books’ (ibid., p. 63). In the UK, such societies operated from London, Manchester, Nottingham and Sheffield in England, and Dundee, Glasgow, Kilmarnock, Paisley and Perth in Scotland. At that time there was no universal suffrage. There were many smaller corresponding societies and in Scotland alone 80 such organizations sent delegates to a conference in Edinburgh in 1792. One of the leaders was arrested, tried and sentenced to transportation overseas for 14 years. Others were also transported, and in 1799 an Act of Parliament was passed making corresponding

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societies illegal (p. 64). Two hundred years later, as we shall see next, there is in the early twenty-first century, a virtual worldwide attack on the invaluable work of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) because they expose the shortcomings and discrimination of governments in respect of educational, economic and political opportunity for their populations, adults included. At about the same time as the short-lived efforts of the correspondence societies for adults, there were growing pressures arising for the children of the masses. Sunday schools, though non-formal, were, in a way, a first step towards elementary schooling in England, becoming established from the late eighteenth century, and leading to the foundation of the Society for the Promotion and Establishment of Sunday Schools. They formed an important strand in the geographically disparate opportunities for young children in the rapidly expanding mass of the population associated with industrialization in England. Prior to the 1870 Education Act requiring formal primary schooling for all, all schooling in England was by definition a non-formal activity whether public or private. In the rapidly changing population and settlement geography of midnineteenth-century England, with the significant influence of the emergent railways, peaks and troughs of literacy became apparent between the growing industrial conurbations and the peripheral rural areas, as illustrated in the form of a geographical profile in Figure 4.1.

Figure 4.1 Peaks and troughs in literacy and schooling in the major ecological zones of mid-nineteenth-century England Source: Brock, C. (2015), ‘Social and Spatial Disparity in the History of School Provision in England from the 1750s to the 1950s’, in An Introduction to the Study of Education, D. Matheson (ed.), Abingdon and New York, Routledge, p. 139.

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Although there was no public education provision in England at that time, in the sense of state-funded institutions, education endowments had established small grammar schools in many market towns, especially in the sixteenth century. As industrialization and related transport facilities developed in the eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, greater disparities appeared in the interstices of such networks, as well as between nodes. Wealth concentrated in the centres of conurbations with associated educational provision, while mass poverty in the inner suburbs, as well as in rural areas, was characterized by mass illiteracy. It is important not to equate formal education with schools as such. The definition of formal offered earlier means a formal official system of education, usually national but sometimes intra-national. In view of the fact that the grammar schools, church-based primary schools, and some other learning institutions, were not part of an English national system at that time, there was even greater disparity in both locations and quality than would likely have occurred within such an official system. Predominantly rural areas were particularly deficient as Gillett (1952) noted in respect of rural Lincolnshire. There was, in consequence, great administrative diversity and a marked variation in efficiency. Some schools were good, some very bad. In some the master really taught the children. In others he merely drew his income and gave but small service in return. He might be ignorant, dissolute or senile, but once he was appointed he could rest in reasonable certainty that the law would treat his office as his freehold and that the chance that he would ever be dismissed was infinitely small. (p. 27)

There were, though, a few market towns with grammar schools in Lincolnshire and the City of Lincoln, the centre of an extensive Anglican diocese of some significance for the early days of learning in England, with Oxford, at its southernmost periphery, as Figure 4.2 illustrates. St Hugh of Lincoln was known to favour periods of release from his duties at the centre of the diocese in order to study in the cluster of seminaries in the Oxford area at its southernmost periphery. He was among the handful of scholars responsible for establishing the first few colleges that later became the critical mass necessary for the Pope to grant the establishment of a university there. The county of Lincolnshire can claim to be the home of two of the most distinguished intellectual innovators in the history of science and mathematics, Isaac Newton and George Boole. The latter is reputedly the founder of the mathematics of computing and symbolic logic. Boole’s early life in education

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Figure 4.2 The extent of the Lincoln Diocese under St Hugh Source: Farmer, D. H. (1985), Saint Hugh of Lincoln, Darton, Longman and Todd, p. 26.

provides further insight into the opportunities for non-formal schooling in England in the early nineteenth century. Born in the City of Lincoln of modestly educated but economically poor parents he was able to enjoy a basic schooling to the age of sixteen, became a teaching assistant, but had no opportunity to go

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to university. On leaving school he had to provide for the whole family and so became a teacher in the town of Doncaster, about 40 miles from Lincoln, and then in Liverpool on the far side of the country. He returned to the family and in 1834 at the age of 19 founded his own school in Lincoln, a day school for both boys and girls, in itself something of an innovation. That he was schooled, and then taught, in modest establishments for what we might call the ‘upper working class’ meant that his efforts and experience were a small part of an organic development of popular schooling that represented a kind of sedimentary accumulation of a loose and incomplete substratum on which a system of education was eventually and unevenly formed. In 1843 Boole had the opportunity to take over a larger school four miles from the city of Lincoln at Waddington (MacHale, 2014). Like all schools in those days in England it depended on fees of about £25 per year. Since this is a discourse of a geographical nature it is interesting to note that, in addition to aspects of mathematics and English, the only other core subject in the curriculum at Boole’s school was geography. In 1849 George Boole, still not a graduate, was appointed on the basis of several extraordinary publications to the Professorship of Mathematics at the then Queen’s College, Cork, now University College Cork, the main library of which today is the Boole Library. A key event in the personal educational ambition of the young Boole seems to have been the initiative of his largely self-taught father, John, as a founder member of the Lincoln Mechanic’s Institute to which George Boole subsequently devoted a great deal of his spare time. Such mechanic’s institutes were nonformal educational initiatives for working men, and sometimes women and girls as well. Although invaluable opportunities for people such as Boole, ‘they were manipulated by the rising middle class for a mixture of altruistic and self-interested motives, more the latter than the former’ (Brock 2014b, p. 146). Hemming (1977), though, testifies to the existence of more than just training in some of the Institutes, including ‘an academically attractive package which progressed and contributed to the modern and technical school traditions’ (p. 24). Some such initiatives were occupation specific, such as those promoted by the Yorkshire Miners’ Association, and therefore geographically concentrated. As Benson (1980) explains: It was in the coalfields where large-scale mining operations combined with widespread immigration had thrown up new communities with inadequate educational facilities, that colliery undertakings made their greatest contribution. Thus, although extensive mining organisations tended to produce settlements in which unsatisfactory social conditions prevailed, they were able, because of their very size, to attempt to alleviate these evils. Colliery communities were generally

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both working-class preserves and isolated from the rest of society so that the mine owner himself was almost the only member of the middle – class whose social conscience was available to be awakened and turned towards educational ends. (p. 17)

The spatially disparate and therefore unequal availability of education access in nineteenth-century England was also a concern for those not having workrelated opportunities. This was an issue evident to the university sector and in particular to the founding father of comparative education, Michael Sadler. He was first appointed to Oxford in 1885 to two positions, one collegiate – to Christ Church – the other to the university. The latter was ‘as secretary to the Oxford Delegacy’, an organization dedicated to bringing educational opportunities to adults in many locations throughout the country (Mackinder and Sadler, 1891 and Brock and Alexiadou, 2013, pp. 9–10). Sadler was indefatigable in his travels and lectures, and always keen to learn himself about the innumerable variations of circumstance and initiative that were to be fundamental to his understanding of context and scale to the analysis of educational problems and initiatives. It is perhaps no surprise that in 1891, his co-author of ‘University Extension, Past, Present and Future’ was none other than the renowned Halford Mackinder, Professor of Geography at Oxford. (ibid., p. 10)

Adult Education, broadly defined, later became a role and department of English universities as they increased in number during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In some cases the near nationwide non-formal adult extension work of Oxford and Cambridge led to the founding of a university. For example, the University of Hull had its origins in ‘The Hull University Extension Society’ founded in September 1876 by a small group of professional men (Bamford, 1978, p. 1). This was part of the extension work of the University of Cambridge and led gradually to the founding of University College, Hull, in 1927, as was the practice at that time initially validated by the University of London. During the interim of 51 years the Hull University Extension Society not only provided programmes of a high academic quality but also: ‘fitted into the matrix of voluntary organizations in Hull, and, given the apathy of the Corporation to its responsibilities in this field, alone provided the basis of higher education in the later nineteenth century’ (ibid., p. 2). Hull was the last of the so-called civic universities to be founded in England, and the last university before the Second World War. The origins of some of the next wave of universities, the so-called ‘new universities’ of the 1960s, lay in technical institutions that

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had been founded in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Those institutions were then non-formal due to not being part of a national system of higher education. Such a system may be said to date from the founding of the University Grants Committee in 1918. Examples of such – now contemporary – universities are: Surrey University, founded as Battersea Polytechnic Institute in 1891; Aston University, founded as the Birmingham Municipal Technical School in 1895; and Bradford University, originating as a Mechanics Institute in 1832 and becoming Bradford Technical College in 1882.

Geographies of Contemporary Adult Education Depending on the time, place and education system in question, Further and Adult Education, as it is now termed, may be both within and without any particular education system, and may therefore be both formal or non-formal. Hillier (2015) describes it as follows with respect to England: It covers provision from very basic language, literacy and numeracy through to post-graduate level programmes. The sector includes voluntary, public and private institutions and is funded by government, employers, agencies and individuals. It is primarily non-compulsory, although increasingly seen by policy-makers to be fundamental to the economic success of the country as well as contributing to the well- being of the society. (p. 107)

The place and nature of non-formal education in any country will be much more eclectic in comparison with other sectors of provision, and that includes its spatial patterns in comparison to the more predictable formal facilities, especially schools. Its extraordinary nature can be seen in the variety of terms by which it is known in England alone: adult education (AE) and further education (FE), vocational education and training (VET), post-compulsory education and training (PCET), adult and community learning (ACL), adult, further and vocational education (AFVE), continuing education (CE), post-secondary non-tertiary education and lifelong Learning (LLL). (ibid., pp. 107–8)

One of the simplest, though acceptable, definitions of geography is that it is ‘the study of places’, and the complexity of the diverse spatial patterns of Non-Formal Education in England may be imagined from the list places given in Table 4.1. The subtle and spatial interactions between the various places listed earlier are always in flux, sometimes due to changes of official policy. For example, during

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Table 4.1 List of places where people can experience non-formal education in England Adult and community learning institutions Armed forces Further education colleges Sixth form colleges Distance and open learning National extension college The open university Libraries Prisons Public venues including pubs and drop-in centres in shopping centres Specialist and designated colleges Training organizations Voluntary organizations Web-based learning Work-based learning programmes Source: Hillier, Y. (2015), ‘England: Further and Adult Education’, in C. Brock (Ed), Education in the United Kingdom, p. 110, London and New York: Bloomsbury.

the year of composing this discourse (2015), the Ministry of Education for England has determined that on reaching the age of 16 (the minimum schooling leaving age), anyone not proceeding directly to the so-called ‘world of work’ must engage in full-time education either by remaining at school or by proceeding to study and/or train elsewhere. One option is to undertake an apprenticeship that may take place entirely within a public or private sector organization, another is full-time study in a Further Education (FE) College. Such an opportunity is also attracting more mature students of almost all ages over 18 who may be wanting a career change and/or may have experienced redundancy. This would be an element of formal education, like higher education, that is part of the national system though not compulsory. Most of ‘adult and continuing education’ is, however, non-formal and one of the most neglected aspects of provision in industrialized and less developed countries alike. Fordham et al. (1979) in their study Learning Networks in Adult Education show how the issue of community is spatially significant, including some elements of connection between formal and non-formal dimensions of learning. Theirs is a case study of a loosely termed ‘working class housing estate’, Leigh Park, near Portsmouth, England; such places often having been known by the somewhat pejorative term ‘overspill’.

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There, the formal educational qualifications of the majority of the population were minimal. They show, however, the importance of such formal educational success as had been achieved as providing certain levels of competence and confidence, but not so much as to threaten a sense of community cohesion that is vital for adult and continuing education to be effective. Bearing in mind Hillier’s list of places where elements of adult and continuing education may be obtained, Fordham et al. had already concluded that the existence of a matrix of independent learning groups and networks in any area contributes a valuable resource for people in that area. The part that it can play in educational, health and social welfare terms is considerable. It offers a positive and dynamic alternative to a number of professionally dominated and controlled services which deal with people on an individualistic or fragmented basis. … To ignore such a resource is to deny, ultimately, the freedom of people to express themselves, to control their lives, to rejuvenate their own world. (p. 202)

Whereas, in an artificially created cluster of people such as Leigh Park at that time, adult and continuing education activities could help to engender a sense of community, in many areas of the less developed world a long standing sense of community networks already exist. The relatively poor Balkan state of Macedonia has managed, in contrast to some of its neighbours, to retain some of the non-formal education tradition of the former Yugoslavia of which it was a part. In those days, most of the non-formal education was realized through the so-called Workers’ Universities, which were publicly funded. Currently, 11 such institutions operate around the country, functioning as public bodies and offering IT and language education as well as training for different crafts and occupations (Mickovska-Raleva, 2016, p. 205). In effect these are legacies of a strong community-oriented administration, albeit possibly operating in the service of a centrally controlled state. In the much less developed context of the majority of sub-Saharan countries community education preceded any formal schooling. In so doing, as King (1976) indicated, social shifts occurred such as: (a) from community teacher to animateur; (b) from single-use buildings to shared use; (c) from centralized to devolved control and (d) from externally funded personnel to community control of resources (p. 13). Such shifts are also fundamentally geographical and related to people’s relationship to location and place. This was well understood by Paulo Freire in his highly localized method for engendering basic literacy for adults in the poorest communities in North-East Brazil. He began by eliciting information from adults in small local communities, and working with them to construct a

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simple informal map of their community, building by building, space by space as well as the roles of individuals in the community. This brings us back to the notion earlier that cartography, even if in primitive form, can be a key tool in a process of non-formal education, especially in illiterate or semi-literate communities. The indigenous terminology often used in this case could be translated into basic Portuguese. Because this enabled these adults to perceive their severe disadvantage and exploitation, Freire was exiled, but continued his work in Cuba and GuineaBissau and published his seminal work Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972). His work promoted the notion of Conscientization: an idea to enable people to participate in the transformation of their world. Freire’s contribution in areas such as functional literacy and political pedagogy was assessed in a collection of essays edited by Mclaren and Leonard (1993). In this volume Mclaren and Da Silva comment on the political geographical focus of Freire’s work: The politics of difference that underwrites Freirean pedagogy does not locate identity in a centrist politics of consensus that leaves individuals to function and flounder as unwitting and obeisant servants of the state but rather in a politics of location that invites them to be active shapers of their own histories. (ibid., p. 51)

A modified form of Freire’s approach was later to enjoy dissemination on a global scale through the adult education programme REFLECT, generated by the NGO ActionAid and subsequently operated in scores of developing countries. Its success is based on a number of core principles which are applied through small local groups. Table 4.2 lists and summarizes these principles. The work of REFLECT, and even that of Freire before, were pre-dated by the unique contribution of Jose Vasconcelos the first minister of education in Mexico following the Revolution of 1916–20. With a largely rural and illiterate population at that time Vasconcelos conceived the idea of ‘cultural missions’, some of which have survived into the twenty-first century. Each one comprised a team of adult literacy tutors and sometimes a mobile cinema that would move from community to community and return later to reinforce. Rubio (1978) reviewed their ongoing work and found that they were characterized by selfhelp, voluntary co-operation and local leadership to different degrees, and were therefore disparate in operation and/or outcome. He identified four aspects of education to be ongoing: adult education; out-of-school education, non-formal education and democracy in education, though not necessarily all together. Considerations of the work of Freire, REFLECT and others following this approach, show them to be essentially small-scale and local in the nature of the knowledge acquired, as well as in their modes of operation.

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Table 4.2 The core principles of REFLECT Core principle

Summary

Power and voice

To strengthen the capacity of individuals to communicate in a meaningful way through practical use. Reflect is not neutral. It is there to help people assert their rights. It aligns with the poorest and most marginalized. Creating a space where all voices are given equal weight by challenging power and stratification. Reflect groups meet on average for two years several times each week. Intensive regular contact is important. Respect for existing knowledge is fundamental but it can be challenged and new information utilized. Continual cycle of reflection and action for the purpose of change. Using a wide range of tools e.g. maps, diagrams, song, dance, role-play, video and photography. Power and stratification as the focus of reflection to help change unsuitable relationships using structural analysis. Reflect operates systematically and applies all its principles to itself. This encourages selforganization by groups.

Political process

Democratic space

An intensive and extensive process

Grounded in existing knowledge

Linking reflection and action Using participatory tools

Power awareness

Coherence and self-organization

Source: Brock, C. (2011), Education as Global Concern, London: Continuum, p. 56.

It is in such less developed regions of the world, the home of the ‘marginalized majority’ (Brock, 2010), that the distinctions between formal, non-formal and informal education become most fluid and significant for human well-being. As the provision of basic formal education gradually grows, in facility though not necessarily in quality, there is an increasing gap between the levels of literacy and numeracy as between school pupils, young people and adults. This is not usually the case in industrialized countries. The informal education of the majority of adults in these poorer circumstances is what sustains family and community, even environment. In many such countries untrained teachers are the norm. The situation is also fundamentally gendered. Brock and Cammish (1997a) examined the influence of eleven factors influencing female participation in education in seven developing countries, mostly acting adversely. They found

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that spatial and social imbalance in kinship was the most influential due to the overwhelming predominance of patriarchy over matriarchy in many of the locations examined. The economic factor was also strong, relating as it does in such societies to survival and widespread poverty. Spatial and locational factors and issues are evident, fundamental and complex, with most of the dimensions of geography involved. Adult education in such contexts is key because it is at the level of the family that decisions about the schooling of both boys and girls are made. This is another example of the geography of educational reality being evident only at the local scale, as illustrated by Levinson et al. (1996). In most such communities the decision about schooling, if any such opportunity exists, will be made by the father. He will be operating within the cultural territory of the community, and usually in accordance with its customs on the basis of which the survival of the group has been traditionally maintained. Many mothers in this situation see it as normal that their daughters will follow their pattern of life and accept the traditional age-sex hierarchy and transition through adulthood as a kind of security. Yet, as Lalage Bown (1985 and 1993) has long maintained, the acquisition of at least functional literacy by women is the key to development. At the very least it enables a woman to argue the case for her daughters’ schooling, and wider learning, with her usually more literate male partner. Todd (1987) identifies the relationship between age of marriage and level of literacy which ‘emphasizes women’s specific role in the process of cultural development. … The age at marriage of women is the key variable, rather than the age at marriage of people in general’ (p. 15). Given the innumerable variations in family and community structures that exist, together with the issue of kinship systems, the outcome in spatial terms is kaleidoscopic, with only the immediately local scale being meaningful with regard to all forms of education. Nonetheless there are some fairly common variables of consequence. One is that of girls being seen as a commodity with real economic value as a result of which there is often a different basic geography of lifestyle as between them and that of their male siblings. Practical instances of this are the expectation of girls undertaking more daily chores such as fetching water (often at a considerable distance), looking after younger siblings, cleaning and cooking. If enrolled at school at all they may arrive late, tired, achieve less and drop out. There is also sometimes a risk involved in travel beyond the family space in terms of sexual abuse, which, if severe, may cause a girl to be un-marriageable and therefore no longer of economic value in terms of commodity.

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In such circumstances informal and non-formal education for girls and women becomes paramount, but as Rogers (2015) has argued: ‘It is when talking about schooling in international development that the learning of these 115 girls and others are doing in their everyday life in family and community is very often dismissed or ignored’ (p. 260). There are many aspects of geography and education at work here and so any possible solution has to involve a spatial dimension.

Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and Spatial Considerations NGOs are vital to the well-being, even survival, of many communities. They are not limited in their significance to less developed regions of the world, but are near universal. In their spatial organization they range from the international to the individual. Many are not formally to do with education, though most involve learning and teaching. Paulo Freire was, in a sense an individual NGO, with his personal and local focus, and mention has already been made of REFLECT in terms of a community-based approach played out through organized dissemination on a near global scale. REFLECT was and is an initiative of the NGO ACTIONAID, in particular of its then head of Education David Archer, now head of Programme Development. ActionAid operates in nearly 50 countries against poverty and injustice, including work on literacy and learning outcomes for children and adults. It is the only international NGO to have its headquarters in Africa – Johannesburg. OXFAM, also an international NGO, was founded in 1942 as The Oxford Committee for Famine Relief to pressure the UK Government to allow food relief to impoverished Greek citizens to pass through the Allied blockade then operating in the conflict with Germany. In 1965 it became OXFAM, having become a major NGO, and is now an International Confederation of 17 organizations operating in nearly half the countries of the world, though its supporting membership is mainly in North America, Western Europe, Australia and New Zealand. So one can see in its structure a near global outreach, but in its practical applications it is focussed on the lives and needs, including educational, of local communities and individuals. The NGO Practical Action works on a local community scale. It was established in 1965 as the Intermediate Technology Development Group by E.F. Schumacher and others. He later published the famous Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973), the core message of which informs the current (2015)

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mission statement of the NGO, which includes the key sentence that confirms its commitment to the local scale: We find out what people are doing and help them to do it better.

This indicates a sensitive and sensible understanding of the informal and local education of people as being their most profound and influential form of learning and teaching. Practical Action has its headquarters in Bourton-on-Dunsmore, a small village near the town of Rugby in Warwickshire, England, which is where it began. Now it has seven Regional Offices and operates over 100 projects in four regions of the developing world: Latin America, East Africa, South Asia and Southern Africa. The NGO concentrates on small-scale manageable innovations such as ‘water from the sun’: that is to say using the prime natural source of energy that will still be available for millennia to come, the sun, to power local water pumps. The sun itself, plus the nature of clean as opposed to polluted water, also forms part of an elementary learning of environmental science that is for all age groups. These three pen-pictures of major NGOs with significant educational operations involving work at a range of geographical scales in administrative terms, but a very local focus in practice, show that there is a massive potential for describing, mapping and analysing this component of the geography of nonformal education. The majority of NGOs are not international, and operate within the whole range of nations from highly developed to extremely poor, as the volume Education in NGOs (Symaco, 2016) illustrates. One such is the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC), which is one of the most innovative in the world and which illustrates well the significance of the local approach to educational innovation, especially with regard to women and girls. BRAC is not, as its name may suggest, a government agency. Indeed, its foundation and operation stem from aspects of formal education provision in that country that were seen to militate against meaningful educational development in rural Bangladesh. It was founded in 1972 as the initiative of Sir Fazi Hasan Abed in response to extreme and widespread poverty in the newly independent country that had separated from Pakistan the year before after a protracted violent conflict. From the beginning the BRAC approach was multi-sectoral in a nationwide effort that came to operate in all 64 districts of the country. From the outset education has been an important component of the work of BRAC with two main initiatives, one, non-formal with adult women, the other formal with children through primary schooling. Both were concentrated in rural areas with communities among the poorest in the world. Initiatives in

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the area of functional literacy and income-generating skills for women were seen as an essential precursor of projects in primary education. This was to engender in women the power to understand and control trading contracts, ensuring the proper income thus agreed, and also to enable women to engage on as equal a basis as possible in decisions about children’s education with their male partners. This clearly had to deal with issues of political, social, cultural and economic geography that also involved land tenure and local power structures. Before BRAC became involved in primary education in Bangladesh a considerable proportion of subsistence communities, usually small villages, had no school. While some boys may have attended a school in another village girls did not, unless accompanied by a male sibling. Even then their security could not be guaranteed in a culture rife with the physical abuse of females. Consequently the BRAC response was to support the construction of a simple school building within the village itself. It had to be in the same style and of the same materials as were family dwellings, and be located within the village. This was so that the school was not seen as culturally alien or locational peripheral to the traditional community (a problem seen to have arisen from the construction of school buildings in other materials on the edge of communities in other places and countries). Then there was the question of the teacher. Given the priority for girls education, the teacher had to be female. In Bangladesh, as in many less developed countries, females, especially if trained teachers, declined to teach in rural locations. By definition, as trained teachers, they had experienced formal schooling which meant that they lived in urban areas. Furthermore the widespread incidence of abuse of females was a particular threat to any woman living alone in an alien rural area. The BRAC response was to require the teacher to be a woman from within the village community who had at least a basic grasp of elementary literacy and numeracy. Such a person would have the trust of the parents of young girls. In order to reinforce the knowledge and skills of the teacher, BRAC supplied relevant materials that could be safely stored in the single room school, and also itinerant teacher trainers to provide support, techniques and ideas. Initially at least about two-thirds of the enrolment of the village school had to be girls, and in some cases adolescent females who had missed out on schooling were admitted. The level of commitment of these teenagers on receiving this ‘second chance’ was often so great that they completed the five-year primary programme in two years and proceeded to a rural boarding secondary school having compressed the temporal scale of their primary schooling. Another profoundly geographical element of the BRAC scheme was that, although their schools had to follow the national curriculum for the allotted

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number of days per year, each village could determine when these days were. This enabled schooling to be an integral part of the temporal economic cycle of the community, fitting in with both agricultural work and with perennial environmental hazards such as the monsoon rains and flooding. In addition to non-formal adult education and primary schooling, BRAC also offers centres for young people and adults and has established community libraries. The flexibility of the BRAC model, fitting as it does almost every circumstance, has seen it replicated in many other countries by similar organizations. Indeed BRAC itself has offices in fourteen countries. In addition to Bangladesh it operates in Afghanistan, Haiti, Indonesia, Liberia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Uganda. Wherever NGOs operate, and that is virtually everywhere (Symaco, 2016), they constitute part of the actuality of educational provision and activity, a component that is not mentioned in descriptions of educational provision in and by national authorities. They profoundly alter the geography of education in any place at scales from local to national. With political and social control, partly through selection, being a key aspect of governmental provision of formal education, especially schooling, NGOs in a range of activities including education have come under increasing pressure from the authorities worldwide. Archer (1994) commented on this in terms of the increasing role they were playing at a time when privatization of educational provision was also increasing in less developed countries. He warned them against becoming agents of privatization: ‘It is essential for NGOs to avoid becoming agents of privatisation even where withdrawal of the State appears to leave primary education provision as grossly inadequate’ (p. 232). Then in 2015 Sherwood reported: Over the past three years more than 60 countries have passed or drafted laws that curtail the activity of non-governmental and civil society organizations. Ninety – six countries have taken steps to inhibit NGOs from operating at full capacity. (The Guardian, 27 August 2015, p. 24)

Amnesty International, one of the NGOs affected in many locations, describes this as ‘a closing down of human rights space’ (ibid.), while a representative of the Carnegie Foundation is quoted as describing this trend as ‘an asphyxiation of independent space’ (ibid.). These are not just geographical metaphors but describe spatial realities, educational included. Such restrictions, or even extinctions, may come within existing spatial oppression and manipulation as in the cases of ‘education under attack’ mentioned earlier, and of the aforementioned external occupation and atomization of space in the West Bank of Palestine.

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Children’s, Young People’s, Family and Community Geographies As has been mentioned in Chapter 1, one of the areas that has probably attracted the most interest of geographers in educational issues is that normally referred to as ‘Children’s Geographies’. Indeed, unlike geography of education, it has its own journal of the same name which includes issues relating to ‘young people’ and families as well as what would popularly be regarded as children. Necessarily this field of geographical interest ranges across all forms of education: formal, nonformal and informal. However, with other journals and books concentrating on formal schooling, primary and post-primary, in general children’s and young people’s geographies have been more interested in non-formal and informal issues, such as relating to family, community, intergenerational and other wider contexts. This momentum is still being maintained with the contribution of Mills and Kraftl (2014) being a key example. Valentine (2003) referred to the passage from childhood through youth to adulthood, in the inaugural edition of Children’s Geographies, as ‘boundary crossings’, including: the ambiguous period of youth; the different spaces implicit in peoples transitions; and the influence of gender, social class and sexuality on the transitions from childhood through youth to adulthood. All of these involve learning, some formal, some non-formal and some informal. This sub-field, if such it be, of the learning geographies of children and young people inevitably interacting and intersecting with the learning geographies of adults themselves of a range from young to old, has sufficient critical mass to generate theoretical and methodological debate. This is witnessed by van Blerk and Kesby (2009) and Vanderbeck (2008) who, while recognizing it as controversial, sees its identity as ‘adult/child power relations’ (p. 394) with related contested spaces. Vanderbeck, while acknowledging key contributions to the literature, such as Holloway and Valentine (2000) and the journal Children’s Geographies from 2003, refers to a lack of theoretical debate, and discussion on issues such as teenagers and territoriality, and ages of compulsory education, voting and sexual consent, all of which have spatial implications. Horton and Kraftl (2006) and Kraftl (2006) also call for more theoretical input from Children’s Geographies, claiming that the body of literature to date had not gone much beyond the purely representational. Peter Kraftl and Sarah Mills, currently and respectively of Birmingham and Loughborough universities, have gone some significant way towards providing a stronger theoretical discussion in their

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book Informal Education, Children and Youth: Geographies, Histories, Practices (2014). Indeed Kraftl was a founding member of the Geographies of Children, Youth and Families Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, of which Mills is currently (2015–18) the Chair. This is recognition indeed of at least one dimension of the geography of education by an august and highly respected institution. A rather special issue with educational and spatial dimensions within this range of humanity is that of gangs, highlighted by the seminal work of Ley (1974) with reference to Philadelphia, and Patrick (1973) with reference to Glasgow. The former proceeded to become an eminent Professor of Geography, while the latter became a distinguished Professor of Education. Gangs are an enduring problem in cities worldwide. They have their own codes and content of learning and behaviours that include fundamental territorial imperatives. They deal with seriously disaffected youth, a significant element sometimes relating also to fundamentalist learnings, such those identified among young males in particular in the Oranji district of Karachi by Kwaja (2013), whom she terms ‘The Lost Boys’. These are boys, she suggests, who: ‘might be leaving school and displaying disaffection for reasons relating to traditional theory while allowing for locale-specific variation’ (p. 180). The Oranji district is adjacent to a feuding Afghan community which spilled over to a Pakistani area where ‘boys often loitered on the streets while girls stayed in coaching centres after hours to prepare for exams’ (p. 179). Given such very specific situations and locales, it is appropriate to develop the discussion of ‘children’s geographies’ at the level of communities, generations and families, and some of their experiences in temporal and spatial terms regarding locales and events. This will be approached first in the context of what might be termed open, conventional societies, and subsequently in relation to people living in various forms of coercion and/or constraint, though these are by no means mutually exclusive. An important contribution to the literature of the former category is Aitken’s (1998) Family Fortunes and Community Space, based on a case study in San Diego, California, in which it is pointed out that families live and through family spaces and in family time. The selected context of the study is ‘suburban’ which is presented as problematic in respect of its intolerance of difference as compared with inner city on the one hand, and more affluent settings on the other. As Sibley (1999) puts it in his review of Aitken’s book, in suburbia: ‘Myths are sustained despite the failure of the conventional family unit and the school to meet the needs of many people, either at the time or at some stage in the life

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course’ (pp. 245–6). Convention and intolerance are of course far from being a peculiarly suburban problem; for example, racism can occur in any location, but here it refers to intolerance in relation to spatial change such as non-recognition of the special and spatial needs of the elderly, or the growth of a young family. In such situations informal learning needs are challenged and formal learning space may require adjustment with regard to children’s needs within the home and in terms of spatial relationships between home and school. Children need, and can make, ‘transitional space’ on their own initiative within or outside the home, for example, with regard to play and fictive situations, in traditional spaces such as a ‘Wendy House’ or cyber spaces such as through computer games and smartphones. Elucidating children’s conception of space is not a simple task and has been approached from different directions. Alexander in his celebrated publication Culture and Pedagogy: International Comparisons in Primary Education (2000) ends a discourse of truly global proportions on the ‘culturally engaged act of comparing’ with five pieces of writing by nine-year-old children, the first of which is on ‘My room’: My room is very important because of the privacy. It has a very happy and relaxed atmosphere, because I have a good time there with my friends and alone. I don’t allow my brother in there without my permission because it’s my place and not anyone else’s. I let my parents in if it’s tidy, but I can’t really stop them. Mum comes in the most. I spend a lot of time there listening to music, drawing, writing, reading, doing homework and sleeping. … My sister says it’s like a student’s room. John likes it all except for my desk. I think he’s jealous. I like my room the way it is, messy, because I feel too cramped and organized when it’s tidy. (p. 569)

Clearly this is the view of an intelligent and at least relatively privileged child, but it shows the significance of a personal learning space within a family setting, in addition to the very different communal and rapidly changing spaces of the learning environment at school. A similar situation is quoted by Sibley (1995), from the Mass Observation Archive of the University of Sussex, that combines both spatial and temporal scales. In the words of a Scottish mother relating back to her schooldays: The time I spent over homework caused a lot of trouble between my parents and myself. I realise now that the internalized whip made me anxious about learning and I was too insecure not to work. … This rubbed off on my daughter as well. A cruel inheritance which I regret. Father would come back late from a freemason’s meeting and stand by the electric light, demanding that I stop

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wasting his money and go to bed. I would not. And when he threatened to take me away from school, I attempted suicide, putting on all the gas rings and howling silently into my school books. (p. 95)

Christensen (2015) employed the technique of ‘place mapping’ to examine the influence of socio-material factors in relation to children’s perceptions and use of place and neighbourhood. The research was conducted in suburban Copenhagen and the outcome offered three categories of factors: (a) located social experiences; (b) experiences of the unknown (c) children’s contested spaces. Karsten (2005) based on oral histories, documentary research and contemporary observations – all in Amsterdam – concluded that children in the 1950s were able to enjoy the public space of the street with its distinctive learning environment shared with others. By the first decade of the new millennium they were constrained so as to occupy ‘children’s space’ within the home but playing and learning through cyber-media. In educational terms she asks in her title did it ‘all used to be better’? She also identifies an increase in segregation by social class, something that can be enhanced by forms of selective schooling, and as we have observed earlier, exacerbated by the marketization of public school provision. School choice can also be seen to relate to social class as Loo and Lam (2015) illustrated with respect to journeys to school in Hong Kong. They identified two key factors: (a) the degree of independent mobility; and (b) accessible school opportunities and concluded that neighbourhood had a limited effect. Journeys to and from school are a special and distinctive learning environment for children involving: interaction (with parents, peers and places), within temporal scales, and involving interdependencies, collaboration and compromises (Nansen et al., 2015). Grandparents have geographies of education of their own. They can be a strong influence on educational patterns within a family, especially if they live with succeeding generations or nearby. This is the case in the majority of rural communities in the less developed regions of the world, or in more traditional urban families anywhere. Their influence can be direct or via the pressure they bear by proximity on parents, their own offspring, what Tarrant (2010) refers to as relational geographies of age. Such relational geographies are culturally mediated and vary accordingly, ranging from little intergenerational influence – including on education – to strong. Physical distance is becoming less of an issue as older people in the more mobile societies increasingly engage in various forms of digital contact with younger generations. Older generations are also engaging more in education related activities partly as a result of earlier

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retirements, though this trend may have passed due to the raising of pensionable age in many industrialized countries. Nonetheless, elderly undergraduates are not uncommon, as well as in part-time studies and skills acquisition at all levels. At tertiary level in the UK and elsewhere this has been encouraged by access to open universities, and also the University of the Third Age (U3A). The Open University of the UK was founded in 1969 and remains committed to the levels and qualifications of tertiary education, though many of its visual services can be accessed by anyone. By contrast U3A, founded in 1973 at the University of Toulouse in France, while open to all ages, is seeking primarily to serve the older generations. It is strong in Western, and especially Central and Eastern, Europe, also Australia and other Commonwealth countries. It is strictly non-political and operated by volunteers through cyberspace. So here we see grandparents and other older people taking advantage of the same ‘space-adjusting mechanisms’ as the young that are a fundamental characteristic of education (Spencer and Thomas, 1969). In the intergenerational context the transmission of learned responses and practices is a strong educational phenomenon that has locational implications. The study by Van Ham et al. (2014) of intergenerational transmission of neighbourhood poverty in Stockholm is a case in point. They summarize their findings as follows: Children living with their parents in high poverty concentration neighbourhoods are very likely to end up in similar neighbourhoods much later in life. The parental neighbourhood is also important in predicting the cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods over a long period of early adulthood. Ethnic minorities were found to have the longest cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods. These findings imply that for some groups disadvantage is both inherited and highly persistent. (p. 402)

Such intergenerational educational inertia was commented on earlier in the context of the problems of teenagers in many of the declining coastal communities in England. It has obvious implications for education in all its forms since the informal family-based learning that provides a baseline for subsequent acquisition of knowledge and skills often has lasting constraints as well as positive attributes. In the UK a significant proportion of disadvantaged families have single mothers as the lone parent, who also have to work to provide for basic survival needs. Siraj-Blatchford (2004) examined structural inequalities associated with socio-economic class, gender and ethnicity in this regard, and identified an urgent need to support parents in respect of the Home Learning Environment (HLE) and especially for young boys. For them the lack

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of a male role model at home, and the frequent evidence of serial unemployment among older male siblings and other male relatives had created a culture of irrelevance of schooling even before they have encountered it. This is a matter of socio-cultural geography where, as Locke et al. (2009) found, the early quality of spoken word acquisition may not include sufficient language skills needed even to develop reading and writing, the sounding boards of lifelong learning. Such examples of socio-cultural geography may operate at a range of scales from individual streets (Robson, 1969) to substantial sections of cities. In the case of Kingston-upon-Hull (Griffin, 2001) a curious double reverse was apparent in terms of negative attitudes to schooling and education in general. Traditionally the city had been able to provide automatic basic employment for the sons and daughters of workers in the maritime industries which meant that attainment at school was virtually irrelevant. After the decline of these industries in post-war recession, and the complete eradication of the fishing industry, in particular in 1973, schooling became seen as irrelevant for the opposite reason that successive generations of unemployed had accumulated within many families. Coupled with the eradication of fishing at Hull the entire working community was shifted from its traditional and socially proximate streetwise location to large estates on the northern fringe of the city, thus breaking up such community solidarity as had existed. This contrasts with the earlier findings of Young and Wilmott in their classic study Kinship and Family in East London (1957) where in post-war Bethnal Green, and soon after the arrival of secondary education for all, (albeit selective), some working-class parents were aspirational for their sons and traditional family structures were more secure: ‘Parents who want their children to enter white-collar occupations know that a grammar school is the essential qualification and one that is no longer beyond their reach’ (pp. 28–9), that is to say not only by attainment but also distance. There is a clear contrast here between an area formerly dependent on a single industry, with fractured families, at the turn of the millennium, and one fifty years earlier with multiple employment options and greater traditional family solidarity and educational aspirations for their sons. As Young and Willmott remark: ‘Educational aspirations for daughters are as yet more rare’ (p. 29). Willmott (1971) followed this up with a focus on adolescent boys in East London in 1966 where he illustrates the spatial dimension as social awareness of the significance of the selective system among boys: ‘From my junior school you usually went on to the secondary modern round the corner, and that was that’ (p. 82). Or as Himmelweit (1954) put it a decade earlier: ‘To move upwards in status, a working-class child must not only have the opportunity to attend a grammar school, but also pass its examinations’

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(p. 123). These examples show that socio-economic community cultures tend to be localized, and can experience decline as well as development. Spatial and temporal scales need always to be taken account of and carefully utilized in tandem when engaging in the geography of education. As an example of family geography at a micro scale and relating to a regular periodic activity, Kime (2008) examined eating behaviours, termed the obeso-genetic environment. It is pointed out that ‘families do not operate in a vacuum’ and there are intergenerational influences (p. 316) that may also include grandparents. Kime describes eating together at table as behaviour of a high order, while eating individually off trays is behaviour of a low order. Are these alternatives regular or intermittent? Whatever, they are indicative of minute geographical and socio-cultural difference in use of space that can have educational implications. ‘At table’ is conducive to conversation and participation, while ‘on trays’ is more likely to involve individual learning of a different kind from, for example, watching the television to clicking on iPads and smartphones. Everyday schooling in the UK, and comparable countries, may require each student to have a personal computer or iPad through which homework is conducted as well as learning at the school itself. Such facilities may also be operable in children’s individual rooms at home. That will depend on socio-economic class and household space, and makes for the geography of educational reality to be virtually atomized in spatial terms. Following on Thrift’s comment that we don’t actually know what any individual knows, we don’t know either where they are learning from informally and how. At what stage do people cease to be children and become young people? This can no longer be a matter of traditional or political regulation, at least in more industrialized societies. In the less developed and economically poorer societies, both urban and rural, the family duties of young children are vital to survival and often determined through kinship and culture. Two contrasting studies in this regard by Jennings et al. (2006) and by Ansell et al. (2014) may serve to illuminate in terms of the geography of education. Ansell et al examine what they call ‘learning and earning’ in terms of children’s rights versus the local realities of children’s daily geographies. They identify a dissonance between ‘global efforts to eradicate abusive forms of child labour and child labour and local settings where children work’ (p. 231). The setting is Tijuana in Mexico, on the border with California, USA, where the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) has had the effect of generating considerable supermarket capacity requiring basic labour and therefore located in residential areas. There are clearly advantages for children in respect not only of income but also of skills acquisition and

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socialization. In geographical terms they have to negotiate the urban landscape, as well as the journey from home to school and back. This is further mediated in temporal terms by there being a two-shifts-per-day school system. The relational scales of experience that are operating are: (a) the household – the scale of social reproduction; (b) community and state – scales of responsible oversight and (c) global – in respect of children being at the heart of the globalization process. The study does not raise any issues regarding exploitation, rather it is instrumental in illustrating the need to recognize ‘the nuances of geographic location, cultural tradition and economic reality’ (p. 237), all of which contribute to the development of children’s learning. The study by Ansell et al, located as it is in southern Africa, one of the least developed regions of the world, illustrates how the coincidental experiences of children’s schooling, training and work, often in small business, can be much more problematic. The locations are mostly rural, and all three experiences have their own geographies of learning. It can be more complex. For example in Lesotho five key livelihood pathways are evident, each of which involves learning spatially and temporally: (a)schooling; (b) herding (boys only); (c) casual employment; (d) informal business and (e) migrant work. Running through all is the issue of HIV/AIDS which carries its own learning curve in terms of prevention, reaction and treatment. Some may experience schooling, though often irregular and truncated, while most education acquired will be through informal means derived from different locations and socio-economic settings. Those engaged in migrant work will also experience informal sociocultural learning through comparison. The geography journal Area (2010, 42:2) clearly regarded the issue of ‘young people’ to be of sufficient significance to warrant a special section of six articles on ‘Upscaling Young People’s Geographies’ (pp. 142–89). In terms of education the editors of this section (Hopkins and Alexander) quote Valentine (2003): Young people aged 16–25 may be at school, college or university, other forms of vocational training, in paid work, unemployed, doing voluntary work, travelling and so on. They experience far fewer spatial restrictions than their younger peers because it is easier for a young person in their late teens or early twenties to pass as an ‘older’ than they actually are in order to gain access to places such as clubs and bars from which they might otherwise be excluded. (p. 142)

In these multiple contexts they will experience a spectrum of learning situations from formal, through non-formal to informal, possibly all three at once (e.g.  school, youth club and on the street). The editors selected three

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themes for the five main articles on young people’s geographies: (a) political geography and critical geopolitics; (b) migration, mobility and asylum, and (c) nations and nationhood, all of which provide different contexts for the acquisition of knowledge and skills. Neither are these contexts mutually exclusive or gender-free. Cahill’s (2010) contribution is in relation to the second of these themes and concerns Participatory Action Research (PAR) in the context of Latino immigration in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is a university-community partnership between the University of Utah and the Mestizo Institute for Culture & Arts, with the action located in ‘Salt lake City’s west side, which is the most diverse zip code in the state of Utah, home to many immigrant and working-class families’ (p. 153). The project was concerned to generate new knowledge both for those within and those outside this space, some of which was to do with structural discrimination and disadvantage in educational opportunity. The contribution of Bushin and White (2010) is also concerned with young immigrants and participatory research, this time in the context of the Irish Republic, and from a range of origins from North America, Europe (EU and non-EU), Africa and Asia. They found that ‘young people’s socio-spatial practices are focussed in many places other than school’, implying that numerous overlapping nonformal and informal education spaces operate, as they do for us all, but specific to the experiences of this particular category of young people. They conclude: Macro-political structures of immigration systems directly influenced the geographies of young people and immigration procedures in Ireland had a differentiating impact on their geographies, in relation to mobility, socialising, employment, income and access to ICTs. (p. 178)

Education in Situations and Locations of Constraint and Coercion A non-formal education issue involving people of almost all ages is that of ‘Education in Incarceration’. This has obvious geographies of its own ranging from the location of prisons and related institutions, such as borstals for young offenders, to any other situation of forceful confinement whether institutionalized or not. The location of prisons and borstals has no obvious educational dimension, except perhaps for ‘open prisons’, but educational space within each institution is an issue. This may range from workshops where income-generating skills may be acquired to rooms and libraries where inmates may study for external qualifications ranging from school-leaving age to undergraduate and

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postgraduate degrees. Such internal geographies vary considerably from place to place according to each regime. In some systems inmates may receive books and other learning materials by post. The degree to which forms of learning are available as a feature of rehabilitation varies considerably from country to country, from extensive to negative. There is a modest academic literature on this issue ranging, for example, from Schyuler (1942) to Bhatti (2010), A recent account by Allison (2016) shows how a pioneering university campus has opened in a prison in Kent (The Guardian, 23 February, p. 36). Of course, likely the most prevalent form of acquisition of knowledge and skills in prisons is that of enhanced criminal expertise which operates informally through information flows within the institution as well as from outside. In other words they are, inter alia, training colleges for crime. Perhaps more significant is the fact that millions of people throughout the world are incarcerated unofficially for social, cultural and economic reasons. This is slavery, a human condition that goes back for millennia and shows no sign of diminishing. Basic skills may be acquired in confined domestic and economic environments, but not education. There is a considerable literature concerning slavery in the British Empire and other dimensions of European colonialism. There were positive outcomes for a few in educational terms such as some of the, especially male, offspring of liaisons between the plantocracy and slaves in the West Indies. Sometimes such offspring were afforded the same educational opportunities as the legitimate children of the family. This led to a significantcreole (mixed race) dimension of Caribbean populations some of whom became the first generation of post-independence political and professional leaders prior to the onset of ‘black power’ in the 1970s. Now, in the early twenty-first century, the global incidence of various forms of slavery is more extensive than ever, and institutions, such as The Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) of the University of Hull, research into it. The current Deputy Director of WISE is in process of compiling a Global Slavery Index and has published elsewhere on global slavery (Bales, 2005). In addition to pure slavery, but related, there are other human conditions that are widespread and growing, such as human trafficking from Eastern to Western Europe. Such situations are often gendered, with women and girls being the more at risk. Slavery in its various forms is a significant, and negative, educational issue in its lack of access to open sources of knowledge acquisition. The volume of coerced migration, also a phenomenon throughout human history, is increasing, having been related to numerous diasporas in the past. These are educationally significant in that they convey culturally related forms of learning that have geographical distributions. There are, for example, Armenian

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schools in many countries following the massacre and forced ejection from Turkey a century ago. There are more refugees in the early twenty-first century than ever before with associated educational disadvantage (Demirdjian, 2012), and even more internally displaced people (Smith-Ellison and Smith, 2013). Such people are not necessarily incarcerated in the literal sense, but are often geographically confined in camps that tend to become permanent. In addition to other support, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), established in 1950, provides what it can in terms of education to over 10 million confined refugees worldwide. Demirdjian (2007 and 2012) examined the case of the education of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. With respect to UNRWA (The UN Relief and Works Agency – for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East) she comments: UNRWA has remained the only body responsible for providing services for registered refugees. As of 30 June 2010 the number of registered refugees in Lebanon totals 416,608. However, only half that number (220,809) live in the 14 official camps run by UNWRA. The rest of the registered refugees live in gatherings throughout Lebanon with no access to UNWRA services. (Demirdjian, 2012, p. 111)

In addition to the total of over 500,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, UNRWA estimates that over 560,000 Palestinian refugees in Syria are now being uprooted again by the civil and international conflict there that has been ongoing for at least four years. Refugee education is part of a growing sub-field of Education and Conflict (Paulson, 2011), part of which has already been mentioned in terms of ‘Education Under Attack’. The detailed geography of education relating to communities involved in conflicts operates at all scales from global to local and is immensely complex. It is also extremely dynamic, making analysis, and even more, theory, almost impossible to establish. This is a challenge for the study of Education as a Humanitarian Response, an issue to which we will return in Chapter 5. Suffice it to mention here that underlying and supporting conflicts are often fundamentalist forces that carry out their own forms of education while destroying others. The educational dimension of the phenomenon known as ‘Islamic State’ is not only concerned with the destruction of conventional schooling and higher education, but also with its own inculcation to various components of populations under its control of information, beliefs and skills that it wishes to instil. This includes a particular interpretation of Islam, widely regarded as a distortion, strictly gendered learning that constrains women and girls, and the acquisition of skills of conflict and punishment, by both boys and

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girls, that are barbaric. The spatial extent of this particular example of nonformal education is extremely dynamic, shifting with the acquisition and loss of territorial control in Iraq and Syria, as well as through social media. This interpretation of appropriate knowledge and skills is also exported by means of ICT to a highly selective audience of, especially young, people with the aim of radicalizing them. This, unfortunately, is as much a form of education as any other, and has its own distinctive and complex geography both in its shifting heartland and also through its outreach. Less extreme but also highly problematic are the spatial and locational educational experiences of children in homeless families, children in care (including foster children), orphans and street children. All are dislocated from conventional family and learning contexts, though some experience family circumstances of sorts. Homeless children and children in care will be considered within the UK context, orphans and street children in a wider geographical perspective. Matsumoto (2013) covers a range of these circumstances in her book Education and Disadvantaged Children and Young People. Being a homeless child, or in care, necessarily means having different spatial experiences, including across the generations. It has long been evident that the educational achievements of such children, at least in terms of examination outcomes, lagged behind those of the majority community. A survey carried out in 1989 by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) was concerned with the wider issue of ‘homeless children’. This included those in homeless families some of whom were refugees or displaced. All were living in temporary accommodation, whether provided by local authorities, or arranged personally, or with friends or relatives. Shifting home from place to place was found to be common, which often involved changing schools. Much of the report was concerned with the effect on schools and their responses. Consequently there was a range of educational spaces involved where formal and informal learning took place, adding up to extremely complex and fluid patterns of geographies of education. The report noted that some families choose a transient lifestyle so that: ‘When these children meet a school system with opportunities and routines which rely on regular and consistent attendance, sustainable achievement is often beyond their reach’ (p. 9). The situation is obviously different, though not unproblematic, for children from traveller communities in the UK, some of whose families are settled on designated sites (Smith and Worrell, 2014). The often rapidly changing locations of what are now known as ‘LookedAfter Children’ also make for dynamic and chaotic geographies of their

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education. The Guardian (19th September 2011) claimed that such children are let down by the education system and that most are allocated to lower achieving schools, then fail to gain passes in GCSE examinations, though Chase et al. (2005) claimed a more positive perspective. Much depends in England on the policies of individual local authorities, which brings another spatial scale into the picture. An innovation with spatial implications for the education of the 60, 000 plus looked -after children is that of ‘The Virtual School’ (Ofsted, 2012). These are not separate schools but teams of teachers with a ‘virtual head teacher’ that operate within and across the schools of a Local Authority. The team itself has a changing spatial operation, moving from school to school which is why it is known as ‘virtual’. Most local authorities have accepted this innovation, but to different degrees, and so there is a disparate pattern at that scale, as well as between schools within any one Local Authority. Of the 9 local authorities surveyed by Ofsted only three continued their virtual school support beyond the minimum school-leaving age of 16. This is unfortunate since official government figures in 2015 showed that of over 8,500 care leavers at the age of 19, only 470 proceeded to higher education. Indeed, in August 2015 the Children’s Commissioner for England published a survey of ‘Children in Care and Care Leavers’ which was followed up by a Committee of Members of Parliament in October of that year which claimed that over 10,000 children in care were in effect ‘cut adrift’ at the age of 16, many of them becoming so-called NEETS (Not in Education, Employment or Training). The classification of NEET in the UK ranges from 16 to 24, but the 16–18 years are regarded as crucial in terms of moving towards some kind of stability and engagement in civic society. The NEET category and terminology has been formally recognized in an increasing number of countries, and the nature of the informal education of such young people is consequently kaleidoscopic in terms of location, place and space. For a minority it will be found in the context of gangs and territoriality as mentioned earlier. Orphan children and young people are a particular category and their incidence varies considerably from country to country, as do the reasons for their situation. Violent conflict, especially in the circumstances of civil war, is a key contributor as examined by Matsumoto (2012) in respect of Sierra Leone, where massive spatial destruction of communities and their schools fundamentally altered the pattern as well as the nature of geographies of education in that country. At the time of writing, an even more complex example is unfolding in the case of Syria (Fayek, 2016). Dire economic circumstances, and overpopulation, as in parts of India (Siddiqui, 2013), can lead to children

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being sold as labour and becoming orphans, while in Ukraine a complex variety of historical, residual and socio-economic factors combine to produce one of the proportionately highest incidences of orphan children in the world (Danilko and Ivanenko, 2013). The extraordinary orphan situation in Ukraine leads to a complex mini geography of educational circumstances in itself. Part of the situation is inherited from the social culture of the Soviet Union within which Ukraine resided for about 70 years. These decades included the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, Stalin’s purges and the Second World War – during which the USSR suffered more dead than all other combatants in the European and Asian theatres of war combined. One legacy was a shortage of young adult males and a related multiplicity of partners which weakened family structures, producing orphans, many of whom became street children, a situation demanding and providing its own forms of education. Such instability enables trafficking to be widespread, with prime destinations being Turkey, Russia and Poland, Ukraine’s neighbours. One of the outcomes is that: About 20 per cent of children without parental care are orphans whose parents have died. The other 80 per cent of the children are social orphans. This means that their parents are alive, but do not take care of their children. Such parents are deprived of their parental rights. The number of orphans and children without parental care doubled during the 1990s and rose to 120,000 in 2006. The causes of increase child abandonment included family poverty and childbearing to underage mothers. (ibid., p. 104)

The majority of Ukraine’s orphans are boys who, up to the age of 18, if they are not street children, have been living in orphanages or internats (more basic shelters) since the age of 6 or 7. These are the locations where such formal education as exists takes place. The spatial pattern is always shifting leading to a kaleidoscopic educational landscape that may also include some formal schooling. The Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine has been one of the key sources of street children and orphans, and contemporary violent conflict in that area at the time of writing will likely lead to an increased flow of unattached children and young people. In addition to standard orphanages and internats are: multiple foster care in individual families; ‘hosting’ – an arrangement where orphaned children spend only weekends and holiday times with families; and ‘family-type orphanages’ – where parents, or a single adult, take care of 5–10 orphans and act as their teachers as well, receiving state support. Danilko and Ivanenko provide a case study of their region, Kirovograd Region, where, since 2005, there has been

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a project ‘Reforming Educational Establishments for Orphans and Children Deprived of Parental Care’. As of 2013 they report: New types of educational establishments for such children have been founded. Nowadays, there are 25 family-type orphanages, 187 foster families in which 497 orphans and children deprived of parental care are brought up. During 2010 31 foster families and three family-type orphanages were founded and 72 children assigned to them. (p. 116)

Kirovograd City and Region are far from being the most deprived in Ukraine, so the immensity and complexity of the educational dimension of this task adds to the geographies of education in that country. As indicated earlier, there is considerable interaction between the realities of being a street child and/or an orphan in Ukraine. Although orphans exist in all countries, so do street children and in far greater quantity. As the name suggests street children are an urban phenomenon and exist across a variety of types. Many of the numerous children living on the streets of India are ‘working children’, making small amounts of money for themselves, for their proprietors, or even their families. Such education as they acquire comprises the knowledge and skills to survive. Their curricula comprise these fields of expertise, and so there exists an atomization of content that forms part of their geographies of education that expand with every experience they have. Although the majority of street children are in countries that are overall ‘less developed’ they are also present in significant numbers in relatively well developed places such as the UK. The NGO ‘The Children’s Society’, established in 1889, includes the education of street children in the UK in its humanitarian objectives along with a broader range of activities in areas of extreme poverty. For example, it concerns itself with young people in the care system, children living in situations of domestic violence, and refugee and asylum-seeking children. While operating nationwide, The Children’s Society currently has a special focus on the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, where in 2015 there were estimated to be at least 150,000 children living in poverty. The area has some of the highest rates of childhood poverty and neglect in the UK and, therefore, Western Europe. While confronting family scale issues through its Community Family Zone Model, it also undertakes research, including on education and street children. For example, while working for The Children’s Society in Manchester, Alison Brock carried out research on ‘Young People on the Street: An Educational Perspective’ (1996), where it was estimated that about 500 street children were located. In London there are estimated to be over 30,000. Because it was not

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permissible to interview the street children directly, Brock interviewed, among others, the project workers who are termed ‘street educators’. Some of the homeless children concerned had received intermittent formal schooling, but for most the knowledge and skills they obtained were through survival on the street with the peer group. Given their life experiences, often involving abuse and neglect, they were suspicious of those outside their group except those who survived by being worked by ‘street adults’ (over 18s) for stealing, drug dealing and prostitution. As with street children everywhere the spatial factor in their learning was focussed on survival, and extremely dynamic in terms of ends and means, though as Brock points out their educational and spatial profiles were generally different from those of gangs, territoriality being much looser. In a Brazilian study, Nunes, Schliemann and Carraher (1993) found that the level of mathematical, basically arithmetical, skills of street children were comparable to those of conventionally educated children though different in range and content. Clearly different types of motivation were at work. The Consortium for Street Children (CSC) operates a global network for the purposes of advocacy, research and network development. They work on the UNICEF estimate of well over 100 million street children worldwide with numerous NGOs working at all levels from local to international to improve their circumstances, a fundamentally educational activity with its own spatial dimensions and dynamisms. As well as in the streets, locations vary from survival on landfills, train stations, on trains (railway children), under bridges and in unoccupied buildings. In all cases the physical environment is an influence in the nature of their forms of learning, and they do learn. Aufseeser (2014) argues that too much of a focus on a binary divide between learning through work on the street and learning through schooling devalues the significance of the former. Researching child workers between the ages of 7 and 18 in Cusco and Lima, Peru, she explains: I focus on children who work in public places such as plazas, public markets, streets and buses, and include both children who return home to family at night and children who are now sleeping in the streets, hostels or abandoned buildings. All the children worked in the informal economy, engaging in jobs such as selling candy or snacks, shining shoes, performing on buses, and renting cell phones, among others. (p. 113)

She suggests that learning through work enhances the self-esteem of children, developing their sense of identity and social skills. In short, work is a space of learning just as a school is. Well intentioned efforts, locally, nationally and

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internationally to curb and outlaw such forms and locations of young people’s learning may in fact be detrimental to their education, albeit an informal acquisition of knowledge and skills. What is needed, Aufseeser argues, is a greater connection between formal and informal opportunities for learning.

Education and the World of Work Aufseeser’s sentiment could well be extended to learning in the world of work more generally and conventionally. Traditionally in the industrialized world where formal national education systems began they were preceded by Guilds of various crafts where young people, usually boys were apprenticed to master craftsmen. Such Guilds were initially locally based in towns or cities, and were able to select from the majority of boys who had not been selected for academic schooling by the church. The spatial relationship between apprenticeships and communities was often local, sometimes even at the level of the family where boys followed their fathers into a particular craft. As industrialization progressed and urban society grew to be the majority there was still often a spatial relationship between industry and community that favoured such intergenerational progression. The aforementioned Mechanics Institutes of England were not part of any apprenticeship model, but rather designed to broaden the general education of working-class males. The degree to which apprenticeships developed varied from country to country, sometimes considerably. In the micro-states of pre-unified Germany – that is to say before the nineteenth century – local crafts and related training created a tradition of craftsmanship that maintained itself in the formal schooling system in the form of the Realschule. Such schools still exist within the contemporary German system and enjoy high status and support. This contrasts with England where increased social class dislocation tended to relegate technical schools, if they existed at all, to a lower status and are now non-existent. Modern apprenticeships in England have been promoted and funded by recent governments, but the geography of their take-up by employers is extremely disparate. Employers in the UK and elsewhere frequently complain that potential employees emerge from school, and even higher education, without the particular skills they need in their places of work. This goes back to the question of what education, especially formal education, is for? As already indicated, governments mostly see it as being to contribute to economic development in the competitive environment of the

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global market place and related national prestige. Schools and universities see it as being for the all-round development of the individual alongside in some areas, such as medicine and engineering, the acquisition of high level very specific professional skills. The educational reality is that, in the vast majority of cases, individuals learn their earning skills at the workplace. This can be through some kind of formal in-house training or informally simply by being on the job. The latter may sometimes be more effective as, for example, On The Job (OTJ) teacher education and training in some developing countries. This was a focus for the Multi-Site Teacher Education Research (MUSTER) Project undertaken in the early years of the new Millennium in Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa and Trinidad and Tobago, and reported by Lewin and Stewart (2003). With reference to sub-Saharan Africa: Apart from the practical reality that a large proportion of primary school teachers in sub-Saharan Africa are unqualified but engaged as full-time staff, OTJ engages the everyday understanding of such teachers of the communities of which their pupils are part. (Brock, 2012, p. 30)

For as Dachi and Garrett (2003) point out, the life of a child in such communities is more akin to that of adults in the more developed and urbanized world, and the preparation of their teachers needs to take account of that. Returning to the more developed and industrialized world, it would seem that the assumption of employers that their employees should arrive with all the necessary skills for their innumerable and unique workplaces is based on human capital theory, even if they are not aware of it as such (Lauder and Brown, 2015). Nonetheless, collectively, companies do provide a wide range of workplace education programmes through which Levinson (1999) suggested: Employers will learn from their current efforts, and this learning will affect their future choices of where to locate jobs, and how to design jobs within a given geography. (p. 104)

This would appear to be necessary because school systems do not necessarily enhance certain traits that employers require for what is known as the ‘developmental worker’. This impacts on: The capacity for innovation and the application of skill, It is for this reason that many countries in East Asia, despite frequently topping the various international test league tables, worry about their lack of creativity. At the same time it is also clear that success in tests like PISA does not mean that students are more likely to conform to the behavioural profiles of corporate ‘talent’ in TNCs (Transnational

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Companies). This appears to be a problem that Singapore, as one of the best PISA performers, is confronting. (Lauder and Brown, 2015, p. 305)

This points to the significance of context, that is to say, both geographical location and social and political capital in affecting education in the workplace, and may become an increasingly difficult problem with distance between the location of schooling and the location of employment. It may also, as suggests, be further complicated by linguistic geography where multilingual contexts can arise from both immigration to a company or country’s workforce, and from emigration to and through the various locations of international companies, whether TNCs or MNCs (multinational companies). Moving up a scale, to global supply chains, the value of digital education and control becomes apparent. The relatively culture free nature of the internet, despite the Americanization of ICT, means that a large company, wherever based, and with numerous suppliers of components, can operate through what is known as a digital control tower. This brings us to a key theme of the following and final chapter: cyberspace and education in all its forms.

Concluding Comments With non-formal, and especially informal, education being a lifelong experience, much of which may be involuntary, it represents a massive and complex resource for research into geographies of education. In respect of statistical evidence it is inadequately served as compared to formal education. That may be why only a small proportion of academics in the composite discipline of educational studies have chosen to examine it. A small group of geographers have been bolder, but have concentrated on the geographies of education of children, young people and families, and international student flows. It is a problem that, in consequence, we know much less about informal education especially, because this is the form of knowledge and skills acquisition that is most influential. More research in this area might well lead to the better understanding of knowledge and skills gained in more formal settings and their efficacy. Any potential progress in this regard would require much more inter-disciplinary study and research, and fortunately this is beginning to gain momentum. Academic tribes are visiting each other’s territory and, as Barry and Born (2014) put it, bringing about ‘reconfigurations of the social and natural sciences’ (pp. 1–56). That they include the natural sciences is especially welcome

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to geography since in its essence it is capable of this already, as indicated in Chapter 1. Bringing the three forms of education together in any organized way would necessarily involve adjustments to the spatial relationships between the three forms of acquisition of knowledge and skills. Meeting this challenge could be increasingly facilitated by appropriate uses of cyberspace at all scales of educational activity from local to global. This is not only a challenge to policy, administration and curricula per se, but also to meeting the considerable challenges to human and environmental well-being, even survival, in the twentyfirst century. It will require a massive upgrading of political will in all countries and international organizations, as well as of educational leadership. It is the contention of this discourse, that a massively increased awareness and understanding of the spatial and locational dimensions of places and networks in knowledge creation and dissemination will be necessary: in simple terms, of the geographies of education. The following and final chapter of this book will therefore turn to consideration of the place of new forms of education in response to imminent challenges of new geographies, human survival and environmental sustainability. Formal education began with the invention of writing in small urban settlements that became the nodes of subsequent networks and systems of educational activity. Now we have ICT and must consider the relatively new environment of cyberspace in educational terms, and its own nodes and networks.

5

Geography, Survival and Sustainability

Introduction Having considered a range of aspects of the geography of education in terms of formal, non-formal and informal modes of the acquisition of knowledge and skills, we now need to consider the issue of ‘cyberspace and education’. This will be approached in a number of ways: first to consider the wider context of cyberspace and education; second to examine issues relating to the phenomenon of globalization within which digital dimensions of all forms of education in terms of place, space and scale render it internally disparate; and; third to discuss the potential role of geography in education’s response to the existential challenges of the twenty-first century – in other words, to discuss the question of how the synergy between geography and education, discussed in the first chapter of this book, could be a significant asset in terms of the necessary collapsing of space and time, given the imminence of potential ‘tipping points’ in respect of human and environmental survival. This is not about geography in the curriculum of schools, though it should be there, or about geography in higher education. Rather it is about how geography, in terms of place, space and scale can better inform the educational process that is itself informed by formal, non-formal and informal modes, and is lifelong.

Cyberspace and Education In 1995, the UK appointed its first minister for cyberspace, Ian Taylor, then the technology minister at the Department of Trade and Industry, where, according to the Daily Express of 10th March that year, he ‘has taken on the role of bringing different parts of the government together to experiment with the new technologies and encourage business, schools, hospitals and others to

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make the best use of them’ (p. 44). Now, two decades later, even pre-schools in the UK have small computer suites, and information and communications technology (ICT) is a standard component of the curriculum through the period of compulsory schooling. Even more, it is assumed, at least in the UK, that all households, or even individual pupils, have a computer at home on which they receive instructions for homework which, when done, is delivered back to school electronically. In fact, in the UK not all households with children have a computer, though most do, and there are still some locations where broadband is so poor that computers cannot be used anyway. This is a small example of the ubiquitous and disparate digital divide that has obvious spatial significance for knowledge creation, dissemination and consumption. Cyberspace, according to Dodge and Kitchen (2001), is not just one big uniform space. Rather: It is a myriad of rapidly expanding cyberspaces, each providing a different form of digital interaction and communication. In general, these spaces can be categorized into those existing within the technologies of the Internet, those within virtual reality, and conventional telecommunications such as the phone and the fax, although because there is a rapid convergence of technologies new hybrid spaces are emerging (p. 1).

This corresponds to the comment by Holloway and Valentine (2001) that cyberspace is not placeless, but is rather an ‘on-line space’ that is ‘mutually constituted with the off-line space of its producers and consumers to produce place-routed on-line cultures’ (p. 159). Because this is to do with information, and therefore learning, it is fundamentally connected with education in terms of the restructuring of spaces through global networks and information flows. These, according to Morley and Robins (1995), can cause crises at the national scale through ‘new forms of regional and local activity’ (p. 1). Such crises may have significant cultural outcomes as argued by Barber (1996) in his Jihad vs McWorld, which has to do with non-formal education mediated through cyberspace. His narrative has much to do with now relatively traditional forms of distance communication such as television, film and corporate globalism. For example, in a ‘fast-food establishment in any city around the world try to figure out where you are. You are nowhere. You are everywhere. Inhabiting an abstraction. Lost in cyberspace’ (p. 99). Used in this sense, as he points out, ‘cyberspace is a metaphor, but when it comes to television, cyberspace is virtually the reality – that is to say is virtual reality’ (ibid.). In geographical terms cyberspace is still a kind of place, of which there are innumerable examples on the internet as well as through film, television and other

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media where knowledge of many kinds and at many levels is shared. It should be remembered that ‘globalization is not so new and therefore any study of globalization should never be separated from its antecedents’ (Taylor, 2009, p. 235 and 2011), such as long-distance mail before long-haul air travel. For example, in educational terms, from the mid-nineteenth century the University of London offered an extramural opportunity for students throughout the world to read for degrees at a distance by post, the documentation from students and tutors being mailed by ship. This proceeded until at least the 1950s, after which bulk air mail became feasible. The celebrated international and comparative educator, Kazim Bacchus (1929–2007), from the then British Guiana, gained his PhD through this distance education facility, as the University of London became a near global institution, or at least extended to colonial and then Commonwealth territories. Telephone, telegraph and radio all represent stages in, and are still instruments of, globalization. With information communications technology, and certainly since the 1990s, the modernization of cyberspace raises epistemological issues, including those relating to relationships between knowledge and power. As we have seen in Chapter 3, the development of national education systems had much to do with the control of people within regulated space, as nation-states developed in Europe (Dodgeshon, 1987). The creation of cyberspace takes that relationship beyond the national scale, though that level of authority still has a stake in it. Considering relationships between space, knowledge and power, Crampton et al. (2007) talk of ‘an epistemology of geographical knowledge’ (p. 107) leading to a geography of theory. Creation and manipulation of knowledges is most obvious in the corporate field where extremely competitive environments create high stakes for profit and survival. This has been translated to the experience, through managerial practices, of formal, non-formal and informal education worldwide. Organized competition between schools, resulting in rankings known analogously as league tables, is driven downwards to individual year groups and classes in schools, as well as upwards to the international level in the form of rankings in exercises such as TIMMS and PISA. Just as in the commercial world there are shortcomings in the voracity of such comparisons, so too in the educational world there is much partiality. This all has to do with what Christophers (2007) terms geographical knowledges, clearly recognizing the prime attributes of geography – space, place and scale – as essential to knowledge acquisition, construction and dissemination. In other words, this is an aspect of creativity in relation to the transmission of knowledge and skills in the service of the economy, where the geographies of cyberspace are nowadays

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central to the mobilization of knowledge. Such a view was put forward by Mitchell (1990) nearly two decades earlier, as indicated by Christophers: Mitchell helps take studies of the politics of the contemporary state beyond the analysis of governmentality and subject formation, opening up basic issues of knowledge, power and truth. Mobilizing knowledges – frequently as here geographical knowledges – is seen to be central to the creation of institutions and the envisioning and control of the economy. (Christopher, op. cit. p. 245)

As can be seen from the sources immediately above, the focus is on knowledge in service of the economy, which is almost the only way that most governments, and indeed individuals, see the purpose of education, especially formal education, to be. Such a widely held conventional view neglects the importance of education to civil society: Education, and especially ‘liberal education’, is what makes civil society possible. That means it has an importance even greater than its contribution to economic success, which, alas, is all that politicians seem to think it is for. (Grayling, 2002, p. 157)

The national economic imperative, as the raison d’etre of education, is clearly the purpose as seen by the OECD, the generator and operator of PISA, which, in part through its own operation of cybernetics, is coming increasing close to being the global power of formal schooling (Meyer and Benavot, 2013). Are these geographies of cyberspace and knowledge management becoming dangerously impersonal? That is a question with implications for the final section of this chapter on geographies of education and the meeting of the range of existential challenges that face humanity and the environment as the twenty-first century proceeds. Certainly Thrift and French (2002) feel that we need ‘friendlier information technologies’ so as to ‘allow us to shape overlapping spatial mosaics in which effective participation is still possible and still necessary. Automatic can be for the people’ (p. 331). They recognize three intersecting geographies of some consequence (pp. 324–8):

a) the geography of software production: primary centres of software production such as Silicon Valley California, New York and London, with supporting places such as within Ireland and India; b) the geography of software power: software in the service of governmentality through rules of conduct, producing societies of control; c) the geography of freedom: where spreadsheets are a spur to creativity. They are concerned with what they term ‘the automatic production of space’, with its changing nature and with ‘spaces overloaded with software’ becoming the

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technical substrata of Euro-American Societies. This is a cybernetic equivalent of Carnoy’s (1974) ‘education as cultural imperialism’. In their study of the use of the internet by British schoolchildren, Holloway and Valentine (2001) found that ‘far from being a placeless virtual sphere, the on-line space used by the British children in this study was often, though not exclusively, an American space’ (p. 158). This they attributed to the embedding of most internet technology in the USA. Given the common language and medium of instruction, as between most dimensions of school society in the USA and the UK, there is an ease of infiltration, though not necessarily planned or underhand. With other cultures and regions, it may be more fragmented and limited. For example, Warf and Vincent (2007) found: In the Arab World the multiple spaces generated by digital networks and reflected in the labyrinthine and rhyzomatic topologies that unevenly infiltrate various nooks and crannies of societies gripped by intense globalization, political and religious upheaval and rapid demographic change. (p. 95)

They found that in 2006 the percentage of national populations in that region that were internet users ranged from 36.1 per cent in UAE, 26.6 per cent in Kuwait, 21.1 per cent in Bahrain and 20.7 per cent in Qatar (small wealthy countries), though 15.2 per cent in Morocco, 7.8 per cent in Sudan and 7.0 per cent in Egypt (the three most populated and with significant proportions of poor). They did not, however, see the internet as being only fragmented by dynamic societal upheavals, but rather also as a force for change in that it ‘will likely generate a variety of impacts in the foreseeable future’ (ibid.). It is now nearly a decade since they carried out that study and we now know the significance of social media in the rise and fall of the ‘Arab Spring’, as well as in inter-ethnic, sectarian and fundamentalist movements that will likely plague that region for decades, if not generations, to come. With stable government seemingly unattainable, and formal education provision severely fractured, the internet will play an increasing part through changing geographies of information, knowledge and skills acquisition for whatever purposes those with power, legitimate or not, choose to pursue. The Arab World is not the only region where the experience of cyberspace as a source of education in all forms is extremely disparate. Many sub-Saharan African countries have patchy connection due to the poverty of their economies and peoples. This places their elites, including the formally educated, at an increasing position of authority not only through political power, but also through the ignorance of the majority. Ignorance, and indeed partial knowledge, are still forms of education of sorts. The same problem is found in the poorest

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Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Laos, but there are also some more developed nations where those in political power restrict internet access, as in China. This complex global web of disparate access to cyberspaces leads us on to consideration of the issue of the true nature of globalization, once popularly regarded as creating the ‘global village’, now clearly a redundant image.

Globalization and Educational Disparity The basic spatial issues here are that (a) access to the digital dimension of educational provision; (b) the nature and quality of that provision and (c) technical ability to interpret and manipulate it, are all extremely disparate in spatial and locational terms. Such disparity has come to be termed the ‘digital divide’. It operates at all scales from person to person, household to household, school to school, community to community, region to region, country to country and on an international and global scale. It is profoundly geographical. This makes the acquisition of ICT skills in the early years of learning in effect a necessary third strand of basic educational competence alongside literacy and numeracy. What is globalization and how is it seen as between geography and education? In geographical terms, it is seen as a series of complex intersecting and overlapping networks of information between nodal cities as well as ‘a growth in the spatial differentiation inside cities even as they can strengthen their cross-border transactions’ (Sasson, 2002, p. 27). It is not seen in terms of a series of education surfaces, and certainly not as a surface of global proportions. In educational terms, globalization is seen as a threat to the longstanding control of learning by individual national policies and procedures through economic, political and cultural intervention (Burbules and Torres, 2000). They go on to mention the main pros and cons of globalization. Among the former they identify the growth of forms of liberal democracy and of a belief in human rights. On the negative side, they see structural unemployment and an increase in the gap between rich and poor, both within nations and worldwide. All these have come to pass in the subsequent two decades, and have implications for education: The broader economic effects of globalization tend to force national policies into a neo-liberal framework that emphasises lower taxes; shrinking the state sector and ‘doing more with less’; promoting market approaches to school choice (particularly vouchers); rational management of school organizations;

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performance assessment (testing); and deregulation in order to encourage new providers (including on-line providers) of educational services. (ibid., p. 20)

All have geographical effects as can be seen in the case of education in England, for example: squeezing public funding to existing schools while awarding it to new providers such as businesses running academy chains; further widening of school choice through new ‘free schools’; appointing ‘super-heads to oversee networks of schools’; reforming internal management structures of schools through business models; frequent testing and ranking to produce league tables. In the tertiary sector two significant global developments have been (a)  quality assurance in the interest of mutual recognition of qualifications, and (b) the role of universities as trading organizations as perceived by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Here the question is whether or not higher education, with its increasing international student flows, is a form of trading that should be subject to the regulations of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). Such an interpretation would in the view of Altbach (2001) compromise the traditional ideals and independence of ‘the university’, and he refers to this as ‘globalization run amok’ (ibid., p. 1): We are in the midst of a true revolution in higher education, a revolution that has the potential to profoundly change our basic understanding of the role of the university. (ibid.)

Daniel (2002) put the dilemma succinctly. Is research a commodity or a commons? These, he says, are ‘two contrary phenomena at work’ (p. 12). Globalization favours the former. Irrespective of GATS, universities have become drawn further into an economic role by globalization, favouring the commodity route. They are seen, and see themselves, as brands, and like all brands exist in hierarchical pecking orders. Such perceptions are partly historical and derivative, but increasingly more formalized through global ranking systems based almost entirely on only one of the three recognized functions of universities: research. The three fundamental functions and responsibilities of universities are: to teach, to undertake research and to provide relevant services to their local communities and regions (Brock and Symaco, 2016), which in spatial terms is necessarily local, or at most regional (Thomas and Irwin, 2016). Current global rankings are based almost entirely on research, and income generated by research. The quality of research is based on its outcome being published in so-called elite academic journals recognized by certain organizations in the USA. This means, inter alia, that publishing in English is a priority. This

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is an aspect of globalization in education that creates new forms of disparity, spatial included, not least that obviously outstanding universities in countries not primarily working in English, such as in France, Germany and Russia, are virtually excluded. In many other countries, English is embraced purely for the purpose of competing, which in turn creates further intra-national, cultural and spatial disparities of the quality of educational activity. In what are regarded as the leading universities in relatively newly emergent countries in terms of higher education, such as Malaysia, academic promotion is subject to having several publications in English in the elite journals every year. Resources are provided in order to try to achieve a place in the top 200 or better, at the expense of the other public sector universities. This increases disparity within the tertiary sector of a country, despite the fact that it is known that national achievement at this level depends on the quality and resourcing of the higher education sector as a whole. Private universities are of course included in rankings and are not a drain on public funding. However, the massive increase in private universities worldwide, especially in the less developed countries and regions, adds to the disparities within the sector, including the fact that many such institutions are not worthy of the title of university, whether in terms of quality, or in terms of the limited range of fields of study offered. The relatively recent phenomenon of trans-border higher education further increases global spatial disparity in tertiary education. We can reasonably conclude then, that in both geographical and educational terms, globalization has led, and continues to lead, to increased disparity. This is despite the global reach of the internet through cyberspace which itself, as we have seen, is really many overlapping and intersecting spaces creating innumerable digital divides. Chapman et al. (1997) see what they term the ‘North–South divide’ at the global scale and in the context of the mass media. In relation to tertiary education and research, they consider the intersection of media studies, environmental studies and development studies in understanding this divide, but they also examine the influence of mass media on contemporary societies at large, that is to say through the most influential mode of education, the informal. They used the North–South divide in their research and narrative in terms of mass media in the UK and India. Despite the massive impact on India in terms of colonial occupation, in terms of their North–South divide they state that ‘the cultural baggage that each one of them carried in to their mutual encounter could hardly have been more different, and their experiences of the world around them also radically different’ (p. 1 ). It would seem that there is a growth of a kind of occidentalism that contains such features as greed, corporate and

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personal, fragmentation of the family, health problems due to over-consumptive life styles, and crude stereotypical portrayal of oriental cultures in the mass media that constitutes one side of this informal education divide. Yet, as Thrift and French noted (earlier) India is one of the key locations of technical support services for West-based global information and communications technology. Also, as mentioned earlier, there are still significant pockets of the UK where internal digital divides persist, while in India, with one of the two most rapid developing economies of the world, the internal digital divide grows and diversifies with that of the population in both the rural and the poorer urban areas. Korupp and Szydlik (2005) distinguish between first-level and second-level digital divides: ‘The first-level digital divide deals with problems of access to computers and the internet, while the second-level focusses on the user profiles of new technologies’ (p. 409). They concentrate on the first-level and find issues of spatial and locational interest from the local to the national scales. They summarize: Our study shows that some of the long-term consequences of the 40-year German separation are diminishing with regard to computer use. We demonstrate that human and social capital are more important than economic capital in explaining private computer and Internet use. Indications for higher social classes to secure or even increase their favourable social positions exist. (p. 409)

The national-level point, with regard to the unification of Germany, shows how political geography is important, since nationalism requires that people live, and receive education, in various forms within regulated spaces, though boundaries can and do change. That there is free movement of labour within the European Union education space adds an extra spatial dimension to education, in all modes but especially the informal. The cultural and economic nature of this space may of course change in reaction to the challenge of immigration from the Middle East and Africa: inter alia, a humanitarian challenge.

Geographies of Education and a Humanitarian Response The range of a geography of education, collectively known as ‘geographies of education’, has been discussed in previous chapters in terms of the forms of education that have developed with societies evolving within increasingly regulated spaces, the most influential of which is the national scale. Formal and non-formal education are seen primarily in terms of contributing to national

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economic growth and international competition. Re-emphasized through the work of PISA, an agency of the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), an essentially global curriculum for schools has emerged based on the European model. While driving up standards in a limited range of subjects in the school curriculum, it is a response to an essentially competitive model of human development that, as mentioned earlier, is a form of globalization that is divisive, even within the mainstream of humanity that is served by complete systems of formal and non-formal provision. Even worse, this model seems unlikely to be able to confront the existential challenges of the twenty-first century which, by definition, would require a different response. Since the processes and effects of education, as a space-reducing mechanism, are inherently geographical, it follows that a different response would involve different geographies of education. This response, this writer has argued for some years (Brock, 2011 and 2016a), has to be a humanitarian response aiming at human and environmental survival and sustainability. This is a form of education for all that is not just the EFA that we know today, that is to say, universal basic schooling, but would come from an intersection of and reconnection of the whole range of educational experiences illustrated in Figure 5.1. The current range of educational circumstances illustrated here comprises three main human groups: (a) the mainstream where geographies of education are expressed in terms of the spatial array of formal education, including

Figure 5.1 A holistic view of education as a humanitarian response Source: Brock, C. (2011), Education as a Global Concern, London and New York, Continuum Books, p. 20.

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schooling for all, plus further and higher education provision and quality informal sources, with all their attendant spatial disparities as discussed in previous chapters; (b) the marginalized where school provision is incomplete at best, non-formal provision mostly absent and informal education mainly local, meaning even greater spatial disparity; (c) the excluded due to extreme remoteness, slavery, and discrimination, massive disparity, much of it unknown. Between these three are other human groups, either on the fringe (e.g. orphans), on the move (e.g. travellers and migrants), or dislocated by disasters (human and natural). Altogether these six categories of humanity produce spatial patterns of education that are highly complex and dynamic, but they all have their informal education experiences which, though widely differing and changing, are in their own hands and cultures, and it is in cultural geography that the foundations of geographies of education reside. As has also been shown earlier, formal and non-formal provision of education is ultimately mediated and appropriated at the local and individual levels of scale. Consequently, it is at these levels that any meaningful action leading to educational responses to the challenges of human and environmental survival will have to occur. This does not mean of course that, as Bottery (2016) has argued, significant developments in educational leadership are not required. They are, but they will need a much more sophisticated understanding of the geographies of educational reality than hitherto apparent. When a simplistic frame is chosen, all too often an apparently universal policy solution is created and then passed down to others as not requiring adaptive implementation. Yet, applying such policies unthinkingly to highly complex situations, nearly all of which, of necessity, are singular and context-based in nature, leads to all kinds of damaging consequences one might expect from such an inappropriate approach. (ibid., p. viii)

It is at the ultimate base level of the individual, as understood by such notable geographers as Mabogunje (1985) (individuals as the ultimate handling mechanism of information flow) and Thrift (1980) (we have no idea of what individuals actually know), that human and environmental survival and sustainability will likely depend. Then there is the temporal scale, as always, to consider. Whatever educational responses are necessary will depend on the nature of existential threats and how imminent they are reckoned to be. The Gaia theory, made popular by Lovelock and Margulis (1974), sounded the warning that the Earth’s capacity to self-regulate its delicate environmental balance must not be disrupted. Although widely publicized, this has been largely ignored by those in political

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and corporate power, possibly due to Lovelock being a remarkably independent and somewhat maverick scientist and inventor and never holding any formal position in higher education. More likely, though, it is due to it being politically inconvenient. Gaia, highly spatial in its nature, is clearly an issue of fundamental educational importance that should have been central to school curricula long ago. It can be made easily intelligible to primary school students as well as to adult learners, and indeed has been, through the use of the ‘Goldilocks’ analogy (Zalasiewicz and Williams, 2012). Some thirty years after Gaia’s appearance, Martin Rees (2005), Astronomer Royal and former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, authored the book Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century? He gave the odds as 50:50, and in 2011 established, with Cambridge colleagues, the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Rees mentions four examples of ‘worst case possibilities’ to trigger disasters, all of which combine geographical and educational attributes: The disaffected lab worker who spreads viruses through global air travel; the termination risk caused by stratospheric aerosol geo-engineering; distributed manufacturing leading to nanoscale manufacture of military grade missiles; artificial intelligence escaping into the Internet with devices communicating between themselves. (Brock, 2016a, p. 30)

Meanwhile James Martin had, in 2005, had established The Oxford Martin School with the same objective of gathering evidence, across a range of disciplines, of the existential threats that face humanity and our environment, and generating ideas to combat them. Martin (2006) produced a book that was designed as a ‘blueprint for ensuring our future’ in the twenty-first century, in which he lists a range of seventeen existential threats to human and environmental survival that will need to be met, and soon. These are listed and paraphrased in Table 5.1. This is a formidable challenge to a currently dislocated and disparate kaleidoscope of geographies of education in a short space of time, perhaps half to three-quarters of a century at best. The differential rates at which the various macro-groups of humanity identified in Figure 5.2 are likely to be significant to the ability to respond to challenges of human and environmental survival that are illustrated by Table 5.1. The implication is that the marginalized majority could move disproportionately through short- and medium-term stages of survival, aided to some extent by the relative incompleteness of their systems of educational provision. The disparate mainstream, that is much less prepared than might be supposed, may well be slower to respond due to the vested interests of the various components of their established systems and spaces of formal education. The dislocated may

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Table 5.1 Martin’s existential challenges to human and environmental survival Challenge

Necessary actions

The Earth

Stop actions leading to climate change, polluting rivers and lakes, breaching the ozone layer, wasting fresh water. Poverty All nations need to reach a decent literacy rate and adequate levels of employment. Population Overpopulation needs to be curbed by raising the educational levels of women and improving lifestyles. Lifestyles Twentieth-century lifestyles cannot be sustained, but technology has the potential to support new, comfortable, lifestyles in keeping with sustaining the environment. War The existence of weapons capable of ending civilization makes this a very different century from any before. Weapons control and eradication is essential for survival. Globalism This is already here but must be adjusted to allow unique cultures to survive. Localism is vital to sustainability. The global–local link is fundamental. The Biosphere Global management of the biosphere is essential, including a computer-inventoried knowledge of all species. Terrorism All grade uranium and plutonium must be locked. Causes of terrorism must be eradicated, including mutual respect of all religions for each other to prevent their perversion. Creativity Creativity must be supported by current and future levels of technology in the interest of innovative innovations to progress sustainability. Disease Increasing potential pandemics (including terrorist generated) must be resisted by appropriate defences. Human potential Most people today ‘fall outrageously short of their potential’. The Singularity This is the chain reaction of computer intelligence. It needs to be controlled to enable appropriate education of young people to cope with self-evolving technologies. Existential risk There are risks that could lead to the termination of the human species, demanding immediate resolution to control science. This is essential because current estimates give us an only 50–50 chance. Transhumanism Nanotechnology will change human capability, creating advanced civilizations, but also an increasingly wider gap between rich and poor. Advanced This will permeate cyberspace and affect decisions relating to the civilization management of planet Earth. Gaia We must learn to live within the constraints of the Earth’s natural balance of species and environments. Failure to do so will be catastrophic. The skillsScience and technology and accelerating furiously, but wisdom is wisdom gap not. We need more inter-disciplinarity in education and less corporate greed in the economy. Source: Brock, C. (2016), ‘Education as a Humanitarian Response as a Global Objective’, in S. McGrath and G. Qing (Eds), Routledge Handbook of International Education and Development, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 30–1.

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Figure 5.2 Temporal scale and education as a humanitarian response Source: Brock, C. (2011), Education as a Global Concern, London and New York, Continuum Books, p. 33.

be disadvantaged by the aforementioned requirement to return to the status quo ante and thereby reintroduce such vested interests. The excluded may well remain excluded. Geographies of educational provision are likely to become more varied and complex, as communities at various scales from national to local respond to the pressures of the challenges of the various threats identified by Martin (Table 5.1). For example, although climate change is accelerating on a global scale its nature and effects are, and will not be, the same everywhere. Neither will they become evident at the same rate. The current temperate zone of Western and Northern Europe is likely, it seems, to become warmer and wetter, while the tropical zone of Africa to the south is likely to become even drier and dessicated, extending to include parts of Southern Europe. This may well, among other things, accelerate the flow of migrants to Western and Northern Europe.

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Successful responses will have to be on the local scale of Schumacher, not by some grand global, or even regional scale of design. This is a matter for communities of developing a cultural capacity in order to accommodate necessary changes. Brock and Cammish (1997a), in the context of their researches into female participation in education in developing countries, defined cultural capacity as ‘the extent to which and the rate at which a society is capable of absorbing cultural change’ (p. 118). Since education is culturally based and the scale at which educational reality is apparent is local, it is in the context of, at least, relatively local responses that meeting the existential challenges will take place, if at all. The notion of capacity-building is well established in terms of economic and administrative dimensions, but even in more economically advanced societies, the issue of female disadvantage is a deterrent on progress. In the context of the global/local relationship, it is an altogether different level of challenge to induce relevant changes in societies where females are structurally and otherwise disadvantaged. In practice the depth and nature of female disadvantage is the result of a complex interplay of factors leading to a compounded situation that is locally and culturally specific. (ibid.)

This argues for any educational reform having the capacity to respond effectively to the challenges to human and environmental survival and sustainability to be locale-specific. This brings us back to Schumacher’s assertion that ‘production of local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life’, and apply it to education in the context of survival. This is what is meant in Figure 5.3 by ‘local resonance’ in the school curriculum, and the mutually supportive objectives of all its components. The standard components of what has been referred to earlier as the global curriculum derived from the European model and comprising a range of familiar subjects, some of which are regarded as more important than others, is not going to go away. It is too deeply ingrained as a kind of conventional wisdom; in other words, it is taken for granted. So what is required in the context of providing a formal schooling that is going to satisfy, and also benefit from, the locale-specific reality in responding to imminent existential challenges, needs to have three equal dimensions: (a) a core technical skills dimension; (b) a liberal education dimension; (c) a local resonance dimension. These are portrayed as three intersecting circles in the Venn diagram that is Figure 5.3. The core technical skills would be mathematics (numeracy), language (literacy) and ICT. These would be followed in two ways: (a) in specialist

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Figure 5.3 Essential components of a relevant curriculum Source: Brock, C. (2011), Education as a Global Concern, London and New York, Continuum Books, p. 49.

sessions to acquire the necessary specific skills, and (b) in other sessions, through integration with other subjects in terms of both local resonance and also wider application. These two ways are shown by the black curved arrows on the diagram, while elements of non-formal and informal education would also be included through local and wider contexts. Two examples of potential integrated curricular themes may serve to illustrate this point involving issues that are globally commonplace but vital: (a) the ubiquity of insects; (b) the near ubiquity of plastics. As Sir Ken Robinson indicated in his 2006 TED lecture, if all insects in the world were eradicated, life on Earth would come to an end, but if all humans were eradicated the remaining species would flourish. Insects, like bacteria and water, are fundamental to survival as clearly shown in Planet of the Bugs (Shaw, 2015). With regard to plastics Zalesiewicz et al. (2016) have clearly illustrated that they are now forming a globally wide and in effect geological stratum. This is both on land and under the oceans, as reported by McKie (2016): The research, published in the journal Anthropocene, shows that no part of the planet is free of the scourge of plastic waste. Everywhere is polluted with the remains of water containers, supermarket bags, polystyrene lumps, nylons and other plastics. Some are in the form of microscopic grains, others in lumps. The impact is often highly damaging. … The annual total of 300 million tonnes is close to the weight of the entire human population of the planet. (p. 18)

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The object of operating the school curriculum in such a way is to provide a relevant spatial character, both local and beyond, that is a form of the geography of education that would hopefully be a balanced, humane and relevant experience. It would arguably provide a basis for responding to the challenges of the twenty-first century. Geography itself could contribute to highlighting such problems, as argued by Morgan (2012) in his Teaching Secondary Geography as if the Planet Mattered. It is highly unlikely that such an adequate response can be made on a global policy scale (Coicaud and Tahri, 2014), or by intergovernmental cooperation, or by international agencies such as the United Nations Agencies and the World Bank Group, or by multilateral agencies such as the European Union. So the only likely possibility is the cyberspace route through the fundamental global–local relationship that fits the need for local resonance and response. The subject geography would of course be an important curricular component, and as indicated at the beginning of this book, the situation whereby the majority of people in the world have not studied it beyond a very limited and antiquated level needs to be rectified. However, more important is the change proposed in the geography of educational provision at school level so as to effect an operation that is aimed to get the maximum benefit from what cyberspace can offer. One could term this ‘the geography of the curriculum’ and to achieve it three different, albeit overlapping, communities need to be involved in each locale. The scale of what constitutes the local would vary because of the different scales at which the three essential components of the exercise operate from place to place. These three components are: (a) schools; (b) post-compulsory institutions: universities and further education colleges; (c) civil society. Figure 5.4 illustrates this interaction. Taking this beyond the school level curriculum as illustrated in Figure 5.4 enables the integration of all three forms of education across the age range of lifelong learning. In order to achieve this, there would be interactive networks of learning connecting the activities of schools, colleges and civil society with additional timetabled educational events open to all age groups. This would help to collapse the time scale that exists between learning about important issues of supposed complexity, currently temporally separated merely because they are presumed to be of different degrees of complexity. Some such educational events could be organized (a) only between schools and universities or colleges, (b)  others only between civil society (adults) and universities or colleges, (c) others only between civil society and schools and (d) others open to all. With regard to the imminent existential challenges of the coming decades, such events could focus on challenges such as Gaia and the biosphere, violent

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Figure 5.4 Integrated education with locale-specific, global humanitarian and environmental sustainable perspectives Source: Brock, C. (2011), ‘Education as a Global Concern’, London and New York, Bloomsbury, p. 145.

conflict, globalism, population and poverty, and creativity, as identified by Martin (2006). This in turn would help individuals of all ages to reach further towards their personal potential and challenge the skills or wisdom gap. One of Martin’s seventeen problems identified as needing urgent resolution is that the majority of human beings fail to reach their potential. As Brock puts it: If the formal dimension of education is somehow not in tune with informal and non-formal learning in relation to the economy and the environment, then the potential for enhancing the cultural capital will have been constrained by the limitations of the social capital of which formal education, where it exists, is a part. (Brock, 2011, p. 144)

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As Wilson (2010) observed, achieving such an objective as enhancing cultural capital will involve challenging power relationships within communities. Such relationships are apparent in the vested political and commercial interests alluded to earlier and operate at all scales from local to global, including as we have seen earlier even within families and generations. An integrated arrangement such as illustrated in Figure 5.4 would go some way to challenging the divide between formal and informal dimensions of education with which Edwards (2014) is concerned. She terms these ‘disruptive innovations’ that are enabled by new forms of ICT, and regards them as non formal approaches to learning’. These are ‘hybrid pedagogic approaches that use digital technology to disrupt the formal/informal learning divide, delivering a learning experience that is both ‘formal’ and ‘informal’. (p. 141)

Making such innovations happen depends on how well Bottery’s (2016) call for appropriate educational leadership is answered. He is optimistic, but both political leadership in terms of systemic policy and funding support, and professional leadership in terms of imagination and creativity will be needed, and in innumerable locations and contexts. It will demand a massive spatial turn in the geography of education as a supportive academic, professional and popular exercise.

Concluding Comments This chapter has attempted to move the discussion towards the current and future situations within which geographies of education will reside and interact in the twenty-first century. While the geography of cyberspace has emerged over several decades, it is now one of the prime players in the provision of sources of learning and teaching whether in formal education or, increasingly, beyond. As we have seen from Dodge and Kitchin (2001) and Holloway and Valentine (2001), among others, there are multiple cyberspaces and they interact with off-line space to produce ‘place-routed on-line cultures’ (ibid., p. 159). The effect is also not neutral since a significant proportion of on-line influence is formulated in one polity, the USA. This, together with the incidences of digital divides from individual, through local to national and regional scales makes for greater disparity in educational provision and outcomes than ever before, as reactions to that fact will vary. Globalization is neither uniform nor some kind of panacea for challenging the problems now faced by humanity and planet

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Earth. The enduring relationship between knowledge and power plays on, with most nations still prioritizing a role for education in the promotion of economic competition and various degrees of internal social and political influence, even in some cases control. Ever closer surveillance of their populations is a form of education in the service of perceived security. Such a scenario will not likely fit well with the local scale of educational integration that is suggested in this chapter as being appropriate and necessary to enhance the role that education could play in assisting human survival and achieving environmental sustainability. Nonetheless, a number of spatially oriented contexts for educational reform have been suggested earlier, and illustrated in diagrammatic form (Figures 5.1 through 5.4). They move towards a local resonance of education that involves and intertwines all three forms of education, formal, non-formal and informal, and can take effect through the global–local potential of internet connections to create a dynamic curriculum that could be drawn upon by all ages in any community in ways that are relevant to it. Schools, colleges and universities could work with and through civil society to achieve what could be termed relevant geographies of curricula. Such curricula would of course draw on the existing subjects and disciplines that humankind has assembled in order to understand its life and world, but they would also be integrated as necessary for the challenging of the existential threats of the coming decades as these affect each community and locality. Nation-states will not go away, but they would be wise to give more influence over formal aspects of education to where the geography of educational reality actually resides, the locale.

Conclusion

The prime objective of this book is to encourage interest in the nascent field of geography of education, a field whose existence has become evident over the past few decades, although largely only to those already involved – the increasing numbers of relevant papers in a range of academic geography journals would only be known to specialists, mostly geographers. They are making an important contribution, and that is why a large number of references have been included here so as to encourage follow-up and further development. They inform and illustrate a range of geographies of education. But overall, the geography of education, as a member of the family of sub-disciplines of educational studies, is barely evident and almost missing from the journals and books of educational studies, unlike the history, sociology, politics, philosophy, psychology and economics of education. As mentioned at the beginning of this narrative, this is partly due to academic tribalism and the cult of specialization, but the climate is changing and interdisciplinarity is in the air, including across the social and natural sciences (Barry and Born, 2014). Both geography and educational studies are composite disciplines. Indeed, they share a synergy in that both are spatially oriented, since education is a space–saving mechanism (Spencer and Thomas, 1969). By this is meant that education has to do with flows of information from sources to receivers across spaces. Traditionally this is seen as being from teacher to student in the setting of a school, and much of educational studies is concerned with that context, which is perhaps why the geography of education has not appeared earlier. Indeed, its recent emergence among a minority of the geographic community has been largely to do with non-formal settings such as family and community. Geography is about scale, space and place (Symaco and Brock, 2016), and school, family and community are all part of locales where educational reality occurs, often subverting the national scale of prescription and regulation where education is seen more in political and economic terms. Comparative education, which is the nearest of the family of educational studies sub-disciplines to geography, has, for most of its near century of existence (Brock and Alexiadou, 2013)

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been fixated on the national scale – on formal education systems. Yet this is only one scale of educational operation and is, in any case, never uniform in practice, even in the most totalitarian of regimes. The fact of the matter is that education is culturally based and only part of it, the formal mode, is politically delivered in terms of regulated space. Even then, such regulated spaces are extremely complex within, including in geographical terms. National scale statistics are rarely a true reflection of educational reality. One of the geographers to make an early contribution to the geography of education, Nigel Thrift, observed that we don’t really know what people actually know. What tends to be publicized is the little we do know – results of examinations. Even here there are clear geographical patterns that invite more analysis and sometimes concern. For example, with regard to recent (December 2015) preliminary analysis of GCSE results in England’s state secondary schools, there was said to be a ‘north–south divide’, though on a very large scale of mapping. Within this was also the evidence at the smaller scale of local authorities that, in general, coastal locations exhibited poorer achievements than average, including many in the south of the country, such as Thanet. Here, for example, we have somewhat traditional resorts and a long redundant Kent coalfield contributing to a local cultural legacy. Evidence on educational issues depends, as in a microscope, on the scale at which it is observed. Furthermore, the nature of geography has changed significantly since the 1960s as discussed in Chapter 2. Through more rigorous theory and consequent application, more sophisticated analyses of patterns of human activities, and their outcomes, including in terms of educational opportunity and outcomes, are now possible. Unfortunately, only a small minority of those engaged in educational research have studied geography beyond the age of about 14, if at all. So it is not surprising that the geography of education has been slow to get off the ground in the educational studies community. It is hoped that by including some of the approaches that exemplify this ‘new geography’ of the past halfcentury or so, more of those engaged in educational studies and research will appreciate what such approaches can tell us. The writer applied the theories of three scholars contributing to the new geography, Broek, Haggett and Walford, to educational themes and the results are included in Chapter 2. They are just as relevant today, as they highlight the significance not only of scale, but also of place, space, location, distance and movement along lines through networks of educational practices, experiences and outcomes. Since, because of the political factor, education in regulated space reigns powerful in the conventional imagination, it was deemed necessary to devote

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Chapter 3 to the emergence, nature and priorities of education systems. It was shown how the regulated spaces that became modern nation-states often began through colonization by networks of towns and cities. Such networks included an educational dimension initiated in the earliest towns that served the interests of three key groups: the powerful, the wealthy and the religious. These were not necessarily mutually exclusive, though they were almost exclusive to the male gender. Such polities subsequently grew through conquest and sometimes overseas colonialism, leading to the virtually global extension of what Mallinson (1980) termed ‘the Western European Idea of Education’. This model has gradually brought forward what may be regarded as a standard school curriculum focused on a narrow range of subjects that is almost global. It is in the process of becoming a feature of ‘global governance’, especially through the activities that are part of the OECD’s PISA project (Meyer and Benavot, 2013). Despite this convergence, there are in reality many exceptions to its influence, since the majority of the world’s people are marginalized from the mainstream, or excluded, or suffer educational disruption from natural or man-made disasters. Consequently, even in advanced industrialized societies, the realities of stateeducation systems in practice are far from their portrayal in official descriptions. Internal disparity is rife and these systems need, among other things, much more spatial and locational analysis by geographers. A focus on national or subnational systems of education, based on official data that is often partial, dealing only with formal education – in other words, dealing only with components of the recognized public sector system – is not enough. This is a limitation of the otherwise informative book Prisoners of Geography (Marshall, 2015), which focuses mainly on regulated space at the national level. The private sector of formal provision is often overlooked, but it is growing on a global scale. At school level this dimension varies considerably, with, for example, England exhibiting a remarkably high proportion of the compulsory education age group, about 8 per cent, in private institutions. They have their own geography, which is not insignificant in its influence both politically, through fast tacks to power, and economically, through a range of multiplier effects. In some of the highest achieving countries in terms of PISA profiles, the results are boosted by a massive investment by families in out-of-school cramming facilities that Mark Bray (2007 and 2010) has termed ‘shadow systems’ of education. The geographical distribution of such activities is growing and is not restricted to these high-profile cases. On a broader scale, however, the private sector growth in higher education is remarkable, especially in developing countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. All this goes to show that there are

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many and overlapping geographies of education within the regulated spaces of national education systems. Migration in respect of education is also a significant geographical feature, not only in terms of information flows but also in terms of human movements. At the local level, journeys between home and school have their own educational attributes and effects, as do those from student’s homes to universities both within and between countries. International student migration is one of the special interests of some of the new wave of geographers of education. Non-formal and informal modes of education, which refers to the acquisition of knowledge and skills outside of official systems, account for the majority of what people actually know. They are relatively neglected in the field of educational studies and exhibit their own innumerable geographies, which are the subject of Chapter 4. Non-formal education is the mode through which most of the knowledge and skills of humankind are acquired. This is due in large part to its temporal dimension – non-formal education runs from birth to death and happens over a majority of hours each day. The temporal scale is often neglected, even when the spatial scale is recognized and employed with regard to education. Geographies of non-formal education, a growth area, introduces different spaces and networks of learning, from family homes as well as individual rooms within a house, to streets, sports and other clubs, workplaces, care homes and day centres for the elderly, churches and military spaces. What children learn in school is massively influenced by any and all of these. Children’s geographies has its own journal of the same name of over ten years’ standing, with over 100 articles and growing. This is clearly a success story, but there are many millions of other children whose learning takes place in the context of being refugees, in or out of overcrowded seemingly permanent camps. Others learn in contexts where their schools have been under attack, a growing phenomenon in nearly half the countries of the world. There are others who are orphans or working or street children who have little or no contact with formal schooling, but experience their own forms of learning, some leading to unlawful occupations. The message of Chapter 4 is that we know even less about what the marginalized majority of the world’s population know than we do about those in more privileged circumstances. Curiously, this is increasingly due to the influence of cyberspace in education. By the end of Chapter 4 we have discovered that for those whose formal education experience is limited to school level, school is only a small part of their acquisition of knowledge and skills about which we know very little. We know that

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most of what people know is acquired through non-formal and informal modes of learning. The geography of these forms of education is extremely complex and little researched. What we do know is that the world and its peoples are facing a range of existential threats, responses to which will be informed by the levels and natures of the education of humankind in its myriad locations. One of the most informed experts on this front was James Martin (2006), in whose list of issues of concern (see Table 5.1) was the concern that the majority of people in the world do not realize their potential. This is a massive indictment of education of all kinds. Martin was a physicist turned cybernetic expert, innovator and benefactor, and it is the context of education and cyberspace that is the main concern of Chapter 5. Cyberspace is not uniform; there are many overlapping cyberspaces, but its potential, through the internet, and on actual and potential geographies of education, to assist humankind to survive the challenges that are imminent is crucial. Among other things, it offers the facility for local communities to develop networks for collaboration across formal, non-formal and informal education to respond at the scale of educational reality. This may be achieved in part through the global–local connection that has the potential to bypass the level of the nation-state, albeit some countries already restrict access, in whole or in part. There are already innumerable cyber-geographies of education that may be beyond mapping, and there are also innumerable digital divides to be overcome. On the rather hopeful assumption that at least some of these divides may be overcome, Figures 5.1 through 5.4 offer ideas for gathering all forms of education together to effect a local resonance to curricular development that may help to develop the cultural capital that communities will need to better understand and respond to Martin’s list of existential threats. Some, such as fundamentalism, terrorism and climate change are already upon us. What has this to do with geography? Well, the geographical implications of Figure 5.4 should be evident. We know that it is on the local scale educational reality resides. It should be possible at this scale of operation to enable spatial and locational qualities of information and action to play their part. This means the recognition and application of geographies of education could have positive outcomes. This does not mean that geography should be the core of any new curriculum. Curricular inertia would in any case prevent that. But as De Blij has argued (2012), geography does matter and more than ever. Several of his chapters have resonance with Martin’s existential threats, for example: (a) geography and demography; (b) geography and climate change; (c) climate,

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place and fate; (d)  the geography behind war and terror; (e) interpreting terrorism’s geographical manifestations. He asks: Is there a conceptual framework that can accommodate all these changes, that would help us understand the transformations and inter-connections, inform our thoughts and decisions through a particular comprehensive perspective? This book answers these questions with one affirmation: geography. (pp. 2–5)

While understanding the potential overconfidence of his claim, I would replace ‘geography’ with ‘the geography of education’! At the very least, this potential sub-discipline has much more to offer than has hitherto been apparent.

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Index Aachen 83 Abed Fazi Hassan, Sir 139 Abkazia 29 Abrahamic faiths 82 Abu Dhabi 108 Academic Geography Journals 20–1 academic pilgrims 112 Academic Research Councils, Swindon 55 academic tribes 1, 160, 183 academies 30, 45, 97, 169 ActionAid 135, 138 Addis Ababa 67 Adolescent Male Underachievement 76 adult education 7, 125, 131 Afghanistan 141 Africa 35, 41, 66, 150, 171, 186 agricultural colleges 50 Akademgorodok 78, 115 Alliances Francaises 67 American Indians 87, 88 Amnesty International 141 Amsterdam 145 Andorra 22 Anglican 26, 87, 96, 97, 100, 128 Anthropocene 50, 178 Antigua 73 applied geography 37–8 Arab Spring 167 Arab World 82, 167 Area 20, 21, 39, 149 Argentina 22 Asia – Pacific 66 Association of Commonwealth Universities 67 Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 61 Atomic Weapons Establishment, Aldermarston 55 atomization 60, 62, 65, 97, 148 Australia 18, 22, 26, 30, 64, 118, 138, 146 automatic production of space 166

Badminton School 117 Bahrain 106, 167 Balkans 29 Bangkok 66 Bangladesh 62, 64, 167 Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) 139–41 Barbados 73 Beatles 35 behavioural and humanistic geography 33–5 Beijing 117 Belarus 118 bilingualism 25 biogeography 23–4 Birmingham 77 Bloxham 99 Bologna Process 36, 75, 109, 110 Bo School 107 Bosnia 29 Bosniaks 29 Boston 117 boundary crossings 1, 142 Bradford Pakistani Community 55 branch campuses 101, 108, 117 Brazil 2, 64, 102, 103, 104, 107, 157 British and Foreign School Society 95 British Association for International and Comparative Education (BAICE) 17 British Council 67 British Educational Research Association (BERA) 50 British Overseas Territories (BOTS) 94 British Virgin Islands 72 Brussels 67 Brythonic Gaelic 94 Bucharest 67 built environment 37, 41 Bury St Edmunds 101 California 148, 166 Cambridge 37, 55

214

Index

Cambridgeshire 37 Cameroon 29 Canada 22, 30, 63, 64, 70, 77, 102, 120 cargo cult 27 Caribbean 66, 67, 69, 72, 73, 89, 94, 103 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) 74 cartography 57, 135 Cathedrals Group (Universities) 100 Catholic 26, 62, 95 Cavern Club 35 Central African Republic 106 Central America 109 Central Asia 120 Central Europe 146 centralized system of education 64, 103, 121 Central London 99 Centre for International Higher Education, Boston College 110 Centre for the Study of Education in the International Context 117 Centre for the Study of Existential Risk 174 Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) 50, 51, 100 Charterhouse 68 charter schools 90, 91 children’s, young peoples, family and community geographies 142–50 Children’s Geographies 20, 21, 142, 186 Children’s Society 156–7 Chile 103 China 63, 70, 86, 108, 116, 118, 119, 120, 168 Christianity 9, 82 classroom geographies 53–4 climate change 23, 43, 51 clustering 25, 74, 77, 97 coerced migration 151, 155 Columbia 106 Commission on Religion and Belief in British Public Life 98 Committee of the Regions (EC) 66 Commonwealth Secretariat 67 communication grids 52 Community Colleges (USA) 92 community education 38, 75 Comparative Education Society in Europe (CESE) 17

Compare 17 competing hierarchies 52 components of a relevant curriculum 178 composite disciplines 5, 183 Connecticut 63 conscientization 135 Consortium for Street Children (CSC) 157 contemporary international student migration 116–21 Cook’s Tour 112 Copenhagen 23 core-periphery 48, 74–9, 83, 113, 128 Cork 31 Cornwall 39, 94, 95 corporate service networks 52 corresponding societies 126 Costa Rica 110 Cote d’Ivoire 106 cross-border education 109 crown dependencies 93–4 Cuba 135 cultural capacity 177 cultural capital 119, 120 cultural colonialism 25 cultural geography 24–8, 94–5, 103, 110, 147, 173 cultural imperialism 36 cultural regions 48, 88 cultural territory of the community 137 cultural turn in geography 33, 44, 46 curricular inertia 187 Cusco 157 cyber geography 7, 41, 187 cyber media 145 cybernetics 79, 187 cyber schools 91 cyberspace 6, 7, 161, 179, 186, 187 cyberspace and education 163–8 cyberspaces 144 Czech Republic 118 decentralized system of education 64, 103 Defence Academy Shrivenham 55 demography 31–3 Denmark 121 Department for International Development (DfID) 66

Index determining periods 59 diffusion 25, 48, 58 digital divide 32, 168, 170, 187 dioceses 96 direct grant schools 30, 53, 99 dissemination 37, 73 distance 32, 98 District Primary Education Project (DPEP – India) 64 Dominica 103 Doncaster 130 Donetsk 29, 155 Dubai 108 Dundee 126 East Africa 48, 78, 139 Eastern Caribbean 72 Eastern Europe 67, 146, 151 Eastern Mediterranean 82 East Germany 60, 116 East London 22, 32, 49, 147 East Midlands 49–50 East Riding of Yorkshire 49, 62 East-West Centre (Hawaii) 66 ecological analysis 48, 50–1 Ecuador 104 Edinburgh 126 education: a composite and integrative discipline 11 Education Act 1870 96, 127 Education Act 1902 97 Education Act 1944 52, 65, 93, 97 Education Act 1988 18, 65, 76, 90, 87, 100 educational contraction 45 educational leadership 8, 161 educational surfaces 45, 54–5, 74 education and conflict 152 education and the world of work 158–60 education and training hubs 109 education as a humanitarian response 152 Education for All (EFA) 31, 172 education hubs 6, 52, 72, 73, 81, 108 education in situations and locations of constraint and coercion 150–8 education space 74–9 education under attack 105–6, 152, 186

215

Egypt 106, 167 elaborate and restricted codes (of English) 26 electronic distance 79 emotional geography 33 empirical knowledge 44 England 6, 18, 26, 30, 35, 37, 38, 39, 45, 49, 62, 65, 68, 76, 77, 82, 86, 93, 96, 98, 99, 122, 127, 128, 132, 158 England and Wales 18, 29, 38, 49, 59, 60, 65, 93, 94, 96 English East India Company 113 English language 103, 170 epistemology 20, 21, 39, 43, 165 Eton College 68 Europe 36, 71, 150 European Commission 66, 114 European Education Space 74 European Periphery 78 European Union 66, 69, 70, 75, 171, 179 faith schools 26 Falkland Islands 22, 94 fictive geography 34 field study centres 24, 50 fieldwork 38–40 Fiji 72 first urban revolution 82 Flanders 84 forms of education 13 foundation disciplines of education 5 Fourah Bay College 107 France 2, 29, 35, 60, 65, 66, 83, 86, 102, 116, 118, 121, 170 Francis Crick Institute 115 free schools 30, 45, 97, 98 French Parliament 25 French Revoluition 86 French Speaking Comparative Education Society (AFEC) 15, 17 functional literacy 135 further education 53, 99, 133 Gaelic Medium Education (Scotland) Gaia principle 23, 174, 178 Gambia 72 gangs and education 143 gateway cities 84, 87 Gaza 104

95

216 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATS) 169 Georgia 178 ghost schools 49, 108 Gibraltar 70, 94 Glasgow 126, 143 global coalition to protect education from attack 105 globalization 28, 30, 36, 122, 168, 170, 172, 181 globalization and educational disparity 168–71 global knowledge networks 117, 164 global networking technologies 52 Global Slavery Index 151 global warming 51 Goidelic Gaelic 94 Grassland Research Institute, Hurley 55 Great British Class Survey (GBCS) 26–7 Greater London 99 Great Yarmouth 50, 101 Greece 138 greenfield sites 38 Greenwich 98 Grenada 73 The Guardian 154 Guernsey 94 Guilds 158 Guinea-Bissau 135 Guttenberg 84 Haiti 141 Halle 13 Hanseatic League 83 Harrow School 68 Harwell Science Campus 55 Hawaii 68 Heathrow Airport 55 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate (HMI) 153 Herzegovina 29 Higher Education Institutions (HMIs) 53 Hindu 102 historical geographies of educational migration 112–16 historical geography 35–7 history of education 36 Home Learning Environment (HLE) 146

Index homeless children 153–4 home schooling 68, 70 Hong Kong 120, 145 Hopper’s classification of education systems 101–2 Hull University Extension Society 131 human conflict 37 human rights space 141 human sustainability 23 Humberside Polytechnic 46 Iberian Peninsula 82 immigrants 100 India 64, 67, 102, 108, 111, 118, 166, 170 Indiana 92 Indian Ocean Commission 74 indigenous peoples 23, 24, 125 Indonesia 141 Indus Valley 86 inertia 37, 48, 98 Information Communications Technology (ICT) 2, 19, 22, 24, 28, 43, 54, 91, 153, 160, 161, 164, 171, 177, 181 information flow 9, 17–20, 41, 164, 183 information networks 83 innovation 78 Institute of British Geographers (IBG) 40, 143 intellectual space 46 interdisciplinarity 1 interdisciplinary 160, 183 intergenerational context 146 Intermediate Technology Development Group 138 internal colonialism 88 internal geographies 151 International Baccalaureate (IB) 117 International Geographical Union (IGU) 16, 17 internationalization of higher education 110 International School Community (ISC) 117 international schools 30 International Student Migration (ISM) 117–21, 186 International Working Group for Indigenous Peoples (IWGIA) 23 Ipswich 101

Index Iran 102, 108 Iraq 153 Iraqi Kurds Community Kingston-UponHull 55 Irish Free State 94 Islam 82, 152 Islamic State 152 Isle de France 83 Isle of Man 94 Isle of Wight 50 isolation 50 Israel 53, 104, 122 Ivy League 92 Japan 29, 116, 118 Jersey 94 Johannesburg 138 Journal of Research in International Education 117 journeys to school 32, 52, 149 Judaism 82 Karachi 143 Karen Community, Sheffield 55 Kazakhstan 120 Kensington and Chelsea 98 Kilmarnock 126 Kingston-Upon-Hull 31, 49, 54, 55, 62, 147 kinship systems 137, 147 Kirovograd 155–6 knowledge and innovation hub 109 knowledge business 52, 110 knowledge politics 2 knowledge production 53 knowledge spaces 46 Korea 116, 118 Kuwait 167 Lake District 34 Lancing College 68 Land Grants (USA) 89 language 24, 25, 94 Laos 167 Las Malvinas 22 Latin America 66, 107, 139, 186 League Tables (of Schools) 49 learning geographies of adults 142 learning networks in adult education 133

217

learning space 75 Lebanon 152 Leeds 45, 54 Leigh Park Estate 133 Lesotho 72, 159 Lewisham 98 Liberal Arts Colleges (USA) 92 Liberia 141 Libreville 67 Liechtenstein 72 life cycle of migration 77 Lima 107, 157 Lincoln 128, 129, 130 Lincoln Diocese (12th Century) 129 Lincoln Mechanics Institute 130 Linguistic Landscape 25 Liverpool 130 Local Education Authorities (LEAs) 65, 96, 154 local knowledges 39, 71 local milieu 60, 61, 63 local resonance 177, 182, 187 locational 9, 10, 24, 35, 37, 48, 57, 61, 74, 75 Lome 67 London 25, 26, 27, 55–6, 57, 79, 83, 98, 115, 117, 126, 166 Looked-After Children 153 Lowestoft 101 Luhansk 29 Lutheran Revolution 25, 121 Macedonia 134 McNair Report 46 Madingley Hall 44, 45, 46 Magical Mystery Tour (Liverpool) 35 Maine 92 Malaysia 108, 118, 170 Mali 106 Malta 72 Managua 107 Manchester 26, 56, 126, 156–7 map of time 34 Marburg 84 marginalized majority 32, 174 marketization of education 17–20 Martin’s existential challenges 175 Massachusetts 18, 87, 88, 90 Massachusetts Bay Company 87

218

Index

Massachusetts Education Reform Act (1993) 90, 91 Mass Observation Archive: University of Sussex 144 matrix of small states 71 Mauritius 72 Mechanics Institutes 130–1, 158 Medium of Instruction (MOI) 25, 103 Melancthon, P. 84 mental maps 33, 45, 46 Mesopotamia 82 Meteorological Office, Bracknell 55 Methodist 100 metropolitan cities 72 Mexico 135, 148 Mexico City 107 microenvironments 24 microstates 31 Middle East 35, 69, 171 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) 105 Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) 31, 73, 125 Ministry of Business Innovation and Skills 99 Moldova 29 Monaco 31, 70, 72 monsoon 22, 23 Morocco 118, 167 Mozambique 67 multicultural contexts 55 multilevel analysis 61 multilingualism 25 multinational companies 160 multiplier effect 38, 53, 91, 99 Muslim 72 MUSTER Project 159 Namibia 116 National Geographic Society 2 national parks 24 National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church throughout England and Wales 95 National Travel Survey 32 natural disasters 37 natural philosophy 44 nature of education 9, 10 nature of geography 9, 10, 20, 21, 44–57

Nauru 72 Nazi Europe 29, 116 The Netherlands 18 Network of Experts in Social Sciences of Education and Training (NESSE) 69 Newcastle-on-Tyne 31 New Club of Paris 16 New England 63, 88, 90 New York City 63, 117, 166 New Zealand 18, 26, 138 Nigeria 30 nomothetic models 45 non-formal education places in England 133 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) 7, 11, 127, 135, 138–41, 157 non-selective schooling 45, 52, 53 North America 66, 138, 150 North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) 148 North Carolina 70 North-East Brazil 134 Northern Europe 88, 176 Northern Ireland 30, 93, 94, 95, 99 Northern Italy 83 Northern Territory (Australia) 24 Not in Education Employment or Training (NEETS) 154 Nottingham 49, 84, 126 Nottinghamshire 49 Ohio 92 Old Saybrook CT 63 On the Job Training (OJT) 159 Organization de la Francophonie 67 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 14, 69, 102, 166, 172, 185 Orissa 102 orphans 153, 154–6, 186 Oundle 99 Outer Hebrides 72 Oxfam 138 Oxford xi, 38, 45, 55, 128, 131 Oxford Martin School 174 Oxfordshire Biotechnology Centre 115 Pacific Island Forum 74 Pacific Ocean 43, 94

Index Paisley 126 Pakistan 105, 139, 141 Palestine 53, 104, 122 Papua New Guinea 27 Paris 67, 83, 117 parochial, private and marketization in the USA 90–2 patriarchal societies 77 peaks and troughs in literacy and schooling in mid-nineteenth century England 127 Pedagogy of the Oppressed 135 Pennsylvania 92 periodization 36, 59–60 personal learning space 144 Perth 126 Peruvian Amazon 24 Philadelphia 143 Philippines 72, 108, 141 physical geography 22–3 Pitcairn 6, 63, 70 place 6, 9, 46, 52–4 place-routed on-line cultures 164, 181 Poland 29, 116, 122 policy localization 19 political and economic geography 28–31, 103 political pedagogy 135 political science 28, 130 polytheistic religion 82 population geography 31–3 Port au Prince 67 Port of Spain 73 Portsmouth 133 Portugal 121 potteries 34 Practical Action (NGO) 138–9 practical knowledge 43, 44 presbyterianism 72 primate cities 72 prisoners of geography 185 prisons 150 private education expansion 106–8 private provision of education 67–70 private schools 37, 98 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 14, 102, 103, 159, 165, 166, 172, 185 Protestant Reformation 84 Prussia 85, 121

219

psychology of education 33 Public/Private Initiative (PPI) 28 Public Schools Act (1868) 68 Puerto Rican 62, 90 Puerto Rico 89 Puritan 87 Putin, V. 78 Qatar 108, 167 quality assurance (QA) 169 Queen’s College, Cork 130 racial discrimination 28 Realschule 158 REFLECT 135–6, 138 refugees 100, 151–2 regional complex analysis 48, 51–2 regional education hubs 109, 111 regulated space 6, 43, 81, 82 religious segregation 98 remoteness 22, 78 Renaissance cities 83, 108 Renaissance universities 83, 84, 87 Republic of South Africa 118, 141 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 20 Research Councils UK (RCUK) 50 residual geographies of education 37, 81 Rhine 82 Roman Catholic 25, 30, 69, 72, 84–5, 90, 96, 97, 100 Royal Geographical Society (RGS) 40, 143 Rugby School 68 rural-urban dichotomy 77, 81, 96 Russell Group (Universities) 100 Russia 22, 31, 63, 66, 70, 106, 110, 115, 118, 170 Rwanda 67 St Hugh of Lincoln 128, 129 St Lucia 103 St Petersburg 83 Salt Lake City 150 Samoa 74 San Diego 143 San Marino 22 Saxony 84 scale 6, 9, 19, 22, 53, 62 school choice 32, 53, 90, 91, 98, 145 school mapping 45, 107 Scotland 18, 30, 72, 93, 95, 99, 126

220

Index

Sea of Azov 82 second and third urban revolutions 83–6 secondary modern schools 97 Secondary School Regulations (1908) England and Wales 96 Seine 83 selective schooling 38 Selly Oak 77 Seychelles 72 shadow systems of education 69, 185 Shanghai 117 Sheffield 126 shifting temporalities 34 Shrewsbury School 68 Siberia 22 Sierra Leone 107, 141, 154 Silicon Fen 55, 115 silicon triangle 49 Silicon Valley 166 Singapore 64, 108, 109 Sixth Form Colleges 99, 100 slavery 151 Slovakia 118 Small is Beautiful 138 Small Island Developing States (SIDS) 74 small national scale 70–4 social anthropology 27–8 social cartography 46, 147 social class 25, 26, 130 social geography 24–8, 55 social media networks 24, 43 Society for the Promotion and Establishment of Sunday Schools 127 Somalia 106 Southampton 55 South Asia 66, 69, 125, 139 South-East London 99 Southern Africa 139, 149 Southern Europe 176 South Ossetia 29 South Pacific 66, 73 South Sudan 106 South-West London 99 Soviet Union 22, 29, 60, 66, 102, 116, 155 space 6, 9, 19, 37, 75 space adjustment technique 9, 43, 146 space, place and scale in the geography of education 57–62

Spain 121 Spanish Colonial Rule 107 spatial 9, 10, 19, 20, 23, 24, 26, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 46, 48–51, 60, 62–7 spatial aberrations 105 spatial aspects of the emergence of education systems 81–3 spatial aspects of the emergence of the education system in England 95–9 spatial development of the educational system of the USA 86–93 spatial development of the education systems of the United Kingdom with special reference to England 93–101 Springfield MA 31, 62, 89, 90 Sri Lanka 141 Stockholm 106 Strawberry Fields (Liverpool) 35 street children 153, 154, 155, 156–7, 186 street educators 157 student hub 109 sub-disciplines of geography 21–40 Sub-Saharan Africa 27, 31, 32, 33, 107, 118, 125, 134, 167 Suburbia 143–4 Sunday Schools 127 Sunderland 18, 31, 54 supplementary provision of education 68, 69 surfaces 54–5 sustainable environment 41 Sweden 18 Sydney 117 Syria 105, 152, 153, 154 Teacher Education in Sub-Saharan Africa (TESSA) 33 Teachers College Columbia University 14 teacher training colleges 45, 46 technical schools 53, 97 Technical University of Munich 15 teenagers and territoriality 142 temporal scale 35, 48, 57, 58, 73, 176 territorial expansion and education in the USA 88–90 territorial inequality of education 17

Index tertiary education 31, 36, 108 Thanet 50, 184 theoretical and conceptual frameworks 44–62 Third International Maths and Science Study (TIMMS) 165 Tijuana 148 Tilbury 55 Tokyo 117 Tonga 72 towards a typology of education systems 101–5 town meetings 88 traditional knowledge 23 training colleges for crime 151 transitional space 144 transnational companies 159–60 traveller communities 153 Tristan da Cunha 94 Uganda 77, 141 Ukraine 29, 155–6 unconscious knowledge 44 UNESCO xi, 31, 66, 118 United Arab Emirates 108, 167 United Kingdom 25, 29, 35, 36, 60, 65, 67, 68, 69, 70, 86, 98, 116, 122, 158, 164, 170 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 152 United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNWRA) 152 United States Agency for International Development (USAID) 66 Universities Amherst 92 Aston 132 Bath 16, 38, 55 Beirut (American University of) 71 Berlin 114 Birmingham 79, 114, 142 Birzeit 53 Bologna 84, 114 Boston College 110 Bowdoin 92 Bradford 132 Bristol 55, 79 British Columbia xi Brown 92

221 Brunel 55 Buckingham 101 Buenos Aires 79 Cairo 79 Cambridge 48–9, 79, 84, 114, 131 Cologne 84 Columbia 92 Cornell 89, 92 Dartmouth 92 Durham 38, 107 East Anglia 101 Essex 38, 101 Florida State 108 Glasgow 114 Gottingen 114 Groningen 111 Heidelberg 16, 84, 114 Hong Kong 69 Hull 131, 151 Humberside 46 Jena 114 Keele 45 King’s College London (KCL) 115 Lafayette 92 Lancaster 38, 45 Leeds 46 Leiden 114 Lincoln 46 London 38, 49, 79, 165 Loughborough 38, 142 Manchester 16, 17, 19, 114 Marburg 84 Michigan State 89 Monash 108 Montpellier 114 Munich 114 Newcastle 38, 50 Northampton 21 Nottingham 108 Oxford 28, 48–9, 79, 84, 114 Padua 114 Paris 84, 114 Pennsylvania 92 Pennsylvania State 89 Plovdiv 111 Plymouth 50 Princeton 92 Reading 55 Rome 114

222

Index

Sorbonne 108 South Pacific 73 Surrey 38, 132 Sussex 38 Syracuse 108 Toulouse 146 Tufts 108 UCLA 110 University College, London (UCL) 115 University College, Suffolk 101 Utah 150 Warwick 119 Washington 91 Wesleyan 92 West Indies 73 Wittenberg 84 Wollongong 108 Yale 92 York 38 Zurich 10 University Grants Committee 132 Uppingham 99 urban networks 113–14 urban revolutions 81 urban social segregation 57 USA 2, 6, 18, 25, 26, 29, 30, 50, 60, 62, 64, 65, 66, 69, 70, 76, 77, 86, 94, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108, 110, 116, 118, 121, 148 USA Constitution 18, 86, 87, 89, 121, 122 USA Supreme Court 64 US Virgin Islands 89 Vancouver xi Vanuatu 72 Vatican City 70 Venezuela 108 Village Colleges (Cambridgeshire) Virginia 87 virtual school 154

38

Wales 30, 60, 65, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99 Walford’s model of dynamic themes in human geography 52–7 Warminster 99 wastage 31 Waterbury CT 90 water from the sun 139 Welsh Assembly 65, 94, 96 Welsh language 95 Welsh medium schools 95 Wessex 34 West Africa 49 West Asia 120 West Bank (Palestine) 104, 122, 141 Western Europe 138, 146, 151, 176 Western European Idea of Education 36, 75, 121, 185 West Germany 60 West Indians 57 West London 52 West London Think Belt 55 West Midlands 49 Westminster School 68 Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE-University of Hull) 151 Winchester College 68 Woodard Group 68 work environments 24, 125, 126 Worker’s Universities (Macedonia) 134 World Bank Group 65, 179 World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) 14 World Trade Organization (WTO) 169 Yemen 106 Yorkshire Golden Triangle 27 Yorkshire Miner’s Association 130 Yugoslavia 29, 134