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Kenneth Clarke, the secretary of state for education in England in 1992, described geography as, “Geography has a fundamental relevance to young people because it relates to many aspects of their lives and the environment in which they are growing up ... study at regional, national, international and global level is required as ... all are vital for pupils’ understanding of the increasingly complex interdependent global village in which we live.”
This global village consists of many interdependent countries at different levels of development, i.e., differences between the overall standards of living and quality of life of the countries’ populations. For this reason geography includes the study of these different levels of development. Thus young people can recognise the causes and consequences and thereby assist in their own country’s efforts to raise its level of development.
According to the UK government’s Department for International Development (DFID), development education consists of “activity that aims to inform individuals and to enhance the public’s ability to make critical judgments about globalisation and development.”
DFID believes that a persuasive case can be made that raising awareness of development issues (i.e., through education) has contributed to reducing poverty overseas. This suggests that raising awareness of development issues at home, in Pakistan, can also contribute to reducing poverty. Geography teachers have a significant role to play since geography is the only school subject which can raise this awareness.
In 2010, DFID had allocated around £14m on ‘development awareness’, which was seen as highly controversial by an incoming government committed to value for money in a context of extreme financial stringency. Some projects were subsequently cancelled and the very need for development education put under review: the case for a development education programme in schools was finally agreed by DFID in late 2011. This clearly shows the UK government’s commitment to tackle development issues.
It is important, therefore, that those who teach geography in Pakistan recognise that they have a responsibility to think hard about its role and purposes, not least in relation to development education.
Teaching development geography is challenging. Geography is about the contemporary world and how we interpret or make sense of it. The world continues to change and so does our sense of it, as we bring new perspectives and understanding to the way we view it. At no time can geography teachers afford to settle on a particular viewpoint or way to interpret the world. Just as the meaning of development can be debated, geography, too, continues to be made and remade.
Our understandings continually develop and in no topic is this more evident than in the field of development. For example, geographers have contributed to the design of new frameworks and ways of interpreting observable facts like ‘shanty town’ and ‘subsistence farming’. Through this interpretation they have changed the way in which governments around the world have dealt with such issues. A very positive contribution!
Of course, geographers do not work in isolation and much of their contribution is a product of engaging with ground-breaking ideas from the realms of other disciplines such as economics or political science. These combined ideas have changed, for example, how poverty is understood using methods such as the Human Development Index (HDI), which was devised by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq. The HDI is a method of measuring the level of development of a country by combining information about its life expectancy, educational attainment and income into one statistic and thus being able to compare it with the statistics for other countries.
It is important to recognise that the point of acquiring and developing geographical knowledge is to enable us to see the world in new ways. Thus school geography develops ‘capabilities’ in pupils. Just as in development economics, where poverty, for example, is seen to be significant in terms of how it deprives individuals of certain capabilities, education can also be seen to be significant in terms of its contribution to individuals’ capability to understand and function effectively in the world.
Capability implies to a mix of knowledge, understanding and skills, and if geography can contribute to capability, any young person without geography as part of their general education could be considered uneducated and thus ill-prepared to function in a global society. They would lack ‘knowledge’ and the capacity to ‘make meaning’ geographically; this in turn impairs their capability.
By capability we mean that people have the freedom to make choices and act without hindrance. This freedom is diminished by a lack of world knowledge and the ability to think creatively and critically about society and the environment—and also about “being at home on planet Earth”.
