Geography: a new subject of instruction

Geography as a subject of interest and study has a long history, but it is mainly in the eighteenth century that ‘begins the publication of books whose purpose seems to be that of instruction in schools’. Recent geography scholars have linked this expansion variously to the Enlightenment's desire for knowledge, the development of a public sphere of rational discussion, educational requirements for a commercial society, and the expansion of Empire. Their work has opened up and illuminated many aspects of the subject of geography in the eighteenth century, and they have created ‘a cultural and historical geography of geography’. My aim in this chapter is to build on this work and provide an additional perspective focusing on pedagogy. I want to examine the emergence of geography, a modern subject, and its pedagogy at a time when educational discourses represented ‘modern’ studies not as ‘progress’ but as inferior to classics because they ‘did not train the mind or did not do so as thoroughly as Latin did’. Using geography as example, I also want to analyse the role the classical vs. modern distinction played in relation to gender and the conceptual organization of school subjects.

Instructing the young in geography was relatively new in the eighteenth century. John Locke had recommended the study of geography in his educational treatise Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) because he did not think classics should be the sole subject of study for a gentleman. John Clarke, Master of the Grammar School at Hull, agreeing with Locke, proposed that less time be spent on Latin to accommodate geography. Sixty years later, their proposals had not been taken up. When Vicesimus Knox noted that ‘scarcely any attention is paid to geography’ at many of the best grammar schools, he did not intend this as a criticism. Rather, it supported his sole concession to the subject, which was to introduce maps to help the boys identify locations for events in the classical texts they were studying. He specifically objected to ‘perplex[ing] [the pupil] with an unentertaining geographical treatise’.