I tend to steer clear of geography teachers around the time that Year 9 pupils are choosing their options. As schools, driven by the EBacc, are increasingly insisting that pupils study either history or geography at GCSE, the traditional competition between the two subjects has taken on a new lease of life as teachers compete for pupils.
Of course, particularly in smaller schools, it is common for those teachers to be working side-by-side, each teaching the subject of the other, as part of a broader ‘humanities faculty’.
Together, the two aspects of secondary school planning legitimise the age-old assumption that history and geography are ‘equivalent’ subjects. As long as you have done one or the other, you have ‘done’ a humanity and, therefore, your education is more well-rounded than if you had done neither.
This is an assumption that I think needs questioning.
A mismatch in the humanities
Geography has always sat on boundary of the arts and the sciences, and in many universities can be studied as either a BA or a BSc, with the former usually focusing on human geography and the latter physical geography.
When I speak to people who study or work in the latter, I am struck by just how scientific their work is. Where does glaciology fit in? Or geology? Or volcanology? Or climate change? The human geographers have far more in common with sociologists and economists, and indeed in some cases I would be hard placed to distinguish the work of a human geographer from that of a sociologist and economists, though my understanding is that the concept of ‘place’ is paramount for the geographer.
If you agree with the points I have made, then you might well concur that geographers would be most at home in either a Science Faculty or a Social Sciences Faculty, especially where a school teaches Sociology or Economics at A-Level. But if you read that paragraph and thought “this guy doesn’t have the faintest idea of what geography is” then, that, too, suggests I am right that grouping history and geography is misguided.
For, as Heather Fearn has argued in her blog, the people in a secondary school probably least qualified to teach geography are the historians. Many history teachers - and I include myself in this category - gave up geography at age 14 and have not even a GCSE in the subject, let alone an A-Level or degree. The converse is also true: I do not think we have the stats on this, but I would be willing to bet that more English teachers have history GCSE or A-Level than geography teachers.
Lack of design
This is one of the reasons why history teachers can feel they have more in common with English teachers than geography teachers. English Literature and history are frequently studied in combination by pupils, and the nature of the two disciplines is far more closely aligned, with English and history teachers both interested in the analysis of texts, the construction and critique of interpretations, and the essay as the gold-standard of reasoned argument. The study of English Literature frequently involves the study of the historical context of texts, and historians will often find that works of literature are of great interest to what they do.
My ideal situation is not to have faculties at all: let each subject have its own department. But if a school decides for whatever reason that it has to have faculty system in which several subjects are brought under one structure, then I would ask that the creation of a ‘humanities’ faculty is not the default option.
A Faculty of Arts, including English and History, is a more natural marriage, and there might be much to be gained from having geography included in a Faculty of Social Sciences or Faculty of Science.
What this requires, of course, is serious senior curriculum leadership, where school leaders think in great detail about the content and nature of the disciplines their schools teach. As Christine Counsell has argued, there is a vacuum in senior curriculum leadership in schools, with leaders more likely to focus on ‘achievement’ or ‘teaching and learning’.
It is time that we began taking the curriculum more seriously as school leaders, and deciding whether or not humanities is a meaningful category is just one example of the kind of thinking our schools need.
Michael Fordham is assistant headteacher at the West London Free School
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