How capable is everyone of using their iPhone to increase the sum total of their substantive knowledge and developing a schema of usefully connected knowledge that can be used to solve problems and allow them to flourish in their human experience? How much are people imprisoned by social norms around media consumption and constantly having to take photos of everything they're about to put in their mouths?
This is a starting point for a conversation, not an end point. Conservations about what and how we teach don’t have a destination; only a journey. I’m not suggesting that anyone teach everything listed, I’m suggesting you think about how much of what’s listed here the students studying Geography with you will know by the time they stop studying Geography with you. Is it a lot, is very little, how different are our interpretations of Geography’s substantive knowledge?
When Margaret Thatcher announced "there is no such thing as society" she was met with acclaim and scorn. Taken from an interview in Woman's Own magazine, it's an inflammatory sentence fit for an epitaph. We can imagine Margaret Thatcher throwing the idea of community on the bonfire. Her critics argued she was promoting a world-view of greed and selfish individualism.
Taking a lecturing position at the Unversity of Chile in 1967, Frank published his most celebrated work: Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Although Frank continued to publish throughout his life, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America is considered his best and most well-read work on dependency theory. His experiences living in Latin America during the rise of the Latin New Left reinforced his standpoint of the developed core exploiting the underdeveloped periphery.
Walt Whitman Rostow was renowned as a staunch anti-communist. Rostow's parents were socialist activists, his father had fled Russia at 18 for New York; "americanising" his name from Rostowsky. It was in 1960, taking a brief professorship at Cambridge University after advising president Johnson on foreign policy and aid, that Walt Whitman Rostow published his model of development. Seeing his Kremlin equivalents refer to the Communist Manifesto in their speeches he felt the need for an American alternative. The title of his book says it all, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.
I've used the word indiscriminately with little thought for the understanding of others; shooting quick from the hip. Since it's elevation as inspection focus, the return has been a carpet-bombing. Uncertainty and fear make a dangerous cocktail, and a Molotov by any other name still burns as bright. I confess I've played my part. I've been imprecise. This is my act of contrition. This is what I'm talking about when I talk about knowledge.
People should know the names of the oceans. This is something we should teach in schools.
Deceptively simple. Surprisingly complex.
We'll take a look at some of the surrounding hinterland, and you can decide which side of the knife it falls; valid, useful, and engaging, or needless, bloated, and best ignored.
