Education

Abstract

This article introduces the geographical research field of education. It traces some of the relationships between education and geography. The article explains that education is a pivotal social institution in the making of places and their peoples. As a set of social practices, formal education produces social knowledge, conditions subjects, and distributes opportunity. Education affects the production of space and social change that geographers study. States and other agents with a will to power have deep interests in education, which they mobilize as both platform and medium for myriad ideological and political projects. This article argues that not only is education a social practice central to the production of space, but geography is pivotal to education. The article teases out these relationships, and outlines the different interests that geographers may have in them and the ways that geographers are studying them. It argues, however, that geographers have been slow to recognize the importance of education in their work or its fertility as a research area for studying social and spatial changes. The article encourages geographers to add their insights to wider sociological understandings of education and its effects.