International Seminar on 

Vidya Bhawan Society, Udaipur

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Geography, though placed among the ‘Social sciences’ in school curriculum, largely functions within the ontology and epistemology of Physical sciences. This in turn creates a number of situations, which need to be examined from the vantage of education pedagogy as well as from the perspective of the nature of the discipline. This paper tries to draw attention to this issue by juxtaposing various experiences of children, of teachers etc. with the ontology and epistemology of geography as well as of science.

   Recent efforts made by NCERT have seen welcome moves in the making of appealing textbooks; many of them seem to have fortunately lost the stereotype images that we hold of school ‘textbooks’. But the processes of ‘focus group’ could not come to a consensus on the need to examine the nature of geography that is being taught in schools. Hence in spite of the overall facelift that NCERT has made, Geography as a discipline failed to trigger questions that can lead to a potential modification of its own frames and to take advantage of the ethos of educational change. It is also in this context that the need to examine the nature of Geography in schools is highly desirable.

   In learning of Geography, students are faced with the dilemma that their observations of the world overwhelmingly contradicts the science model that the textbook presents, like the experienced flatness of the earth or the apparent movement of the sun from east to west. Inevitably, students interpret what is taught at schools on the basis of commonsense impulse; the science model thus ends up remaining in an abstract plane, not owned by the students. The teachers go through additional struggles of creations of metaphors and other coping up mechanisms through which they attempt to help their students cross the borders of examinations.

   How do we understand these dilemmas? The situation needs to be understood through various angles and simplistic statements like children do not understand some issues at some age cannot satisfy us. It is also to be noted that the problem lies not only among children, adults too face the same problem when it comes to the contradictions between experience and science. Added to all this is the problem of the nature of Geography. What is the nature of its ontology and epistemology as a Social science? Geography has a history of being trapped for a long time in various dualisms, the physical-human being one of them. It also has a history of serving imperialism. Though geographers have moved out of frames of determinism and obsessions with spatial patterns (without sufficient enquiry onto processes), schoolbooks continue with outdated legacies.