Geographical Education and Nationality

Abstract

This paper concerns the relationships between geography and two linked ideas that have created and shaped the world of humankind in the 20th century. Those two ideas, nationality and nationalism, are considered as projects of the field of geography itself, and as the responsibility of geographers and their ways of thinking, carried into the classrooms of national education systems. For the purposes of this discussion, nationality is the realization by the self that one belongs to a group - the nation; for most of the 20th century this has been most widespread form of group self-identification and the most prevalent cultural determinant at the present time. Nationalism is a style of thinking or philosophy that believes the nation to be the source of creative energy and well-being; in our times and in most places it is the dominant political philosophy. The nation state is the spatially-organized expression of nationalism, emphasizing the nation's territorial imperatives through national boundaries, national capital, national education, national economy, and so on; it is the preferred form for organizing political space over most of the earth.