Geography: A New School Subject as the Result of Early Modern Voyages and Explorations

The sixteenth century was marked by profound cultural, political, and religious transformations. The fracturing of Western Christianity, initiated by the German monk Martin Luther, was the background for the centralization of European states and their expansion into the newly discovered continents. This period saw the rethinking of the epistemological foundations on which knowledge was built and transmitted. The discoveries helped reduce the weight of classical and biblical authorities in favor of direct observations of nature’s phenomena. This era also witnessed a profound rethinking of the educational principles underlying European pedagogy throughout the Middle Ages. New types of schools (the colleges) were founded and new educational systems were developed. In this framework, new disciplines arose: among these we find geography.

Geography, intended as a school subject, was not actually absent from the medieval curriculum but was dispersed among a number of other disciplines. In the liberal arts courses, consisting of Trivium and Quadrivium, geographic knowledge was taught primarily through mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, as well as by using ancient texts of historians and ethnographers, from Herodotus to Tacitus. This division of geographical teachings reflected the needs of an age when knowledge of the world, and the distribution of lands and peoples, did not have to meet urgent practical needs. With the beginning of the first global expansion of European kingdoms and the creation of religious and mercantile missions to the four corners of the globe, a new need arose to transmit acquired knowledge about the world effectively and quickly. Out of this need arose a new geographic discipline in preuniversity schools, very similar to what is still taught in schools today. The process was actually slow and uneven, and it took centuries before an independent geography subject made its official way into classrooms. However, as early as the fifteenth century we see spreading, increasingly better structured and defined geographic manuals such as the textbook entitled La Sfera, written by Gregorio and Leonardo Dati in Florence. The book is inspired by John Holywood’s Sphere, but is different from it inasmuch as it is more descriptive of the parts of the world, and less focused on mathematics. The process of establishing geography in schools can be said to be definitively accomplished in the eighteenth century.

This historical path was a reflection of cultural and epistemological change. Faced with new practical demands for knowledge of the world, new categories of interpretation and transmission of knowledge asserted themselves. In many Western countries today many complain that less time is devoted to geography in schools. Actually, geography is still studied, but we are witnessing the reverse process of that which began in the Renaissance. In fact, geography is being divided again into other school subjects, such as economics, science, history, and law. Again, the change reflects new historical needs, mirroring the emergence of a new era. [David Salomoni]