Why Study Geography?

I am going to be posting an entry tomorrow for Patrick Bailey, the GA President in 1985. I've just had a book published which tries to answer the question 'Why Study Geography?' - I took over 200 pages to answer that question, but in his Presidential Address in 1986, Patrick Bailey answered the question in a couple of paragraphs:

"Studying geography teaches us a number of particular lessons about the world and our place in it. These lessons derive directly from our observations of the earth's surface and Mankind's activities upon it. The lessons can be learned from studying no other subject and they are, I maintain, the justifications for including geography in everybody's school education. 

For geographers there are, I suggest, two over-riding purposes in teaching the subject: first, to lead students towards learning these lessons for themselves, whenever possible from evidence presented; and second, to try to equip them to learn further lessons about the world and their place in it from new evidence which they themselves obtain. I regard the latter as very important. If any teaching at any level fails to generate independent learning, it must be regarded as a failure. The following are the main lessons I think we can learn from studying geography and which therefore ought to be contained within any worthwhile geography course. I have arranged them in one order; there are others. The lessons should, I believe, inform the whole of a course, being treated in different ways and at different levels of difficulty as the course progresses."

References

Bailey, Patrick. “A Geographer's View: Contributions of Geography to the School Curriculum.” Geography, vol. 71, no. 3, 1986, pp. 193–205. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40571121. Accessed 31 Oct. 2020.