Geography against learning?

In doing so I want to make three broad points. * First, that a sole focus on students' learning devalues our roles as teachers and professionals. * Second, that we should simplify our aim as geography teachers to helping students 'become better geographers'. * And third, teaching a politically-engaged geography is well-placed to educate young people to actively critique the deleterious effects of neo-liberalism (precarious employment, social inequality, and environmental injustice - see Figure 1) that will increasingly affect them in the future (Dorling, 2013). * Advancement of free trade and the unrestricted movement of capital * Privatisation of common assets (e.g. healthcare, education, transport infrastructure) * Positioning of individualism and competitiveness as incontestable virtues * Decreasing of social protections and welfare * Redistribution of wealth to corporate elites through an 'accumulation by dispossession' * Promotion of the rule of 'experts' and technocratic knowledge-elites; the use of 'data' to justify decisions Learnification 'Learnification', as described by Biesta (op. cit.), is the shift towards an entirely student-centred concept of learning due to the misrepresentation of 'education' as a system of knowledge transmission. According to Biesta (op. cit.), the difference between education and learning is profound. What about the networks of global production that influence the shifting of local economies and labour markets; the politicaleconomic relationships that continue to ensure the belching out of millions of tonnes of carbon, or keep us reliant on finite fuels and resources; the government policies, economic practices and cultural politics that produce trenchant social inequalities, environmental injustices, and uneven development; and the physical processes that affect the way humans encounter risk in different parts of the world (Hall et al., 2015; Klein, 2014)? [...]geography teachers need to emphasise the importance and purpose of geography to their students, not just as a discipline which helps provide solutions to global problems, but as 'one of humanity's big ideas' (Bonnett, 2012).