Geography of Education by Colin Brock

Author:Colin Brock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Historical Geographies of Educational Migration

Educational migration is clearly part of any system and at a range of scales. Cross-national migration is one of them as shown by the discussion of education hubs and cross-border higher education earlier. Such physical migrations are neither new nor confined to students. They involve teachers as well, as illustrated by the study of ‘academic pilgrims’ by Van de Bunt-Kokhuis (1996) in which she examined the movements of academics of different status within the European Union, including through a number of official schemes to encourage and fund such cross-fertilization of experiences and ideas. She followed this up with the article ‘Academic Pilgrims: Faculty Mobility in the Virtual World’ (Van de Bunt-Kokhuis, 2001), thus illustrating that educational migration has long since ceased to be purely physical.

Migration of scholars is very long standing. As already mentioned, during the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ in Europe, Christian Scholars and their Arab (later Islamic) counterparts travelled widely to meet and discuss philosophical and scientific issues of the day. These were in effect early conferences, a regular feature of international academic life today. They occurred even in difficult circumstances such as between Israeli and Palestinian academics. During the ‘age of Enlightenment’ from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a great deal of interaction between leading scientists, which was paralleled by ‘The Grand Tour’. This was a more relaxed intellectual tour undertaken by wealthy – mainly Protestant – young men, often Oxbridge graduates, which followed a set itinerary to take in locations and discussions relating to Classical and Renaissance European culture. It was a feature for about 200 years from the mid-seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, when the advent of rail travel opened up the opportunity to the nouveau-riche to undertake a less exclusive and geographically more wide-ranging version. Pioneer travel agencies organized such trips led by Thomas Cook, hence the soubriquet ‘Cook’s Tour’ that survives today. Travels of an educational nature figured in the work of such pioneers as the anthropologist Mary Kingsley and the founding father of university geography in Britain, Halford Mackinder (Kearns, 1997). Both were imperialists, not surprisingly in the late nineteenth century, but as Kearns points out this involved a level of subjectivity not at ease with their professional occupations. Another important dimension of British colonialism that influenced education was the operations of trading companies. Ogborn (2002) explored the significance of ‘power, knowledge and ritual’ in the writings of the English East India Company. He shows

how writing travels which concentrates on the production, carriage and use of texts as material objects can foreground the active and collective making of global geographies as a contested enterprise involving multiple agents in a variety of sites. (p. 155)

Ogborn (2000) includes in an earlier analysis the geographical significance of the ships that necessarily conveyed the writings. He sees the ship as three spaces – ‘as a material space, as an accounting space and as a political space’ (p. 161) – and as an early agent of globalization. The historical dimension of educational dissemination has attracted other contemporary geographers.

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