Amenity as educator: Geographies of education, citizenship, and the CPRE in 1930s England

Abstract

This article examines the spaces, materiality, and practices of (in)formal education and citizenship bound up in the educational cultures of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) in 1930s England. Founded in 1926, the CPRE aimed to preserve rural amenities through concerted action, by working through their constituent societies as a centre for furnishing or obtaining advice and information, and importantly, by educating public opinion. While much work has examined inter‐war preservationism and the CPRE's focus on planning legislation and design, less attention has been paid to the CPRE's cultures of education for children and young people. Drawing on archival research, this paper considers two educational topics, namely, nature study and school design, and makes three key contributions to the geographies of education. First, that the CPRE mobilised the notion of amenity to provide an experiential and intuitive education in preservationism: amenity was both education and educator. Second, that this education was linked to notions of (future) citizenship, hope, and (future) preservationism, becoming an education that would remain with the child throughout their life. Third, this article explores the CPRE's authority, revealing the ways in which it was often complex and precarious, as well as the ways in which the Council drew on other forms of authoritative identities, spaces, and structures. In so doing, this paper contributes to ongoing academic debates on the complex and fluid boundaries of (in)formal education.

Historical geographies of alternative, and non‐formal education: Learning from the histories of Black education

“…Decolonising the minds of young learners formed part of broader decolonisation efforts unfolding across civic and civil contexts of schooling, housing, policing, and employment in Britain at the time. As well as the setting up of supplementary schools, efforts to decolonise British education in the second half of the 20 th century included Black women's attempts to improve mainstream schools (Bryan et al, 1985), campaigns by parents to oppose schools for the 'educationally sub-normal' (ESN) (Dhondy et al, 1982; see also Coard, 1971), and parent-led protests against bussing (Esteves, 2018). In the decolonising world of the 20 th century, many of the key actors involved in these struggles had arrived in Britain as a direct result of decolonisation, and carried 'a political education in their luggage' (Johnson, 2014, p. 665).…”

“…Other examples of geographical research recovering historical practices and cultures of citizenship education include Dickens and MacDonald's (2015) analysis of the Salford Lads Club in Manchester and Church's (2019) account of The Council for the Preservation of Rural England, a body that oversaw the protection and preservation of rural amenity in interwar England. While both examples share temporal and spatial characteristics with the case studies examined by Mills, each extends the epistemological and methodological reach of historical geographical research on non‐formal education in different ways.…”

“…Within these interlinking seams of scholarship, geographers' interest in alternative and informal education spaces has also burgeoned (Kraftl, 2013a; Mills & Kraftl, 2014), often shining important light on the spaces and practices of alternative and informal—understood together here as ‘non‐formal’—education spaces. While studies of home‐schooling, care farms, and other contemporary educational environments have proven formative to the development of the sub‐discipline in this regard (Kraftl, 2013b, 2015), a significant strand of work has also emerged that centres historical accounts of education and learning across a range of settings including citizenship education, anarchic education, voluntarism, and geography education (Alderman et al., 2022; Church, 2019; Ferretti, 2016; Mills, 2016a). Combining archival, oral history, and participatory methodologies with ethnographic and other approaches, this work has documented the practices and cultures of informal and alternative education past, albeit from predominantly Anglocentric and North American perspectives.…”

Research on the innovation of ideological and political education for college students based on the Civic and Political Science Cloud Education Platform

“…The advent of the big data era has brought many changes to human society, bringing about a farreaching "crustal movement", initiating a major transformation of the era, and constantly giving rise to changes in thinking, theoretical innovation, and practical development [1][2][3]. Ideological and political education is also affected in the era of big data [4][5].…”

Educational landscapes: Nature, place and moral geographies

“…Francesca Church's paper provides a historical account of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England's (CPRE) cultures of education for children and young people in the 1930s (Church, ). Through the notion of “amenity,” Church focuses on nature study and school design as educational instruments through which young people were taught to appreciate amenity (of natural environments).…”