Studying School Subjects: a guide
Conclusions, Complexities and Conjectures
The 'A' level in environmental studies is a recognition of the factors defining the aspirations and efforts of these rural studies teachers. What was subsequently been denied is not that environmental studies represents a valid area of curriculum, but that it can thereby claim to be an academic discipline. Such claims it would appear are best validated through university scholarship and without a university base status passage to acceptance as an academic subject has been denied. As Carson noted at Offley, new contenders for academic status are often placed in an impossible situation since they are asked 'What evidence have you that universities would accept this sort of "A" level?' On making enquiries to universities, the reply was 'show us the successful candidates and we will tell you'. A chicken and egg situation!
The third hypothesis in the book follows on from consideration of the patterns of internal evolution in school subjects to investigate the role that the pursuit of academic status plays in the relationship between subjects. In continuity with the second hypothesis we would expect established subjects to defend their own academic status at the same time as denying such status to any new subject contenders, particularly in the battle over new 'A' level examinations.
In the struggle to launch environmental studies as an 'A' level subject, the geographers' reaction strongly, and the biologists' much more mildly, followed the lines of the hypothesis. MacKinder, the founding father of geography's road to academic establishment, would have understood this. In explaining the geologists' opposition to geography he saw their fear of the new subject making 'inroads in their classes' as the reason for their response and noted that 'even scientific folk are human, and such ideas must be taken into account'. In continuity with this the geographers strongly opposed social studies, an integrated package that predated environmental studies by several decades.
The geographers, it was claimed, 'saw the new proposals as a threat to the integrity and status of their own subject'.
