Nature - autonomous learning

246 conclusionthat knowledge helps to mould students into certain kinds of people. Formaleducation cannot, in short, fail to shape the character of those whoexperience it.A sober recognition of this inescapable fact is, in my view, liberatingfor both teachers and students at all levels of the educational system. Itmeans, in theory at least if not necessarily in practice, that the what, the howand the why of teaching is always up for grabs.There is no one ‘correct’set of things that students should know; there is no one ‘proper’ way oflearning; there are no ‘self-evident’ goals of education. Instead, there areonly ever choices about what to teach, how to teach and to what ends.Thissaid, when these choices are made and accepted by a sufficient numberof teachers then they tend to become ‘common sense’. In reality, then, thecontent, the manner and the aims of teaching tend to become ‘fixed’ forlong periods of time in societies like our own.Watkins’s book is an attemptto remind teachers (and their students) that things could be otherwise:that together we have an ‘awesome responsibility’ (hooks 1994: 206) toreflect critically and frequently on what university (and pre-university)teaching is about.I hope Nature has given student readers the tools to recognise thatknowledges of nature are constructed and contestable. I hope they nowrecognise – if they did not already – that their professors (myself included)are not to be deferred to because they follow the royal road to truthfulknowledge. My take on nature has been anything but neutral, even thoughI have seemingly ‘stood back’ and presented the spectrum of geographicalunderstandings of the topic. For instance, non-representational theoristswould reject my approach altogether because it focuses on knowledge asa re-presentational ‘layer’ that interposes itself between ourselves and thesocio-natural world.The diversity of nature-knowledges within geographyis enough to show that there is no one ‘correct way’ of understandingnature.Yet understand it we must.As the seven vignettes with which I startedthis book show, the topic of nature infuses our lives.This is why knowledgesof nature are so important.The power to say ‘this is what nature is’,‘this ishow it works’ or ‘this is how we should behave towards it’ is an awesomepower.The study of nature is too important to be left to geographers alone.But, as geographers, we are better equipped to undertake such study if werecognise that knowledges of nature are part of a never-ending struggle tocharacterise and influence the phenomena depicted in those knowledges.When it comes to nature-knowledges, the questions we must always ask