Since 1951 Cambridge University has used Madingley Hall for summer residential courses to bring teachers into contact with the newest ideas in the various professional fields. In 1963 RichardJ. Chorley and Peter Haggett, both then lecturers in geography at Cambridge, were the directors of a course for geography teachers in training colleges, grammar schools, and similar institutions. In this book the seventeen lectures given by fifteen British geographers are published, and the whole symposium is summarized in a "retrospect" by the editors. Chorley and Haggett were careful to avoid laying down a "party line" to by followed by the lecturers, or to do any editing that would give a false sense of unity to the published chapters. The differences and contradictions characteristic of a rapidly changing field of study are presented just as they were expressed. If the teachers in the audience were anything like teachers elsewhere they were probably somewhat bewildered and frustrated by the lack of a unified point of view. Scholars the world over take a certain pride in the special quality of their own insights which must, therefore, be expressed somewhat differently from those of other scholars. But the teachers who come to seek guidance find that in the end each must make his own decision between the regional and topical approach, between insisting on field study or depending on some one else's field observations, between approaching geography as a descriptive art or as a rigorous science-or even between teaching any kind of geography or no geography at all. As in similar books produced in other countries, there are contradictions and differences here, some fundamental and some arising from a failure to agree on word meanings. The book is divided into three parts. The seven chapters in Part 1 deal with the changing philosophy of geography, and the new concepts in geomorphology and climatology, in population, social, economic, and historical geography. The six chapters in Part 2 deal with techniques, including quantitative techniques and field methods. The four chapters in Part 3 deal with teaching, in the older universities and the newer universities, in training colleges and technical colleges, and in the schools. The final chapter, by Haggett and Chorley, suggests the elements of unity that can be found in the symposium, offers a forward look at the possibility of greater use of theoretical models in the teaching of geography, and outlines the problem of the lag between the newer ideas of the scholars and the outmoded content of many geography courses. The editors identify seven major themes, each of which is touched on in several of the chapters. The first is the regional theme. E. A. Wrigley disposes of regional geography by defining it as the description of local associations of people and place, as exemplified by the work of Vidal de la Blache and the French regional school. The industrial revolution, says Wrigley, makes the examination of the local interconnections of a rural society with its habitat irrelevant, for now the regional differences are related to the varying accessibility of places to major markets. According to this definition the functional region is not a region, nor can the varying patterns of accessibility be measured regionally-which is a kind of verbal subtlety that might not come through clearly to the ordinary teacher. On the other hand, D. Timms says that "the recognition of valid regions is the basis of geographical research," and Haggett provides a challenging discussion of the importance of scale, or 443 more...