By way of context for this session on ‘Critical Geographies of Education’, this paper will provide an overview of the field of geographies of education. It will trace its diverse disciplinary lineage – through social, economic, political, cultural and historical geographies – and address ongoing questions about the extent to which geographies of education constitutes a nascent subdiscipline in its own right. It will also acknowledge the importance of a commensurate ‘spatial turn’ in education studies. The remainder of the paper will focus on an overview of the author’s ten years of research on alternative education spaces in the UK. These spaces – pitched explicitly against the mainstream – offer a series of challenges and opportunities for understanding the geographies of education. The paper will, in particular, consider how geographies of alternative education might contribute to broader theorising in contemporary human geography around feeling, habit, love and life-itself.