Requiem for the National Curriculum
nick cowen, 18 July 2008
[This commentary by Prof. David Conway was originally written on 10 June 2008 – it is reposted here so it can be linked to John White’s response to Conway’s claims]
This year sees the twentieth anniversary of the national curriculum. To mark the occasion, last week London University’s Institute of Education held a conference on the subject.
There a former professor of the Institute John White delivered a diatribe against the national curriculum, arguing it to be in urgent need of radical overhaul, if not wholesale replacement.
He claimed that its original content had been uncritically adopted from an outmoded Victorian view of what all middle class children should learn in school. He claimed this view based on an out-dated theologically inspired view of the world and of man’s place within it. As White put it:
‘A world where personal salvation was thought to depend on having a comprehensive grasp of the nature of God’s world … is where our broad subject-based curriculum originated…. As orderly thinkers, classifiers to the core, these devout educators divided the whole map into discrete units and sub-units.’
Apparently, without God and the possibility of salvation, schools need and should no longer go in for such orderliness and division in their approach towards education. Instead, argued Professor White, what children today should study should be made to derive entirely from whatever we think should be the aims of a school education. So far as they are concerned, White seemed happy to go along with that specification of them the Government had given in 2000. That runs:
‘The curriculum should enable all young people to become: successful learners who enjoy learning, make progress and achieve; confident individuals who are able to live safe, healthy and fulfilling lives; and responsible citizens who make a positive contribution to society.’
White claimed there is ‘a clash between the new, whole-person aims and the introverted aims of most of the school subjects…. The older subjects are too often prisoners of their past, ill-fitted to look beyond their own confines at how they might contribute to the pupil’s well-being and civic engagement.’
In place of being dominated, as they currently are, by the need to cover the subjects laid down in the national curriculum, White urged that Government should ‘encourage schools to move … from single-subject to inter-disciplinary and theme- or project-based learning.’
We are surely being softened up for something. What that is can be gleaned from an earlier paper Professor White wrote on the aims of school education for the IPPR, New Labour’s favourite kite-flyer. There, he wrote:
‘If we reconceptualise schooling so that aims become more important and the particular means to achieving them less important, this has profound implications for how and why we assess pupil performance… In so far as personal qualities … are prominent among the new aims, the best people in a position to assess pupils have to be those who know them well… All this raises questions about the limits of impersonal, for instance nationwide tests…. The more one is looking for a wider and deeper understanding of how one thing connects to another … the more … this is something that cannot be expected of an impersonal national tester. Only someone in daily and indeed relatively intimate contact with the examinee is in an appropriate position to make good judgments.’
Oh, dear! An aims led curriculum means an end to standardised national assessment and thereby for any basis by which to be able to compare the relative performance of schools. What a recipe for disaster – or rather for the continued disaster that is so much of present-day state schooling in which all incentive for efficiency has been carefully removed.
In any case, the whole rationale for scrapping a subject based approach to schooling is decidedly dodgy. In its clarification of the aims of the curriculum, the QCA states that ‘successful learners’ will ‘know about the big ideas and events that shape the world’; ‘confident individuals’ be ‘open to the excitement and inspiration offered by the natural world and human achievement’; and that responsible citizens will ‘understand their own and others’ cultures and traditions’.
It is impossible that children could acquire these several accomplishments without having been made to engage in close study of all the ten subjects originally included within the national curriculum.
The British public is being set up for a new revolution in schooling that will lead it further down the road to state serfdom. There is need of urgent public attention to this matter before it is too late to correct the country’s further slide into educational oblivion.
R. Thorn admits that not all pupils have ” the right dispositions towards learning”. Dispositions,inclinations and enthusiasms, by their nature, cannot be instilled: they are determined by inheritance. Why then a blanket, totalitarian “aims led curriculum” which smacks of the neo-Marxist, egalitarian comprehensive system which has wrought such damage to the educational standards of this country since the mid-Sixties?
With its “new person aims” in education the liberal/left Axis is merely reheating the poisonous soup of egalitarianism in concert with all the other aspects of its globalisation ambitions.
“Educational oblivion” indeed !
“Train up the child the way he should go.
Amazing. Professor Conway’s analysis exactly mirror what the IBO seems to have come up with years ago. Also when I look for inspiration to other systems and current research I find the same going on for example from visionaries in the US, Australia, etc. It’s a shame we have to suffer reactionaries sowing the seeds of doubt such as Mr Cowen (or does he really not get it?). The soonr we wake up to what’s needed the better. For too long schools have concentrated on knowledge and then skills but what’s the point if young people don’t have the right dispositions towards learning and the use of what they’ve learnt?
Good luck to the Professor and John White – the UK is nearly there at last (at least in knowing where it ought to go with education)
R Thorn
IB Educator
Istanbul
[Nick Cowen adds: being against state-control of the school curriculum does not necessitate being against new developments in pedagogy and education, only the belief that governments are not equipped to deliver them. The IB does well, for example, exactly because it is not behold to any particular government.]
I’d like to put the record straight about mistakes made in David Conway’s commentary on June 10, writes Prof. John White of the Institute of Education.
1. His piece was allegedly a critique of a talk I gave on the topic on June 4 at the Institute of Education. But the points he made were not about the talk at all, but about a piece I had written nearly four years ago for the QCA called ‘Towards an aims-led curriculum’. Why were your readers misled in this way?
2. He said – correctly – that I was happy to go along with the aims for the curriculum that the government had given in 2000. But when he told us what the aims were, he referred to aims issued by QCA in 2007.
3. I take it that 2. was just a sloppy mistake. Less excusable is his statement that ‘White urged that Government should ‘encourage schools to move from single-subject to inter-disciplinary and theme- or project-based learning.’ This is the basis for claims made later in his piece suggesting that I think school subjects should not be taught.
The issue here is: what has Conway left out from my QCA piece by using that row of dots? The answer is: the two words ‘where appropriate’.
When I wrote that schools should be encouraged ‘to move where appropriate from single-subject to interdisciplinary and theme- or project-based learning’ I meant this literally. The ‘where appropriate’ is important to me. My view is that schools should be encouraged to see that there is a variety of ways in which subject matter can be taught, ie they should not think that discrete subjects are the only way. I mentioned four in this quotation: discrete subjects, subjects working together in an interdisciplinary way, themes, and projects. The passage in question is part of a longer paragraph in which I talk of laying down ‘for each subject internal aims.’ It should be clear from this that I am not advocating doing away with subjects in favour of themes and projects. In fact I am assuming here that subjects will remain.
[Note: Civitas has published the report The Corruption of the Curriculum which argues that subject knowledge in the National Curriculum has been sacrificed in order to satisfy various politicized demands on the education system, and Swedish Lessons, which argues that the government should disengage from deciding the school curriculum and allow more diversity in pedagogy.]