Debugging the curriculum

Civitas, 14 June 2011

Via Bishop Hill, we learn that schools will no longer be required to teach climate change as part of the science curriculum. This is a good step, not so much because of the political controversies surrounding climate change policy, but because its inclusion helped to set a bad precedent. It has become a common tactic of influential interest groups (whether on the right or the left) to try and get their pet issues inserted into educational policy so that they can be advocated nationally to the detriment of other important content. This is one of the drivers of unnecessary centralisation in the education system. This process diminishes teachers’ professional autonomy, reduces their local accountability to parents, and forces them to waste time complying with Government directives rather than delivering engaging lessons. Moreover, in concentrating on topical issues rather than the knowledge necessary to grasp subject areas, children’s educational horizons have been narrowed.

Rarely has this been clearer than with the science curriculum, the compulsory elements of which have progressively turned into ‘scientific literacy’ (essentially, an ability to parse a Guardian science article) rather than a course which imparts the basics of the scientific method and its most significant discoveries. In essence, science education has been hollowed out from the inside by the combined demands that it be immediately ‘relevant’ to everyday life and that it satisfy the particular interests of political lobbies (see our report, The Corruption of the Curriculum for more examples). Ironically, in the case of climate science, this is ultimately counter-productive: there is no better way of showing children how important the environment is to maintaining our way of life than teaching the fundamental sciences that allow us to better understand it in the first place. It is this very knowledge that has been chipped away through progressive changes to the national curriculum.