Unlike the U.S., British schools follow a national curriculum backed up national exams. But a teachers’ group wants to drop traditional classes in history, geography, literature, science, languages, art and music.
Instead, schools would be allowed to decide how they teach big themes such as global warming, conflict and healthy living.
The present list of subjects would be reduced to little more than English, mathematics and computing. The National Association of Head Teachers . . . said its structure of 14 compulsory subjects should be replaced by a “minimum framework” that would be “skills and competence-based, rather than prescriptive and knowledge-based.”
No, you wouldn’t want a knowledge-based curriculum.
I like the quote from Prof. Smithers, in favor of knowledge:
“We have discovered a number of ways of making sense of the world which have been formulated as the sciences, humanities, social sciences and expressive art. It is reasonable to require young people to engage in these vital subjects for a spell of time.”
Compare his language (e.g., “spell of time”) to the language of the National Association of Head Teachers:
…a “minimum framework” that would be “skills and competence-based, rather than prescriptive and knowledge-based.”
On the basis of language alone, I would sign up for Smithers’ school.
Truism: Any time the suffix “-based” starts showing up, you know that there is educational BS about to take place.
> No, you wouldn’t want a knowledge-based curriculum.
Well, no, you wouldn’t.
Drilling facts into students’ heads worked reasonably well when the world was mostly simple and static.
But it is exactly the wrong thing to do in a world that has become complex and changing.
Stephen,
Name me a time when the world was “mostly simple and static.” I would love to know about it!
Yes Stephen, what’s the watershed that marks the transition to a post-“mostly simple and static” world wherein the teaching of “mere” facts ceased to work “reasonably well”?
Stephen,
Has statistics, probability theory, algebra and geometry changed lately? How about the laws of thermodynamics? Can you learn the changes in knowledge without understanding the fundamentals the knowledge is based on? Could Einstein have developed relativity without first learning classical physics and math? Can you learn relativity without learning classical physics first?
Stephen…I suspect that the “big themes” curriculum would involve plenty of drilling things into students’ heads…specifically, the opinions of the course designers, which the students had better be able to parrot back, or else.
Also, it is wise to eschew temporal bigotry.
Yeah, that’s great there England. All those kids will be fully qualifed to discuss global warming while serving Starbucks lattes to all those products of the Japanese, Indian and Chinese schools that produce all the people who actually have a real education and a work ethic. And David, agree 100% that those big themes will be nothing more that drilling the proper attitudes and ideas into the students’ heads rather than actual learning.
I weep for the future of the people that brought us to the present.
Stephen,
I suspect the world last was “simple and static” about the time the printing press was invented.
Stephen:
re this: “But it is exactly the wrong thing to do in a world that has become complex and changing.”
I don’t think you’ll find anyone who disagrees that our schooling needs to provide more of an emphasis on problem-solving and critical thinking. But one does need a solid base of knowledge. The problem with our educational system is that we go to extremes. Either we drill facts and postpone creative and critical thinking until far too late, thinking kids can’t do ANYthing until they know EVERYthing, or we drop facts and knowledge altogether and ask kids to think critically about things they know nothing about.
If you were a soccer coach, you wouldn’t have kids do drills for 12 years without ever playing a game…but you also wouldn’t have them play endless games without ever teaching them HOW to play.
Perhaps it’s called the “National Association of Head Teachers” because they are all prolific smokers of dope.
Why do people pursue careers in teaching if they don’t place a high value on knowledge?
“Why do people pursue careers in teaching if they don’t place a high value on knowledge?”
I have read interviews, etc. that suggest that a large number of teachers (or teachers-in-training) like working with kids. It is not inconsistent to like working with kids and also not be terribly interesting in many formal fields of knowledge (e.g. math, history, literature, …).
-Mark Roulo
//I suspect the world last was “simple and static” about the time the printing press was invented.//
I suspect it’s a myth we tell ourselves so we can congratulate ourselves for what a complicated and changing world we manage to survive in. It’s a conceit. Life has never been simple and static.
Dawn,
I don’t know if you are a reader of history in any serious way, but if you’re not, perhaps you might try it.
Simple and static — also, illiterate, brutish, grinding, starvation-stricken, disease-ridden, superstition-driven and short — essentially describes the lives of at least 90 percent of the population of Europe in the middle ages, and of significant percentages of the populations of Asia and Africa into the present day.
For a quick, popularly-written but footnoted look at Europe prior to the renaissance, and to the changes the renaissance wrought, you might try William Manchester’s “A World Lighted by Fire.” It’s available at your local big-box bookstore.
CORRECTION: The book title cited in my last post is incorrect, and was cited from (admittedly fallible) memory.
The correct citation is: “A World Lit Only by Fire”, Manchester, Little, Brown & Co., 1992. Back Bay Books paperback edition, 1993.
Bill - I read your comment as implying that life first got complicated and changing with the press. Something quite different from what you said. However, disease, witchcraft, crusades, war…none of this makes for simple or static lives. Thanks for the book reccomendation though!
It’s an amazing book, by the way. I read it at least a decade ago, and still cite pieces of it in conversation from time to time.
Drilling facts into students’ heads worked reasonably well when the world was mostly simple and static. But it is exactly the wrong thing to do in a world that has become complex and changing.
How is it exactly the wrong thing to do? If the world has become more complex, how does that mean it is wrong to know more about it? If a student doesn’t know anything about the world today, how can they know it is even changing?
How does it harm kids to learn facts?
If you make all knowledge “relative”, and focus on “problem-solving”—when the elite define what the problems are—you will produce a generation of “citizens” who exist in an eternal present. They will be infintely malleable, easily led, and highly distractable. Then the “Vanguard of the People” will not be troubled by the vagaries of democracy or the need to justify its actions and decisions. Harriet Harman will be pleased.
“It is the citizen’s responsibility to remember. Everyone must be an historian, lest we drift into a tyrannical present.” (Character in a BBC play. 1987)
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
Milan Kundera “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”.
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”
There can be no forgetting if nothing was put in memory in the first place.
It seems counterintuitive that the purpose of education is to produce ignoramuses as this Downes fellow seems to suggest.
Were I the paranoid type, I’d think that Britain were well on its way to becoming Airstrip One from Nineteen Eighty-Four. Suck all content out of the schools. Dissociate the people from their history. Once both are done, it becomes much easier to make people “unpersons” and pretend that they had always been at war with Eurasia.
In the end, human memory is the only grounding we have in time or space. Our surroundings can be changed so that the past is unavailable to us, the content of the internet could be filtered and altered, but what is in our memory is ours. The anti-fact mentality of progressive education robs people of this.
Ever even talked to someone educated in the British state schools in the last few years? These people are generally staggeringly, frighteningly, incoherently ignorant, more so than anyone from even the worst schools in the US.