John White: Today's lessons need to be modernised
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Your support makes all the difference.In 2000, the Government gave the school curriculum its aims, but so far they have had little impact. It may sound daft, but before then the curriculum was officially aimless. In 1988 Kenneth Baker introduced a complex National Curriculum structure based on school subjects almost identical to those introduced for secondary grammars in 1904. But what it was for he never let on.
In the 1990s teachers pressed for an overall vision. Why the 10 subjects, the programmes of study, the 10 levels of achievement, the SATs? The Government responded; now we have four pages of values, aims and purposes at the beginning of the official Handbook for Teachers.
They are a good first shot at a vision of education centred on a fulfilling life for the pupil as individual and as citizen. And with the whole picture we should now be able to see how all the discrete bits fit together. But can we? Remember that Baker's 1904-style curriculum has already been in place for a decade and a half. How well does it match the new aims? How far have mathematics, history, PE, art and other grizzled old-stagers reconceptualised themselves as vehicles to achieve these larger, more encompassing, ends?
To judge by the verdicts of my co-authors of Rethinking the School Curriculum, not nearly enough. Since 1904 the subjects and their teachers have had a century in which to build up ways of operating and to reinforce their status in the curriculum. Many of them see their task as apprenticing students in their craft so that the best will be able to go on to further specialisation. They are not good at looking beyond their own frontiers and seeing how they can work with others in a general education for all. We have been told since 2000 that schools are not there primarily to produce future linguists, musicians or athletes, yet that has been our tradition.
Our curriculum has grown up around categories and procedures that are now obsolescent. Music became a compulsory subject because of 19th-century hand-wringing over the decline of church singing. It has become a vehicle of general musicianship that has roots in conservatoires and universities. Religious education became compulsory in 1944 because Christianity was seen as the basis for democratic citizenship. By 1900 the science curriculum had crystallised into physics, chemistry and biology, but today basic science is a relatively small part of research.
Not surprisingly, in most of the traditional subjects there is a poor match with the post-2000 aims. The main official justification given for mathematics is that it provides powerful tools of logical reasoning. But does algebra help one to think logically about personal relationships or policy on asylum seekers? The new overall aims require a sound understanding of the contemporary world yet history contains little on the 20th century. And why is there no place in the curriculum for world literature?
Easily the best match with the new aims is found in design and technology. This is a new subject, the least encrusted. Like the overall aims, it is geared to the business of living, helping students to think flexibly about how to reach their goals and to reflect on the values of the goals themselves.
If the Government is serious about its new aims, it should not treat them as a national mission statement that everyone can ignore. It needs to ensure that the discrete bits of the curriculum are brought into line with them. It should ask whether so much of the curriculum needs to be compulsory for all and how far more student choice can be built in. Just how much maths beyond basic arithmetic, for instance, does a fulfilled human life require?
A better match with the aims will give students and teachers a clearer sense of what their schools are for. It could well do something to reduce disaffection at secondary level and improve England's appalling international record for numbers staying on. It is now up to the Government to get the curriculum it inherited in sync with its new aims.
John White is the editor of 'Rethinking the School Curriculum: Values, Aims and Purposes' (RoutledgeFalmer; £24.99). There is a seminar with the authors at the Institute of Education, London, at 3.30 pm on 4 November (contact Jon Raeside on 020-7842 2165)
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