3. What Future for the National Curriculum for England?
What is a Curriculum? And Why is Our National Curriculum Contested?
Fireworks at the White House on the 4th of July 2012
The first question in the subtitle of this post might seem a little odd as the meaning of the term would appear to be entirely obvious: a curriculum is simply a programme of study.
We might observe here, however, that the word can be used in various ways. Sometimes when people speak of the curriculum they mean the totality of the student learning experience, including that which students learn informally, although more typically the phrase is used to refer to the formally stated knowledge and skills that a student is expected to acquire.
We might also note that curriculums exist at many different levels within education. All individual schools have their own curriculum, as do courses, and these curriculums are shaped to an extent by the teachers who are in charge.
But the state curriculum differs in scale and in function from those just mentioned. It is a very special type of curriculum. And of all the curriculums that exist in this country it would seem fair to state that England’s official National Curriculum is the most educationally significant and also the most controversial.
Why is that?
The Curriculum Hullabaloo
The reasons for the persistent hullabaloo that surrounds the National Curriculum are various and are probably not as sinister as the more paranoid amongst us are fond of claiming. One reason for the hullabaloo is that our national curriculum aims to direct the teaching activities of all state schools in their compulsory phase.
As parents we are all required to educate our children, by law, and for most of us, who have to work to live, this means sending our children to a state school, and this school must follow the National Curriculum, or explain why it hasn’t, so it’s quite right that many of us, including those that don’t teach, take a view on the content of the curriculum.
Further, there is no unanimity as to what we are as a nation, our collective representation of ourselves is contested and vigorously so. Contesting what our nation means is not an immoral act, it is simply what citizens in a democracy do, they argue over what they are and what they should become. Some might share John Major’s traditionalist vision of England as a green and pleasant land of cricket, warm beer, and hot chocolate and Ralph Vaughan Williams at bed time. For others, England is all about personal freedom, watching Gypsy King get beat in the pub, drinking cider and then dancing to black American dance music until the early hours of a bank holiday Sunday. Contrasting views of what England is, and what all of this stuff really means in terms of the more serious question of values, naturally leads us to differing views of what a national school curriculum ought to include.
It is also true that the citizens of our country disagree, often fundamentally so, about the role of education in the formation of the future citizens of England. I am a liberal traditionalist, so I favour a view of compulsory education that is principally intellectual, and which gives priority to a curriculum that provides the young with access to disciplinary knowledge, or what the English sociologist of education Michael Young has described as “powerful knowledge” (Young, 2014).
I support Young’s sociological perspective because I believe that future English citizens should be raised to think for themselves, as a free people, and to exercise intellectual autonomy they really do need some disciplinary knowledge. Academic education benefits them as human beings and it benefits the nation in which they find themselves. Knowledge really is power, or at least intellectual power, and schools are specialised institutions which unlike any other are responsible for engaging the young in formal disciplinary knowledge.
But as I have previously suggested, there are other legitimate views on the cultural role of state education, albeit ones that are in my view in error. There is at least one more reason for all the hullabaloo over the curriculum.
This is that teachers don’t much like being told what to do by government, any government - who does? - and teachers, who often like nothing better than the sound of their own voice, will of course express their own divergent views on education whenever the state lays down the cultural law on education via the mechanism of a national curriculum it entirely controls.
I don’t, as some do, see anything to fear in the democratic debate that we have had, and are about to have, over the meaning of state education and the future the National Curriculum of England. I see this hullabaloo as entirely healthy.
Education Belongs to Everyone
All participants in this debate need is an experience of education and our national life and we all have that. We should all state what we believe to be educationally worthwhile and should therefore be included within the school curriculum and we should make our views known in this election.
What we should all also try to do, and this takes effort, is to listen and to reply with respect to the views of those with whom we disagree, as we are all members of the same democratic polity. We owe this to each other.
As I write the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called an election for a day that is close to my English republican heart: 4th July.
Whatever your views on education, or Labour, or the Conservatives, or the rest, the good news is that we all get to vote in six weeks time, and we can, if we judge the school curriculum to be that important, vote for the party that has the best idea as to how we might move state education forward in the interests of the next generation.
Our debate over the future of the National Curriculum for England could not have come soon enough.
Picture courtesy of WikiCommons. Thanks to a Matthew Straubmuller for the use of the image.
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2. What Future for the National Curriculum for England?
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