Secretary of State for Education Bridget Phillipson’s review of the school curriculum, announced, alarmingly to anyone in their right mind, as aiming at a “cutting-edge curriculum” which is “modern”, “innovative” and focused on ‘equity’, is at the stage of seeking views in advance of issuing proposals. One of the documents the review Chair, Professor Becky Francis, is most likely to be looking at is a major report on 11-16 curriculum and assessment by the awarding body OCR, published in July and clearly hoping to shape the outcomes of the review.
Given that the “O” in OCR is Oxford University, my alma mater, and “C” is Cambridge University, two institutions with a 800-plus year tradition of liberal education, and that “R” is the Royal Society of Arts founded in 1754, with Fellows like Marie Curie and Stephen Hawking as well as my humble self, I assumed, in turning belatedly to this report, that recommendations emerging from such a distinguished source would be anything but embarrassingly “cutting-edge”. Reassurance was confirmed when I saw that the Chair of the OCR review was Charles Clarke whom I had known as a sensible and moderate Labour Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department of Education and Employment in 1998-99. What, I thought, could possibly go wrong?
My illusions were quickly shattered when early on in this 120-page report Clarke announced “that what is learned needs to be focused far more on the world as it now is and is going to be” than on “the past”, and that what matters are having “the skills and confidence to meet the challenges which [pupils] will face in the future”, instead of out-of-date stuff about “acquiring the canons of knowledge which have been built up over centuries”. In two sentences, without argument and seemingly without any awareness of what he was doing, Clarke had casually tossed aside the whole rationale for a 2,500 year old tradition of liberal education based on the transmission of Plato’s “the good, the true and the beautiful” and Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and known”. If this is an augury of the intellectual level of our impending ‘national conversation’ on the school curriculum, heaven help us was my immediate thought.
Most of what follows about the curriculum that is seriously bad in this report can be traced back to these two sentences. The current curriculum is insufficiently focused on the contemporary world, the report says. English therefore needs to be more about “modern” forms of communication such as business and digital writing, film, TV and less about “heritage texts” that are shamefully non-contemporary and shockingly do not reflect issues that affect pupils today. Farewell therefore to the likes of Jane Austen and William Wordsworth, though Mary Shelley, one assumes, despite the deep disadvantage of being dead for a long time, would doubtless be recommended for survival thanks to her highly ‘contemporary’ bisexuality.
The curriculum is also much too heavy, the report adds, especially in history, mathematics and science. Despite having been already slimmed down to vanishing point, history is singled out for particularly drastic surgery. But how it might be done and with what consequences for young people’s already limited cultural and political literacy – a key basis for any well-functioning democracy according to E. D. Hirsch – it does not say.
Space in the curriculum needs to be cleared not just for “the contemporary”, but also in anticipation of “the world [that] is going to be”. What might this involve, we ask, when we do not know the future and events like last week’s U.S. election result keep on surprising us? No need to worry, says OCR, we have the answer: climate change is “the biggest existential crisis of our age”, and “climate change education” must therefore be added to the allegedly overcrowded curriculum. Why this topic should qualify as the main candidate for entry to a slimmed down curriculum – by comparison with demography, mass migration, global poverty, geopolitical change or world peace – is nowhere explained.
Climate change education, the report says, will help pupils become a more “carbon literate” generation, acquire a more sustainable lifestyle and help their families and wider communities to do likewise, enabling them to challenge “unsustainable ways of thinking” in others (I can assure you, kids, this will make you really popular with neighbours, cattle farmers and the elderly). As a topic – by which they surely mean ‘ideology and way of life’ – climate change needs, they say, to be taught and assessed throughout the curriculum and included in GCSEs and vocational qualifications. “Ecotherapy”, an appendix implies en passant, might also help schools in their other new role of tackling what other pressure groups are calling the ‘mental health crisis’ affecting our country.
Most worryingly the report calls on the Government to show “leadership… to drive forward the implementation of climate change education with the absolute urgency it needs”. Some of us know exactly what this would mean: even more propaganda promoting a particular version of climate change and a highly contested plan as to how to respond to it, kindly supplied free of charge by the many philanthropically funded agencies linked to the ‘climate industrial complex’. Does OCR really think that Ed Miliband’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, or any other Government agency, would help sponsor materials that put forward the range of views that exist on these issues, or is it that OCR does not care about the fundamental Socratic principle of reaching out to truth via dialectic? Did it consider, in making these recommendations, Hannah Arendt’s widely discussed view that “the function of the school is… not to instruct [children] in the art of living” or encourage them to assume responsibilities and take up views prematurely on controversial issues? Does it not realise that what it is proposing looks as if it is crossing the dangerous line that separates education from indoctrination? One can only assume not.
The other recommendation for change across the curriculum is for more diversity and inclusion. The curriculum, it asserts, needs to be “relevant to modern Britain and encourage diversity”, the current version being insufficiently “inclusive” with texts used in English failing to “engage with students’ identities”. It needs to become a better reflection of the diversity of British society and of “the interconnected, globalised world in which we live”. As with climate change education the one thing the report never does is explain why this theme should permeate the curriculum rather than any other. It praises initiatives to increase the take-up of science subjects by girls and efforts to improve the representation of black, Asian and ethnically diverse artists in teaching materials, but at no point shows any recognition that the consistently most under-performing group in examinations is white working-class boys. As an English national awarding body there is also never any recognition that the most important thing it might be expected to do is to help the development of a sense of national identity. The emphasis is on encouraging diversity and children’s own cultural and ethnic identities, alongside our membership of a wider world, with virtually no recognition that those taking its examinations are inhabitants of England and citizens of the U.K.
The report has much elsewhere within it that is of value. Indeed, when writing about assessment – which is its main purpose – it is generally measured and thoughtful. Reducing the amount of assessment risks limiting what is studied in school and moving away from a reliance on timed examinations risks weakening the reliability of assessment, but OCR is well aware of the advantages and disadvantages at play here and has no wish to put itself out of business. It is a pity it did not confine itself to its main area of expertise.
What strikes me most about OCR’s preoccupation with climate change and diversity is the way this illustrates how isolated the small group of people who run most of our cultural institutions and public bodies – David Goodhart’s “Anywheres” and Matthew Goodwin’s “liberal elite class” – are from the rest of the population and what is happening outside their bubble. It is extraordinary that, faced with the massive problems being experienced in this and many other Western countries by what Amartya Sen has called “plurally monocultural” societies – the riots last summer, grooming gangs, the recent pogrom in Amsterdam – the plea should be to encourage diversity rather than promote unity. It is equally extraordinary that priority is given to groups deemed to be high up in the hierarchy of oppression through which the ‘elite liberal class’ sees the world – girls and ethnic minorities – rather than to those – white working class boys – who most urgently need attention. Behind this blindness lie assumptions about race and identity, the place of the nation state, our relationship with the past, the value of Western civilisation, the importance of knowledge and in the case of climate change the very notion of a climate ‘crisis’, that, as this report shows, remain unexamined and uncriticised because everyone in the same bubble shares them and takes them for granted.
Some commentators, over-excited by levels of hostility to our new Labour Government and by the Trump victory in the USA, have recently been suggesting that ‘elite liberal’ ideology might at last have begun to have its comeuppance. This report shows it still alive and well this side of the pond, at least as far as schools are concerned.
Dr. Nicholas Tate was Chief Executive of the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority (1994-7) and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (1997-2000). He is the author of What is Education for? and The Conservative Case for Education.
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It’s clear to me that Ed Miliband is a much more important scientist than Newton or Einstein and David Lammy is a much greater intellectual than Shakespeare or Orwell. So I fully support the complete destruction of anything resembling education in our schools and universities and its replacement by propagandising which someone like Goebbels would envy.
To quote one of my favourite YouTubers, “David Lammy has the IQ of a pull-along duck!”
Is it really as high as that? But then it might be a cunning shield of his actual agenda. Probably not the good of Britain!
But is of less use…
The Scottish education system used to be one of the best in the world but it has been going downhill for decades thanks to leftist teaching union influence, culminating in the SNP’s introduction of its “Curriculum for Excellence”, which it is anything but.
Perhaps they are worried that if they teach too much history then someone might learn from it
Teaching English and European history to people who are later supposed to accept their eternal white guilt because there was really no difference between the Empire and the mythological Nazis except that it was even worse would obviously be counterproductive.
If the goal is to create a suitably malleable mass of future voters, these must remain uneducated in anything beyond what we’d call political opinions they’re supposed to accept as dogmas which are beyond questioning.
What, MORE at the centre?!
It gives a whole new meaning to the line from Yeats: “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”. If you overstuff the centre, everything at the increasingly remote edges will fall off the cliff.
I’m not sure Sir Keir Starmer is full of passionate intensity
In a marxo-fascist system the primary purpose of the education system is compliance training.
Students must unquestioningly accept the latest dogma. Independent thinking should be discouraged and, if necessary, penalized.
Educating the slaves beyond the basics is unnecessary. Adolph’s idea for the sub-aryan slave races was the minimum necessary for them to be able to perform simple manual labour for the master race.
Yep. Indoctrination not Education.
Time to end nationalised, statism, state owned education.
We are not smarter than our forbears.
I remember taking an exit high school exam (North America) from 1898. I did not score that well. I doubt today most 17 yr olds would have a prayer passing it.
Education deflation + grade inflation.
So, the story is basically Labour guys from Oxford recommends that Labour government use the opportunity to replace the curriculum with the Labour party manifesto because that’s more relevant to the world of today than mathematics or knowing about (doubtlessly ‘terribly white’) English monarchs of the past.
That’s basically the same story as the Essex police report just for education: Left-wing politicians extending their tentacles into all areas of society because they’re seriously convinced that their political opinions are really universal truths while everything else is as untrue and as it is evil.
The Civil Service is mostly OxBridge and have done their damnedest to run the country irrespective of government and electoral wishes. The Russians have recruited their spies from Oxford and Cambridge.
“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”
George Orwell
The top maybe all Oxbridge but the rest seem to be dolts. WFH; 4 day week ; no progression except increments of salary. Why do there seem to be few capable CS?
Oxbridge is long lost, and can’t be trusted – they’d sell anything, especially to China.. “For those who are in, the things that are in are out”. JW, Cantab
Didn’t Brown sell our Gold for Euros?
Yes teaching that the Earth is flat was also once part of the curriculum.
I guess they will also be blocking X (see article in this edition) in the UK and websites such as The Daily Sceptic because only the elite have the right to exchange ideas and think.
Education Endless Marxist Propaganda
As a chemistry teacher 2000-2020 i was made to teach / indoctrinate global warming etc and carbon capture as fact for OCR exams. I was well known for my sceptisim in the science dept.
I wonder what method of “carbon” capture was taught? The energy equations must have been interesting or perhaps too difficult! The process will produce more emissions than it removes unless wind and solar are free and infinite. Never mind!
I wonder how many parents are thinking of home schooling or partnering up with other parents to do this.
If I had children of school going age, I would seriously consider it.
As a retired Headteacher, may I compliment you on a wonderful book. I am a ministerial appointment as a Director to CCEA, the N.Ireland curriculum and exam board. I have frequently bemoaned the absence of any professional debate around the topic of “What is education for” and this, again as you remark, means the latest government or public hobby horse becomes the central issue. Our children are not being taught to read and count yet at board level we are spending our time debating what is appropriate and what age is age appropriate for sex education. Our Dept of Education is pressing ahead despite CASS and despite me repeatedly contesting the “scientifically accurate ” mantra. I have regularly quoted your views!
The answer to this question (Which age ...) is extremely simple: Sex is by definition private and hence, the government has absolutely no business in this area. Not at 5, not at 10 and not at 15, just never. That some half-ossified UN perverts believe differently would warrant paying more attention to their hobbies than they’d probably like instead of forcing children into not-so-covert sexting with adults.
and implemented via the inspection process. https://hughmccarthy.substack.com/p/brownstone-look-whos-in-the-classroom
and 70 + articles entitled “What are we doing to our children?” as I opposed government restrictions on children and, indeed, on all of us-based on the evidence and the data eg the youngest person to die OF Covid in N.Ireland was 38 , yet we closed schools, harmed children and no one is responsible.
The harm from the useless lies we were fed daily on TV by the supposed “scientists” and clearly didn’t have a clue was a crime against humanity. Why there are no prosecutions is completely insane.
Basically, they’re planning to ditch education for concentrated brainwashing. We should be grateful that their intentions are so clear …. so those who have them can properly educate their children themselves.
They have broken Universities and now they have nearly broken schools with their hard left rubbish. Neither subject is important in the big picture. It is all a game to the fools.
Just when you thought our children couldn’t become less educated. along comes the Wendolene-lookalike with a further round of dumbing down.
If I had a school aged child I would pull him or her out of any British school so fast their little head would be spinning!. This country is going downhill so fast it is frightening.
and Dr Tate’s article in action. Rousseau. Implemented via the inspection process-this is how it is done.
https://hughmccarthy.substack.com/p/brownstone-look-whos-in-the-classroom