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are having “the skills and confidence to meet the challenges which [pupils] will face in the future”, instead of out-of-date stuff about “acquiring the canons of knowledge which have been built up over centuries”.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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