A knowledge led curriculum?

Education is a fast moving business at the moment and Education monkey has been too busy swinging from school to school to get on and write stuff for this blog. However, it's the beginning of a new school year so why not grasp the nettle?

The Monkey has been doing a lot of reading over the summer, triggered by the revision of the National Curriculum. Among the most interesting material has been Trusting Knowledge by Dr Jo Saxton and Annaleise Briggs. This apologia for a knowledge-based curriculum explores several arguments circulating around the notion and welcomes the introduction of a national curriculum that includes specified knowledge. Saxton takes on super-teacher, Phil Beadle over his comments that the Secretary of State wants to return us to a Victorian curriculum. However, her argument - that this is an educational decision and not a political one - has much merit. The we turn to another little volume, Seven Myths about Education, by Daisy Christoldoulou, where she unpicks these seven 'myths' about teaching process skills rather than knowledge:-

1. Facts prevent understanding
2. Teacher-led instruction is passive
3. The 21st century fundamentally changes everything
4. You can always just look it up
5. We should teach transferable skills
6. Projects and activities are the best way to learn
7. Teaching knowledge is indoctrination

Now, while Christodoulou rather over-polarises the argument, the case that she makes for teaching knowledge will find an echo with any teacher who has always felt that simply having pupils 'find out' from an arranged set of resources lack rigour and rarely leads to deep understanding.  Much of Christodoulou's case is founded in the work of American educationalist, ED Hirsch, whose concept of 'Cultural Capital' underpins much of the collective view of the Review Body.

Add into the mix the notion of generating in our pupils a positive mindset that makes them hungry to learn (see  Mindset by Dr Carol S Dweck) and then read Matthew Syed's Bounce, which sets out the thesis that we can accomplish great things without being talented but merely by repeated and diligent practice.  The sum of all this is that there is a strong case for the kind of curriculum that is proposed from 2014.

What Christodoulou, Saxton and Briggs have in common is a link with Civitas, the right-wing think tank that is, with Policy Exchange, being a significant influence on education policy. However, that does not necessarily make their work ideologically unsound and the Monkey, for one, is strangely persuaded of the validity of this thinking.

In the next Monkey Business we will look at how we got here in the first place.