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The Corruption of the Curriculum

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The Corruption of the Curriculum The Corruption of the Curriculum The Corruption of the Curriculum Shirley Lawes, Michele Ledda, Chris McGovern, Simon Patterson, David Perks, Alex Standish Introduction by Frank Furedi Robert Whelan (Editor) Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society London Registered Charity No. 1085494 First Published June 2007 © The Institute for the Study of Civil Society 2007 77 Great Peter Street London SW1P 2EZ Civitas is a registered charity (no. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee, registered in England and Wales (no. 04023541) email: [email protected] All rights reserved ISBN (13) 978‐1‐903386‐59‐0 Independence: The Institute for the Study of Civil Society (Civitas) is a registered educational charity (No. 1085494) and a company limited by guarantee (No. 04023541). Civitas is financed from a variety of private sources to avoid over‐ reliance on any single or small group of donors. All publications are independently refereed. All the Institute’s publications seek to further its objective of promoting the advancement of learning. The views expressed are those of the authors, not of the Institute. Typeset by Civitas Printed in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Trowbridge, Wiltshire Contents Page Authors vi Editor’s Preface Robert Whelan ix Introduction: Politics, Politics, Politics! Frank Furedi 1 English As A Dialect Michele Ledda 11 Geography Used To Be About Maps Alex Standish 28 The New History Boys Chris McGovern 58 Appendix 1 83 Appendix 2 84 Foreign Languages Without Tears? Shirley Lawes 86 Teaching By Numbers Simon Patterson 98 What Is Science Education For? David Perks 109 Notes 140 Index 155 v Authors Frank Furedi is Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. His research is oriented towards the study of the impact of precautionary culture and risk aversion on Western societies. In his books he has explored controversies and panics over issues such as health, children, food and cultural life. His writings express a concern with the prevailing regime of cultural confusion towards valuing intellectual and artistic pursuits and with the difficulty that society has in providing a challenging education for children and young people. His books include: Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (2005); Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone: Confronting 21st Century Philistinism (2005); Therapeutic Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Anxious Age (2004); Culture of Fear (2002); and Paranoid Parenting (2001); His new book Invitation to Terror is to be published in October 2007. Shirley Lawes is currently Subject Leader for Modern Foreign Languages at the Institute of Education, University of London. Before moving into higher education, she worked for many years as a teacher of French in secondary schools, further and adult education and industry. Shirley is editor of the journal Francophonie and has published widely on modern languages teaching and learning, and initial teacher training. Michele Ledda teaches English at secondary level and has also taught French and Latin. He has an Italian degree in English Language and Literature and holds an MA by research in English from Leeds University, with a disser‐ tation on James Joyce’s Ulysses and Petronius’s Satyricon. He collaborates with the education section of the Manifesto Club (www.manifestoclub.com) which campaigns for an elitist education for all, and has written various articles on vi AUTHORS education both for academic journals and for online magazines. Chris McGovern has 32 years of teaching experience, at all ages from 5 to 18 and in both the maintained and the independent sectors. He has been head of history in two large comprehensive schools and is currently headmaster of an independent preparatory school in North London. He is a qualified Ofsted and ISI inspector. In the 1980s he helped to found the History Curriculum Association and remains a director. During the 1990s he served on two government advisory bodies: the School Examinations and Assessment Council and the School Curriculum and Assessment Authority. As a member of the group that revised the National Curriculum for history in the mid‐1990s he published a critical minority report. He has been an education adviser to the Policy Unit at 10 Downing Street under two prime ministers and a member of the TUC local government committee. He is a regular contributor to press, TV and radio discussion of educational matters at home and abroad. Simon Patterson has 30 years of teaching experience at degree level, in philosophy and related subjects, but his critique of the national curriculum in mathematics is based on his exposure to it as a trainee teacher on the Graduate Teacher Programme in 2001/2. He came to feel that the syllabus he and his colleagues were attempting to teach sought to cover too many disparate topics and that the practice of returning to the same topic year after year, and the rigid constraints on time this imposed, tended to de‐ motivate students and contributed to a culture of under achievement. vii THE CORRUPTION OF THE CURRICULUM David Perks is head of physics at Graveney School, London. After completing his PGCE at Oxford he went straight into teaching and now has 20 years of teaching experience in state schools. He campaigns for the teaching of science through separate academic disciplines and writes regularly on education issues, with a focus on defending academic science education in schools. Alex Standish is Assistant Professor of Geography, Department of Social Studies, Western Connecticut State University. Dr Standish recently received a doctorate in geography from Rutgers University in New Jersey. His thesis looked at the changing relationship between geography education and citizenship in schools. Previously, he completed a master’s degree in education at Canterbury Christ Church University College in the UK. He has also taught in both primary and secondary schools in the southeast of England. Alex Standish has emerged as one of the few critics of new directions in geography education. He has debated the future of geography at the Geographical Association’s annual conference and on BBC radio’s Today programme. He also writes for spiked‐online and the Times Educational Supplement. Robert Whelan is Deputy Director of Civitas. His books include The Corrosion of Charity; Involuntary Action: How Voluntary is the ʹVoluntaryʹ Sector?; Helping the Poor: Friendly visiting, dole charities and dole queues; and Octavia Hill’s Letters to Fellow‐Workers 1871‐1911 (ed.). He is a director of the New Model School Company, set up under the auspices of Civitas, which aims to bring independent schooling within the reach of more parents, and he teaches English to Bengali students at a Saturday school in Bethnal Green. viii Editor’s Preface The problem that faces the editor of a multi‐author volume is that the chapters may not all fit together. Sometimes authors seem to be travelling in different directions, and give the impression that they should be appearing in separate books. That has not been a problem with The Corruption of the Curriculum. Our contributors, all of whom write from practical experience in the classroom, identify certain problems that occur in all of the subject areas. Traditional academic subjects are being drained of their intellectual content in favour of promoting concerns about racism, the environment, gender and other topics. Classes must be judged by children to be interesting and relevant to their day‐to‐day lives. Politicians are interested in education as a means of increasing GDP, and thus raising more taxes, while the methods being applied are very unlikely to achieve even that non‐educational goal. Teachers are no longer treated as professional people, capable of exercising judgment, but are micro‐managed by Whitehall, where every hour of their day is prescribed. In Shakespeare’s Henry VI Pt 2 the anarchist rebel Jack Cade makes grammatical knowledge a capital offence: It will be proved to thy face that thou hast men about thee that usually talk of a noun and a verb, and such abominable words as no Christian ear can endure to hear. (IV, 7) Many young people emerging from eleven years of compulsory state education would be in no danger from Jack Cade’s insurgents, because they would be unable to distinguish between a noun and a verb. But every subject has its own grammar, its corpus of knowledge that a teacher passes on to students, without which a grasp of the subject must remain forever out of reach. It is out of concern for these traditional disciplines that the authors of this collection ix THE CORRUPTION OF THE CURRICULUM of essays have raised the standard of defiance against the Jack Cades of the educational establishment. I would like to thank Claire Fox and her colleagues at the Institute of Ideas, without whom this book would not have happened. It is a lonely business, defending high culture and academic rigour, and you need to know who your friends are. Robert Whelan x Introduction: Politics, Politics, Politics! Frank Furedi Over the past two decades the school curriculum has become estranged from the challenge of educating children. Pedagogic problems still influence official deliberations on the national curriculum, but issues that are integral to education have become subordinate to the imperative of social engineering and political expediency. As I write this essay I receive word that the Equal Opportunities Com‐ mission has just dispatched 40 pages of guidance to head teachers and governors in England about how they should go about tackling inequality between the sexes. The guideline, The Gender Equality Duty, is the product of an imagination that regards the curriculum as principally a political instrument for changing attitudes and behaviour. ‘The gender equality duty presents a fantastic opportunity for schools to make a coordinated effort to tackle inequality and ensure that all pupils are able to fully achieve their potential’ declares the Commission.1 Instructions to schools about how to close the gender gap compete with directives that outline how children should be taught to become more sensitive to cultural differences.
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