One of the farcical aspects of being a school parent over several decades, as I have been, is the way we see slabs of curriculum come and go, often for no better reason than a minister of education fancied it. We see our children bringing home paragraphs of knowledge that have suddenly been deemed essential and then, at a later stage, not essential. Funnily enough, what hardly ever changes is how the paragraph is supposed to make its way into our children’s minds.
Take the stone age. In your briefing notes, you’ll have seen that the stone age was put on the curriculum by your predecessor. Wise men and women sat in a room in the building you now occupy and said: “Let’s begin at the beginning. Yes, like children do. So, what comes first? Apes? No, that’s biology. Neanderthals? Bit too much guesswork there. The stone age? Yes, good, lots of facts there. Flint axe-heads. And they lived in Britain. Let’s start there, then.”
Because I visit many schools in a year, I noticed that all of a sudden primary school classrooms started acquiring friezes that began with the stone age, and small children (eight- and nine-year-olds) were surrounded by wall displays saying: “The stone age was a time when …”
The great advantage of the stone age for those who believe that our children aren’t being instructed enough is that it’s an area of knowledge for which the children themselves almost certainly have no prior experience. I notice, for example, that in key stage 1 and 2 history (national curriculum, England 2013) the non-statutory example given for “neolithic hunter-gatherers” is Skara Brae in Orkney.
So, Skara Brae – not local to any children covered by the national curriculum – has become part of the usual school stone age paragraph. That’s how education works nowadays. “Non-statutory” becomes “customary”, largely because visiting Ofsted people use the national curriculum documents as part of their tick-box reporting.
Hidden in the stone age clauses are several theories, none of which is necessarily true: 1. There was a stone age. 2. We should imply to children it’s where history starts. 3. There is a narrative that runs from the stone age to the next “age”. 4. “We” are part of that narrative. 5. Eight is the best age to teach this. 6. A good way to teach the stone age to English eight- and nine-year-olds is tell them about Skara Brae.
None of this is argued for in the national curriculum documents: teachers, parents and children are all too low in the food chain to be thought of as worth engaging in any kind of debate about any of these six theories.
One of the most common words in the documents is “should”, which is telling. Instructing teachers how they “should” do things deprives them and their students of the excitement of discovering things. In fact, if I had to invent a way in which I could put something into the school day to guarantee that it would be forgotten by the majority of children, this is how I would do it.
This authoritarian way of handling teaching and learning comes to us in mysterious ways: it has no author. We work hard on the MA course we teach at Goldsmiths, University of London, to show our students (most of them teachers) how and why we reference ideas and opinions. It’s a form of democracy. It enables us to make connections between schools of thought and the people behind them.
Not in national curriculum documents, though. They aren’t part of this tradition. They come from another world: naked, not-to-be-questioned authority. The stone age, just do it.
The same principle holds sway in key stage 3 and 4 English. At key stage 3, students should read “seminal world literature [pdf]”. For English literature GCSE, that has turned into all work having been originally “written in English”. Why the change? And then, in what looks like nothing much more than a personal obsession, someone has decided that at key stage 4, whether you’re doing English language and literature or English literature, you must study Romantic poetry. Why?
Why couldn’t it have been left to academics and teachers to interpret the document’s phrase “the best that has been thought and written”, which may or may not have included the Romantic poets? Why must it be the great anonymous authority, without any intellectual justification, who decides?
I can answer that. The reason is because people in government think that “authority” means “being authoritarian” – ironically enough, without being a named “author”.
While all this has been going on, another directive has resulted in more plastering of school walls: the “British values” charts, one which I’ve seen, says: “DEMOCRACY – your opinion counts”. Yes, but it doesn’t matter what you think when it comes to the stone age and the Romantic poets.
Yours, Michael Rosen
