There is a game called fantasy football in which fans choose their ideal imaginary football team. In much the same spirit, I am going to play fantasy curriculum as I think most school curricula have become bereft of imagination, independence and joy.
I am quite happy to leave my children at the primary schools they are at to learn the basics – the 3Rs, hypocrisy, how to conform, suck up to authority, etc. But at secondary school, I would follow the ancient Greeks, who believed that schools should teach a whole way of living – not simply a series of techniques for fitting into the economic system.
I would put at the centre of the curriculum what I believe is known in law as tort – that is the level of responsibility that is due to each actor in a particular event. I would call it blame studies. To give a simple example, if my wife leaves a mug of coffee on the floor and I kick it over, is she responsible or am I? This sort of conundrum plagues us in both personal and professional life because our reptilian brain always insists on the answer “someone else”.
I would teach gender studies, so we can fully understand the different ways in which men and women delude themselves and torment each other. I would teach media studies so we can understand how the world of technological communication bewilders and misleads us.
I would put the compulsory study of psychology and philosophy at the heart of a curriculum. Central to the philosophy strand would be the nature of causality – as we seem hung up on the idea that one single event causes another single event whereas, in fact, the effect of any cause spreads out in all directions, for ever. Understanding this gives us strength, because we come to understand that good things can have bad results and bad things, good. This is known in Buddhism as detachment. It can also be taught through the proper study of history.
I would include sport and games, as teaching teamwork and fitness is crucial to physical and mental health. As someone biased towards the humanities, I would include art, literature and music – largely “useless” disciplines, but they would put self-enrichment and the enjoyment of culture at the heart of the school as opposed to the so-called hard subjects, which are all about means to ends rather than ends in themselves.
Cookery is a subject that I dearly wish I had learned at school. What could be more enriching for a life than to know how to prepare delicious food? Once they hit 16, I would teach them about wine, too, to make them unwilling to get juiced up on alcopops as soon as they were able to. Getting slowly sozzled on a decent pinot noir would be far less antisocial.
I would be happy to have religion taught because people’s beliefs about God are central to the way the world works. But I would not allow religious schools because they are divisive and, to my mind, teaching children from an early age that this or that God represents the ultimate truth is a form of brainwashing.
I would teach ethics, as children need to know the difference between right and wrong, and how many definitions there are of that particular polarity. I would have a big, quiet library at the heart of the school that children would be encouraged to mooch about and discover books in their own way and their own time. In the time left over, I would fit in geography, maths and science. Homework would be voluntary – if it was felt that a child needed to do more work in some area, they would be encouraged, but not forced in that direction.
My fantasy curriculum might seem eccentric, some would say bonkers – but then, they said that about, um, Michael Gove …
