Educating Ruby (11 page)

Chapter 4

What's worth learning these days?

As far as we can see, there are three kinds of things that deserve to be in the school curriculum. We call them utilities, treasures and exercise-machines.
Utilities
are things which are self-evidently useful for young people to know or be able to do. They include being able to tie your shoelaces (if this is still essential since the invention of Velcro), tell the time, check your change, read a newspaper, a timetable and a good book, fill in a form, write a coherent letter, behave sensibly if you get lost, ride a bike, swim and so on. To read the newspaper, or join in a conversation, it is necessary not just to have mastered the skills of reading and speaking but
also to have some knowledge and understanding about the world and current affairs.

Much of this information is picked up by children – as by adults – on the fly. Much learning happens by inferring what people must be talking about (assuming they are making sense), and we all get very good at doing this without any formal instruction. If we can't fill in the gaps in this way, we ask people to stop and explain. But understanding how a city works or what the rules of football are, in a more systematic way, is also useful. To become informed and effective citizens, young people need to know something about, for example, the global financial crisis, climate change, neuroscience, sectarian violence, how it is possible for people to be ‘groomed' or ‘radicalised', the pros and cons of different forms of government and how the idea of the nation state is changing in an era of globalisation. We can argue about the detail, the ages at which each of the utilities should be introduced, and how to tell when they have been mastered to a good enough level, but the value of teaching or coaching things that are genuinely practical and useful in their own right is, in principle, pretty obvious.

Then there are
treasures
: things which we all agree may not be directly useful, in a rather utilitarian sense, but which, we broadly agree, form such an important part of our (however we define ‘our') cultural heritage that everyone who lives here should have encountered them. This is much more contentious, because there are strong opinions but no practical touchstones against which to assess competing claims for inclusion. The traditional curriculum has been largely built around the discussion of treasures: discussions that have often become dull and formulaic under the pressure of traditional exams. There are also unintended consequences when selections of content are made on the basis of
tradition and inertia, or in terms of the traditional cultural interests and values of one subset of the population. There is nothing inherently wrong with making children from Somalia, Romania or Pakistan study
Twelfth Night
or
Wuthering Heights
, if we agree that everyone who lives here should have encountered them, but the price is often that this exposure functions not as a lure for further appreciation of British culture, but an inoculation against it. A disagreeable dose of Shakespeare at school may stop you ever contracting Shakespeare again.

Selecting these treasures involves complex issues about which all of us have strong feelings – and traditional education doesn't like it when things get heated. It tries to organise the curriculum so that things are kept cool. In a multicultural society, there are going to be many different histories and beliefs at play, even in a primary school. But if we avoid such discussions, children are not going to learn how to address differences in an open-minded and respectful way, and the curriculum itself becomes populated with dull topics about which nobody cares enough to disagree. Few (except perhaps the odd Trad) can get terribly worked up about relative clauses or the difference between ionic and covalent bonding, so some schools spend a lot of time on those and not much on the rise of Islamic State or child sexual exploitation.

Finally there are
exercise-machines
. Topics and activities can justify their place in the curriculum, even if they are not utilities or treasures themselves, if studying them, in a particular way, does develop something that is useful. For example, learning to add fractions has become neither particularly useful (when was the last time you needed to?) nor, to many people's thinking, intrinsically valuable enough to count as a treasure. Children are growing up in a decimal
and binary world, and while it may be useful to know what a third is in decimals, weeks spent laboriously trying to get bemused children to understand why ½ + ⅓ does not equal ⅖ could well have been spent more usefully. Unless, in the process of wrestling with the fractions, the children are developing some other capacity or habit that
is
useful – perseverance, patience or their powers of logical analysis, perhaps.

But, if this justification is to be used, we will want to know exactly what the target capability is, how adding fractions is going to be used to develop that capability (i.e. what activities will turn it from a pointless drag into a meaningful form of mental exercise), whether adding fractions is the most effective exercise-machine for developing that capability there is, and what the evidence is that the capability does, in fact, generalise to other contexts and materials. Could it not have been exercised even better by getting the children to spend half an hour each morning doing Sudoku? It's an empirical question, and the onus is on those who would defend the compulsory teaching of fractions (or the Tudors, or French irregular verbs) to present the evidence. With so many important and interesting things to be learned, jostling for time in the curriculum, such hard questions have to be asked. Strident assertions of value are not good enough. You could argue that adding fractions is only seen as a cultural treasure
because
of its long-standing, privileged place in the school curriculum, not the other way round. It's truly a sabre-toothed topic.

If you are as bemused as your children and pupils about the point of learning some of the things that are still on the curriculum (as they were in our day), take heart. Asking schools (and ministries) to justify them is an absolutely valid and important thing to do. We have heard of one brave
school where every term the children are each given a ‘joker' they can play at any point of any lesson during that term. When they do so, the teacher has to stop teaching and try to give the class their best explanation of why that topic is important enough to be taking up the children's time. The explanations are listened to respectfully and evaluated by the class. Trads might well be appalled by this apparent show of disrespect or lack of trust. Mods, however, will be open to the possibility that the thinking involved, and the discussion that could ensue, is a better preparation for life than passively accepting what you are told. This is not an opportunity to be ‘cheeky' or ‘disruptive' but to learn to be a more active and critical – in the best sense – consumer of your education.

We are going to make some suggestions about what a curriculum for this century might be like. Please take these as illustrative, not definitive – and certainly not exhaustive. We will divide our remarks into six age groups, using the current English key stages (KS). Again, these are only rough suggestions of age-appropriateness for various goals; often children will be grouped not by age but by the stage of their developing expertise and understanding. KS0, or the early years foundation stage (EYFS), concerns young children from 3 to 5 years old; KS1 corresponds to Years 1 and 2 in primary school, and KS2 to Years 3–6; KS3 covers the first three years of secondary school, Years 7–9; KS4 covers the two years, 10 and 11, currently leading up to the GCSE exams; and KS5 is old-fashioned sixth form, Years 12 and 13, currently leading up to A levels.

Before we make some brief suggestions about what the central job of each of these stages might be, we need to make a preliminary point about project work, also known as problem-based or enquiry-based learning. We think that this
approach, done well, is vital for three reasons: (1) for getting children's engagement in learning, (2) for accelerating their conventional achievement, and (3) for developing the habits of mind which we think should be at the core of education. The ‘done well' is vital. It is as possible to do project-based learning badly as it is to do chalk-and-talk badly. Neither method by itself guarantees success; it all depends, as with so much in life, on how you do it. We will illustrate what ‘done well' looks like as we work our way through the stages.

Be warned, though, that the Trads will start huffing and puffing at the very mention of projects. They think that project work means throwing children in at the deep end of unstructured, unsupervised learning, which is often way beyond their capabilities, and letting them drown. Their straw man is what they call ‘minimally guided' project work, in which the teacher just does a whole lot less than they ‘ought' to be doing, so they like to quote a research paper by Paul Kirschner and colleagues which finds that minimally guided project work doesn't work.
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But that's just ill-thought-out project work, quite untypical of what you will find in most schools. Between ‘laissez-faire' and ‘total teacher control' there are hundreds of ways in which guidance is provided, and varied judiciously,
and
children are more engaged, independent and inquisitive than in the old-fashioned schoolroom. We go into lots of schools, and that is what we usually find. Trads tend not to go into schools much (or not schools other than their own) because the
complexity and sophistication of what they might see would muck up their tidy oppositions.

Currently in England there are four guiding principles that underpin the early years foundation stage:

Nothing wrong with all of that, but the current framework goes on to make the EYFS sound very like ‘pre-school'; that is, there is lots of emphasis on literacy and maths, and lots of assessments that children are expected to reach at different ages. We much prefer the less micro-managed specification that the EYFS originally had. The earlier
guidance stated that through well-planned play, both indoors and outdoors, children can:

This sounds as if it was written by people who knew and liked small children, and we would like to see it back. Note that it is not afraid to use the word ‘play', because the writers do not oppose ‘play' to ‘serious learning'. It is much closer to the globally respected and widely copied early years curriculum from New Zealand called Te Whāriki, which means a woven mat in Maori. The image suggests that content and process are woven together; skills and attitudes develop
alongside knowledge and understanding as children work on interesting challenges and subject matter.