Knowing Stuff
Knowing Stuff
Knowing Stuff
My column for the East Anglian Daily Times, 15 May 2013:
‘Youth,’ said Oscar Wilde, ‘is wasted on the young’.
Listening to some adults you would think that teenagers today know everything about what doesn’t matter and nothing about what does.
The esteemed editor of our very own East Anglian Daily Times, Terry Hunt, caused a bit of a stir recently when he expressed surprise at what a group of young people didn’t know. He asked why eighteen-year olds educated at some of Suffolk’s best state schools were not aware of who the great English artist John Constable was.
What made it more surprising was that one of the students had studied Art & Design at GCSE and all of them lived on the edge of what is often called ‘Constable Country’.
The editor’s disbelief resonates with a pretty fiery debating that is currently raging across education. It centres on what knowledge our children should learn.
And all too often this gets reduced to a lazy and polarized argument that says that because the world is changing rapidly knowledge becomes out of date as soon as it is learnt.
At first glance, that idea can be attractive. You only have to look at the technology that wasn’t around, say, fifteen years ago and the associated vocabulary we take for granted - ‘re-boot’, ‘surf’, ‘download’ and ‘screenshot’ – to realise that knowledge can change quickly.
As my good friend Ian Gilbert asked in his memorably-named book – ‘Why do I need a teacher when I’ve got Google?’
It’s easy to be seduced into thinking that knowledge is changing so fast that we shouldn’t be teaching actual ‘stuff’ anymore and that instead we should just teach children how to learn – research skills and suchlike.
The Education Secretary would disagree. Following the work of American educationist ED Hirsch, he points out that the way we learn is by learning things. The child who has knowledge of the main ideas and concepts of our culture will find it easier to learn more.
And, after all, whilst knowledge may be changing rapidly at the boundaries of, say, quantum physics, lots actually stays the same. Boyle’s Law is still Boyle’s Law.
So knowledge clearly matters, as do the skills to apply it. The big question is: whose knowledge?
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When I first moved to Suffolk, some sixteen years ago, I lived for a term in the cottage of legendary London headteacher, Michael Marland. As leader of the three-site North Westminster Community School, he cut a dash in his pinstripe suit and signature bow-tie jumping from one black cab to another moving between the various school sites in leading a sprawling and complex school.
In his book-filled house back in Walsham le Willows he had a whole room devoted to books about Suffolk. ‘We have a responsibility,’ he told me once, ‘to teach our young people about their local environment, about local language, traditions and architecture’.
I agree – just as I agree with Terry Hunt that Suffolk children ought to know about John Constable. The problem is that lots of other people want our children to learn lots of other things in school.
In his new book, Thinking Allowed, education guru Mick Waters says that in two months of listening to Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme he heard calls from different pressure groups to include these topics in the curriculum: personal finance, healthy eating, drug awareness, crime prevention, bereavement, sexuality, alcohol abuse, internet grooming, pensions, dementia, parenting, voting responsibility, swimming and design. Only last week someone called for sewing to be more significant in every school.
What we don’t want is the school curriculum as a dumping ground. That’s why I would argue strongly that there should be a slim national curriculum that applies to every school, including academies and free schools. This should outline the essential knowledge and skills we should expect of our future citizens.
The rest should be up to schools. Here in Suffolk that should involve a strong emphasis on understanding the world beyond our county, so young people are ready to compete on an international level. And it should include knowing about our ancestors and their customs: They, after all, helped to shape who we are today.
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Sixth Form joke:
I've been driving in my car and then I thought to myself, this is Madness
Geoff Barton
Suffolk
16 May 2013
Thursday, 16 May 2013