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Curriculum Exposed
Originally published in 1989. This book defines and explains in simple language the essential characteristics of the school curriculum and the forces which act on it. The National Curriculum provides an integrating theme throughout the book, and the author gives a list of suggested further reading. This is not just a standard first year text for students starting B.Ed and PGCE courses but also an introduction for school governors who under the 1986 and 1988 Education Acts have an increased responsibility for the curriculum in their schools.
138 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1989
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February 21, 2011
I think I would have started this book – if I was writing it – with Chapter Seven on Curriculum Politics. I’m going to quote the first two paragraphs of that chapter in full:
“Schooling is a deliberate attempt by adult society to change its young. It is not, pace Rousseau, designed to allow the young to develop naturally. It is a compulsory, artificial system by which society collectively seeks to inculcate specified attributes in children, and the curriculum is the vehicle by means of which those ends are attained.
“Curriculum, then, is a political matter – in the widest sense of the word. While utopian is probably too strong a term, those who are responsible for schooling the nation’s children must necessarily have a view of which attributes are desirable in children and which are not, what kind of adult they wish the children to become, and to what kind of society they should belong.”
It is this, the idea of what kind of adults do we want our kids to become and what is the role of education in realising this desire, that forms the fundamental concern of this book. Rarely is the normative role of education stated quite so clearly and unambiguously. I think that is because we all too often turn away from the role of the curriculum in schools as one of indoctrination. But if we don’t have some notion of where the curriculum is likely to lead our children or the kinds of adults it is likely to turn them into, surely that is even worse.
If you think about it for any time at all school is a terribly strange place. “The difficulty is that a curriculum which is classroom bound, as it mostly is at present, although it is an experience of a sort, is necessarily vicarious in relation to ‘real life’ experiences.” This is much the same criticism that the philosopher John Dewey had with much of schooling – that it was a preparation for experiences kids might have at some unspecified time in the future. He preferred kids to engage in enquiries – and so for school to give them a sense of real worth to what they were doing. However, as is said here, kids always see though this if it is not 'real' – it is pointless trying to fool kids in the hope that they will ‘believe’ what they are doing is more real than it actually is.
But if one of the tasks of education is to prepare kids to belong as active members of a democratic society, then the idea of education as a kind of apprenticeship in democratic activity is a potent one. And the more real that activity, the more real the learning would necessarily seem to be.
A lot of what I learnt last year was focused on providing a differentiated curriculum for the kids in the class – kids who would be, by definition, spread across a spectrum of abilities. It is good to see that the difficulty of providing such a learning environment is not understated here: “But it does not follow that each student working alone is following a genuinely individualised curriculum. Indeed, the question has to be asked whether it is feasible for one teacher to ensure a good match between task and pupil by means of individual curricula for a class of, say, thirty pupils.”
There is a wonderful line in this about how, if a curriculum is to be a model for what is to happen in the classroom, then it should model what actually happens in real classrooms, not ideal ones (“It should start as a model of not as a model for” is a lovely want to put that idea). And perhaps an even better line, “A good model is a map, not a route”.
The relationship between curriculum and assessment is a vexed one. It seems all pretty easy, in some ways. A curriculum should help create the kinds of kids we want in society, so all we need to do is work out how we want them to end up and then create a pathway through school that will get them there. Doing that is merely a matter of constructing tests that confirm they have arrived at whatever destination we have set. Easy as pie.
The problem is that, ”the range of tasks which can with confidence be assessed to a uniform, national standard is small, imposing considerable limits on what can be reliably tested.” And anyway, one of the things we want our schools to produce is independently thinking students – hard to test that with a standardised test, which seems to be true almost by definition. He explicitly makes just that point: “The kinds of tests which can be administered on a large scale, reliably and fairly to a common national standard, have little relevance to the attributes required in an ‘enterprise society’ in the industrial and commercial sense of the term. The sort of cooperative endeavour, risk taking, and personal and social qualities which are required in life after school in an ‘enterprise society’ are precluded from standardized, subject-based test, no matter how ingenious the test-setters may be.”
There is always a curriculum – just as there is always some kind of planning necessary in education – so this isn’t a topic that will go away by refusing to think about it. However, deciding what is important to teach and how and then how you will assess what has been taught (or whether assessing what has been taught is a good idea ‘right at the end’ or whether assessment should be ongoing) are all questions rarely tackled when people talk about ‘improving’ school curricula. Normally what passes for a critique of school curricula is a series of simpleminded insults flung at schoolteachers, an increasingly packed curriculum designed to undermine teacher professionalism and partisan ideology trying to pass itself off as historical fact. This book gives a broad understanding of the kinds of themes necessary to think about when thinking about curricula. It is old and it is UK centred – nevertheless, I found it very clear and useful.
“Schooling is a deliberate attempt by adult society to change its young. It is not, pace Rousseau, designed to allow the young to develop naturally. It is a compulsory, artificial system by which society collectively seeks to inculcate specified attributes in children, and the curriculum is the vehicle by means of which those ends are attained.
“Curriculum, then, is a political matter – in the widest sense of the word. While utopian is probably too strong a term, those who are responsible for schooling the nation’s children must necessarily have a view of which attributes are desirable in children and which are not, what kind of adult they wish the children to become, and to what kind of society they should belong.”
It is this, the idea of what kind of adults do we want our kids to become and what is the role of education in realising this desire, that forms the fundamental concern of this book. Rarely is the normative role of education stated quite so clearly and unambiguously. I think that is because we all too often turn away from the role of the curriculum in schools as one of indoctrination. But if we don’t have some notion of where the curriculum is likely to lead our children or the kinds of adults it is likely to turn them into, surely that is even worse.
If you think about it for any time at all school is a terribly strange place. “The difficulty is that a curriculum which is classroom bound, as it mostly is at present, although it is an experience of a sort, is necessarily vicarious in relation to ‘real life’ experiences.” This is much the same criticism that the philosopher John Dewey had with much of schooling – that it was a preparation for experiences kids might have at some unspecified time in the future. He preferred kids to engage in enquiries – and so for school to give them a sense of real worth to what they were doing. However, as is said here, kids always see though this if it is not 'real' – it is pointless trying to fool kids in the hope that they will ‘believe’ what they are doing is more real than it actually is.
But if one of the tasks of education is to prepare kids to belong as active members of a democratic society, then the idea of education as a kind of apprenticeship in democratic activity is a potent one. And the more real that activity, the more real the learning would necessarily seem to be.
A lot of what I learnt last year was focused on providing a differentiated curriculum for the kids in the class – kids who would be, by definition, spread across a spectrum of abilities. It is good to see that the difficulty of providing such a learning environment is not understated here: “But it does not follow that each student working alone is following a genuinely individualised curriculum. Indeed, the question has to be asked whether it is feasible for one teacher to ensure a good match between task and pupil by means of individual curricula for a class of, say, thirty pupils.”
There is a wonderful line in this about how, if a curriculum is to be a model for what is to happen in the classroom, then it should model what actually happens in real classrooms, not ideal ones (“It should start as a model of not as a model for” is a lovely want to put that idea). And perhaps an even better line, “A good model is a map, not a route”.
The relationship between curriculum and assessment is a vexed one. It seems all pretty easy, in some ways. A curriculum should help create the kinds of kids we want in society, so all we need to do is work out how we want them to end up and then create a pathway through school that will get them there. Doing that is merely a matter of constructing tests that confirm they have arrived at whatever destination we have set. Easy as pie.
The problem is that, ”the range of tasks which can with confidence be assessed to a uniform, national standard is small, imposing considerable limits on what can be reliably tested.” And anyway, one of the things we want our schools to produce is independently thinking students – hard to test that with a standardised test, which seems to be true almost by definition. He explicitly makes just that point: “The kinds of tests which can be administered on a large scale, reliably and fairly to a common national standard, have little relevance to the attributes required in an ‘enterprise society’ in the industrial and commercial sense of the term. The sort of cooperative endeavour, risk taking, and personal and social qualities which are required in life after school in an ‘enterprise society’ are precluded from standardized, subject-based test, no matter how ingenious the test-setters may be.”
There is always a curriculum – just as there is always some kind of planning necessary in education – so this isn’t a topic that will go away by refusing to think about it. However, deciding what is important to teach and how and then how you will assess what has been taught (or whether assessing what has been taught is a good idea ‘right at the end’ or whether assessment should be ongoing) are all questions rarely tackled when people talk about ‘improving’ school curricula. Normally what passes for a critique of school curricula is a series of simpleminded insults flung at schoolteachers, an increasingly packed curriculum designed to undermine teacher professionalism and partisan ideology trying to pass itself off as historical fact. This book gives a broad understanding of the kinds of themes necessary to think about when thinking about curricula. It is old and it is UK centred – nevertheless, I found it very clear and useful.
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