Curriculum Review: where's the moral commitment to knowledge and truth?

Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, education researcher and director of Don't Divide Us, on why the government's blueprint for schools education is too obsessed with modish, secondary concerns.

Well-known education blogger and author David Didau describes the government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review as ‘a curate’s egg’. It is an apt, if generous, description. Superficially, there are some recommendations that will both please and displease many – which is what happens when you try to please everyone.

Didau says the Review is more like a ‘negotiated treaty between warring factions’. Again, a good description. This raises the question of authority. After all, an educational body seeking to bring fractious parties together has to have some kind of intellectual and moral authority, which would be evinced in the presentation of a clearly articulated, logical account, saying in plain English what the curriculum should be, with intellectual and moral reasons for the committee’s judgments.

This is notable by its absence in this Curriculum Review.

Where’s the ‘big idea’?
While those who wrote the Review may be highly qualified, an unwillingness or inability to make a value judgment about the underlying model of education, and the curriculum principles that should flow from it, is painfully obvious. Without such ethical moorings, it is too easy for fragmentation and incoherence to develop. This makes it easier for education and the curriculum to be thought in terms of, and valued for, an expanding list of external goals teachers are expected to deliver while still maintaining academic standards. In the absence and incoherence, it is easier for third-party organisations, including some who promote highly politically partisan beliefs, to be invited into schools and classrooms.

How this weak, or absent, intellectual and ethical mooring can play out on the ground, so to speak, is seen in the following example. English Literature teachers are expected to draw on a wider range of different texts, as long as the core content (of established recommended texts) is not increased. That means making a judgment about what to select and, very likely, what has to be either removed or covered in less time.

What criteria are suggested for making such judgments? Thematic complexity? Literary sophistication? Depth of characterisation? Prosodic qualities of the language? These are the kinds of things a Leavisite model of literature would propose and would have been largely uncontroversial until the 1970s/1980s.

Today, the expert panel offers ‘diversity and inclusion’ as the selection criterion. And there are many charities and companies at hand to supply their versions of ‘diversity and inclusion’. In fact, the Review references Penguin and the Runnymede Trust as experts in the section on English Literature. A publishing company and an anti-racist charity are not, as far as I know, scholars in literature, experienced teachers or knowledgeable about school or curriculum matters.

Those, like myself, who believe in the intrinsic value of education and knowledge are often regarded as misty-eyed romantics at best, or elitists who would impose an education system and curriculum judged by some to be outdated or oppressive.

We need a commitment to truth
On page 7, the Review talks of education being ‘inherently valuable and important for its own sake’. Very good. But why, then, are the remaining 190-plus pages devoted to a multitude of extrinsic values and aims (of varying sense and credibility), with the repeated reminder of the now-ubiquitous phrase ‘we are led by the evidence’? On the surface, grounding one’s authority by referring to ‘the evidence’ sounds reasonable, and, obviously, when deciding policy matters of great public importance, evidence is needed.

But it is only half the story. No evidence speaks for itself or directly shows what policy direction should be. All empirical evidence has to be interpreted and this involves subjective elements. This is where moral value judgments come into play. They help us decide what counts as evidence and what its meaning and significance is.

One important reason why academia has developed intellectual methods and standards, and lengthy periods of induction for prospective academics, has been to ensure that subjective value commitments do not overwhelm the truth content which guarantees the reliability or generalisability of academic knowledge. This is a key distinction between formal knowledge (eg, maths) and everyday knowledge (eg, financial literacy). Through this primarily intellectual work, academic knowledge acquires an objectivity that is the result of human reason (it is constructed), but is prevented from the relativism of extreme constructivism by a prior moral commitment to truth.

For these reasons, those committed to a classical liberal education model insist that knowledge selected for the school curriculum must be derived from academic sources in the first instance, before adaptions are made according to wider educationally relevant criteria, which can include secondary goals. These secondary goals need not destabilise or overwhelm the curriculum as long as the mainstay of formal knowledge, or traditional subjects if you like, remain substantively in place.

For example, a nation may wish to prioritise a specific subject or cohort for a given period. The 1980 Department for Education and Science report on Girls and Science was commissioned to look into teaching of science to girls in comprehensive schools. The report considered things like provision of laboratories, sex of teachers and local employment patterns. (Who would have guessed schools in areas where engineering factories dominated were also where more girls took science?)

Teachers also need to know some child developmental psychology – but about their linguistic and conceptual development rather than their feelings of wellbeing. But if secondary goals, no matter how urgent, come to replace education’s primary goal – the transmission of academic-based knowledge with its truth value incorporated – then we can legitimately ask in what sense we have a meaningful education system at all.

Intellectual and moral confusion
The fundamental issue with the curriculum being proposed by the Review is that the inconsistent logic and banalities demonstrate the deeper intellectual and moral confusion. There are no good reasons for thinking primary-aged children need to know financial and media literacy, something that the Review strongly recommends. Any money such young children have is managed by their parents. If the aim of media literacy is to protect pupils from ‘fake news’ or ‘misinformation’ when they are older, a classical liberal education in English Language and Literature is a far better way to encourage the kind of curiosity and independent thinking that help foster the ability to question all claims and assertions and ask for relevant evidential support.

All of which raises a broader question: how much does our society publicly value such individuals? Didau warns that exacerbating a tick-box school culture could lead to ‘manufacturing compliance’. I agree, but I think the problem of proliferating systems of monitoring and accountability indicate the deeper moral disarray about education’s intrinsic purpose. After all, if we are confident that we are teaching the best knowledge, then outcomes, while important, are no longer obsessed about as if everything depended on meeting targets and short-term results.

Keep politics out of the classroom
The worry about ‘misinformation’ appears in several places. And political bias is a hot topic, and not only in the BBC. In schools, one problem is that, according to a post-general election survey, the majority of teachers support the Labour Party. This makes the profession’s own blind spots difficult to acknowledge. Maybe this is why one school recently found itself in the news for allowing a teacher to tell pupils that Reform were at the extreme/fascist end of a political spectrum. There may well be some teachers who would place Labour at the extreme/communist end, but they are in a definite minority within the profession. While it is legitimate to teach about either fascism or communism, teachers offering their own views about contemporary political parties or politicians is far less so.

It is not uncommon to find educators for whom politics is too messy and slow. Impatient for their social and political desires to be enacted, they see nothing wrong with using schools and the curriculum for such ends. As for sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Education Act, which mandate political impartiality in schools, why be a stickler for the rules when few in political or public life are? Cultural cynicism is not a good soil for education. No wonder that Reform MP Lee Anderson penned a letter of protest to the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson.

Given all this, it is surprising to read the following from former Ofsted chief inspector, Amanda Spielman:

Similarly, the language of decolonisation or anti-racism or gender identity doesn’t feature, though the politically controversial notion of ‘climate justice’ does get a look in. Overall, well done to the review group for not overtly embracing these highly politicised agendas.

Did she miss the sentence on page 51 where the Review’s ersatz moral mission is given?

As set out in our Terms of Reference, the Review will seek to deliver a curriculum that reflects the issues and diversities of our society (such as protected characteristics and socio-economic background), ensuring all children and young people are represented.

By now, it should be clear that ‘diversity, inclusion and representation’ have a very particular meaning in educational discourse, one far removed from everyday meanings. In education contexts, the meanings of these words are rooted in multicultural and identity political beliefs that are, to say the least, publicly contested.

The phrase, ‘seek to deliver’ obscures the fact that the Review committee is not delivering material goods, but an intellectual and ethical framework for educators to create, teach and assess the success of the school curriculum. This is part of the tacit social contract between government, the profession and parents who send their children to be educated according to commonly accepted notions of impartiality. It seems ‘issues and diversities of our society’ or ‘representation’ is the Review’s framework of choice, and in this, the ‘world-class curriculum for all’ is the antithesis of a classic liberal curriculum model. A government with some confidence and courage should give the public the choice at the next election: do we want an issues/diversities led curriculum, or a classical liberal one?

Blind to its own (plentiful) contradictions, the Review claims to support a knowledge-based curriculum. And indeed, we can find some knowledge-based suggestions. For example, primary and secondary school within a catchment area should liaise over which foreign languages they offer to ensure better continuity of learning across Key Stage (KS)2 (seven- to 11-year-olds) and KS3 (11- to 14-year-olds). Or slimming down the grammar requirements at KS2. Given that the Year 6 Writing Standards has 44 items which include ‘understands and uses the subjunctive form’, and the infamous ‘use fronted adverbials’, this is a welcome touch of common sense.

But a few such examples embedded within a lot of faux sociological edu-speak does not amount to an intellectually and ethically sound curriculum. The obfuscating language helps no one; it is not a consequence of an accidental ‘oops - missed that one’ kind of error. It masks a profound problem which has been at the heart of Britain’s education system for a long time. This is the growing thinness of deeper intellectual and moral thinking among politicians and professionals responsible for school education and, to compound the problem, the inability or unwillingness to admit it.