The Daily Telegraph brings us a story on curriculum change in The United Kingdom, because of fears that students are being taught subjects influenced by political agendas.
Here’s a few of the key paragraphs:
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“Much of the Government’s national curriculum will be dropped because head teachers say it has been tainted by political interference.
Subjects will include a renewed emphasis in history on key figures such as Winston Churchill and less focus on “values-led” issues such as the slave trade.
Head teachers believe this may cut the amount of lesson time devoted to areas including racial equality, parenting skills and the environment.”
What do you think? Are they doing the right thing? Are traditional school subjects the best thing for students? Is that the best way to prepare them, or do you have other ideas?
[tags]parents, parenting, kids, children, students, England, Britain, The United Kingdom, UK, government, schools, curriculum, politics, tradition, private schools, education[/tags]
3 responses so far ↓
Erica // Nov 15, 2007 at 9:51 am
I believe in pupil lead teaching. Have a basic idea of what should be taught but focus in on topics that pupils are clearly interested in.
I think this system would keep pupils engaged and teachers fresh and challenged. Like homeschooling, but on a larger scale.
InTheFastLane // Nov 15, 2007 at 6:42 pm
I would think that even “traditional” topics are somewhat values oriented. Isn’t all history written and taught from a particular perspective?
AmyL // Nov 15, 2007 at 10:22 pm
I for one think that’s terrific. Many of the changes public schools in America have made over the last 50 years have been in the direction of pupil led teaching, (Constructivism) with disastrous results.
It’s not that it’s wrong to focus on topics that would interest children. Hardly. The parts of that philosophy that make learning fun and interactive are wonderful and should be kept.
However, removing the basic building blocks of curriculum that were proven successful over hundreds of years just because it’s not all exciting and sexy, well, that’s a mistake. History for example. First we needed to stop focusing on all those dates. Too hard to remember all those little numbers. Along the way, we switched to Social Studies: looking at individual groups and cultures without any time line context at all. The reason high school seniors don’t know any history is because it isn’t being taught in order. How on earth is anyone supposed to have a solid concept of when things happened when they don’t learn it in order? It’s insane.
And yes, there are values injected into most history texts. It’s definitely not the same particular perspective from textbook to textbook. There are revisions upon revision-sometimes for good reasons, other times not-over time.
One way to solve that problem is to teach the kids the time line, and expose them as much as possible to the original texts, an analysis from an historian who agrees with the claims of the original author of said text, and a complementary analysis written by an historian who disagrees. Let’s give people the chance to look at things for themselves and draw conclusions from there.
In the for what it’s worth department, science, literature, and art courses are also often slanted one way or another. There are pet issues in science, popular writers or artists while others are shunned…happens all the time.
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