national curriculum – Little Boxes

Dying because our leaders don’t understand how science works

At the government’s daily press briefing about COVID-19 on the 11th April, the government’s spokesperson, Priti Patel, repeated the mantra first put forward by Boris Johnson, and repeated ad nauseam by ministers since: “We are following,” she said, “the expert scientific and medical advice and taking the right steps at the right moment in time.” Patel was careful with her emphasis. The right steps. At the right moment in time. How does she know? The science says. It’s a bit like that game of Simon says… If Science says so, we do it.

Priti Patel, UK Government Press Briefing, 11 April 2020.

What Patel does not understand, or is not acknowledging, is that Science doesn’t speak to us like that. There is no single guiding voice, providing us with ‘the evidence’, making it clear what we should do and when. Doing-the-right-thing-at-the-right-time is little more than a political slogan, a ditty for us to sing as we merrily dig our graves. The message may provide some comfort—we all want to feel that the government is in control—but it is a false comfort at best. It is not a sign of good judgement and wise decision-making. It hides the details that we so desperately need to debate. It reveals a failure of our society to place the right people in the right positions, a failure of our education system above all else. We don’t need a government which can meekly defer to a scientist standing on the side to answer the difficult questions, but one that understands how to incorporate scientific evidence into policy making. This is not a matter of doing what The Science says. We are lacking leaders with a scientific attitude and an understanding of how science works. Why?

The Cluttered Curriculum

We can’t do it all: we can’t teach our children everything. British education systems have responded to the demands of every age by adding to school curricula. It has been much harder to purposefully take things away. Just like the nice jacket that doesn’t quite fit, we’d better save that little bit of trigonometry in case we need it later. The cluttered curriculum is fueling the great post-GCSE exodus from science: to enthuse young people about the beauty and utility of science, we need to decide what to take away.

Ever-burgeoning curricula sometimes create a temporary fix for their own problems, when they push entire subjects off school timetables by accident. The passing of subjects such as Latin is occasionally lamented, the threat to drama or music is sometimes recognised, but science curricula continues to protuberate. The accumulation of curricular items has created a particular crisis in science: we don’t spend lesson time on what is most important-we can’t try out, think about, play with scientific ideas-because there’s too much stuff to learn in the first place.

Continue reading “The Cluttered Curriculum”

The Things That Children Learn

It matters what subjects we teach in schools but we’ve been getting it wrong for a long time

Details from Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Vincent van Gogh, photographer unknown, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Education includes increasing a child’s knowledge and understanding of a subject… but does it matter which subject? In the U.K., the government believes it to be of such importance that they regulate what is taught in schools to an enormous degree. Even outside the core areas of mathematics, English and science, almost every single lesson that a child receives during their time at a state secondary school is aligned to a topic prescribed by the Department of Education. The U.K. is not alone in this position, and there is a growing international consensus, as more countries sign up to the OECD’s programme of international student achievement (PISA), on what a child should know and be able to do by the age of fifteen. The prevailing position of those with the power to change the curriculum is that it matters very much indeed what children learn. What is more, they are confident they know what it is our children need to know… Continue reading “The Things That Children Learn”