Curriculums and paradigms – a challenge from George Monbiot

Today’s blog is by regular contributor, Ben Ballin. Here he explores recent comments by activist, author and Guardian columnist, George Monbiot. As ever with our blogs, the views expressed are not necessarily shared by the Association.

In unmistakeably Govean fashion, the 2014 National Curriculum for England channelled Matthew Arnold and boldly announced itself as an introduction to “the best that has been thought and said.”

A decade later, the journalist and environmentalist George Monbiot found himself on Twitter (20 Jan 2023), asking if this – or any national curriculum – really is ‘the best.’  He also wondered who has the right and the power to decide such things.  He is not the only one.

George’s eleven tweets immediately generated a lively online response.  In essence, they asserted that any attempt at providing an ‘omniscient’ national curriculum risks leading to “a lack of diversity in our thinking”, which in turn makes us less capable at addressing humanity’s many, varied and interconnected crises.  The tweets make for a stimulating and interesting read.

George persuasively argues that educational homogeneity risks leaving us ideologised, “unable to imagine different forms of social and political organisation.”

“When we are all taught the same things, in broadly the same way, we lose the resilience that diversity affords.  It becomes hard to dissent from mainstream narratives and to deviate from rigid cognitive pathways.”  

Like many associated with NAEE (not least in the most recent edition of ‘Environmental Education’), he also outlines the need for education that incorporates systems thinking but does not treat “complex systems as if they were simple ones, which is like being taught English and told it’s Finnish.”

All well and good, although there is evidence aplenty that the undoubtedly “rigid constraints” that the English national curriculum imposes are regularly, even systematically, subverted by teachers and schools who have decided to apply “imagination and determination” to the learning experience: indeed, that teachers more often than not seek and find “opportunities, such as outdoor education, and [those] provided by current events, using them to illustrate wider principles.”  Indeed, George might be surprised to find that some of school inspectorate Ofsted’s own research sometimes endorses, rather than suppresses, such opportunities.  

“It is often suggested that the main task of teachers and tutors is to deliver a curriculum that has been designed by others … teachers and tutors should just ‘do’ (do as they are told, do as the curriculum tells them to do) without too much need for thinking, reflection and judgement… [but] good teaching actually requires teachers to think about what they are doing, how they are doing it, and why they are doing what they are doing” (Biesta, 2010).

There are, as ever, contradictions and mixed messages at work: education proving itself to be more of a complex than a linear system of cause-and-effect.  Because, of course, education is part of the ‘continent of culture’ and an all-too-human part, at that.  (This,  despite the centralising efforts of some of the more corporate academy chains).

Fortunately, too, there are many ways of conceiving of a curriculum, statutory or otherwise, It does not have to be uniquely conceived of a subject-based list of core knowledge.  I quite like Eisner’s broad definition of a curriculum as “a series of planned events that are intended to have educational consequences for one or more students.”  

A curriculum could therefore be built on key experiences that ‘light a fire’ (rather like Tim Brighouse’s ‘Birmingham guarantee’ in the 1990s and early 2000s, where children were entitled to experience live music and live theatre, go on a residential trip etc).  A curriculum could also be built on areas of learning (as in Wales and Scotland); cross-cutting dimensions (such as environment, cultural diversity etc, as proposed in South Australia in the early 1990s); concepts, values, dispositions (some of the latter even feature in England’s 2014 curriculum).  Whatever its form, any coherent curriculum should probably begin with two organising considerations:

1. Aims and purpose.  I recall Robin Alexander’s caustic characterisation of England’s efforts as “The Mrs Beeton approach – first catch your curriculum, then liberally garnish with aims”, whereas “Aims must be grounded in a clear framework of values – for education is at heart a moral matter – and in properly argued positions on childhood, society, the wider world and the nature and advancement of knowledge and understanding.  And aims should shape curriculum, pedagogy, assessment and the wider life of the school, not be added as mere decoration.”
2. A paradigm.  In George Monbiot’s tweets, the paradigm is about “lighting a fire, not filling a bucket.”  Dorothy Heathcote suggested several other paradigms that she had seen operating in schools: little flowers in a garden, child-as-enemy, machine learning etc.  I rather like – and sometimes try to aspire to – her ‘crucible paradigm’, where we “stir meaning around together.”  I wonder therefore what a crucible curriculum might look like.  For starters, it would be defined socially and creatively, by both learners and teachers together, and grounded in the specifics of their whole situation.

George Monbiot’s tweets have initiated a welcome and necessary debate about the national curriculum.  George has done this with the freshness of someone who is not an ‘education insider’.  That is to be welcomed (indeed, as he argues, it offers a necessary antidote to rigid thinking about such things).  Dear reader, building on George’s challenges and my responses to them, I wonder what paradigms or aims you would most favour …  and what sort of curriculum they would engender?  All feedback welcome.

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Ben Ballin can be contacted at benballin@hotmail.com