What's wrong with a national curriculum?

What’s wrong with a National Curriculum?

Simple answer: it’s national, and children are individuals.

Each child should have his or her own curriculum depending on their proclivities and needs as they mature. The child is the product of two parents and it is their responsibility – ethical duty – to care for the child and to ensure that it is educated. Each family is in turn different from every other family and can foresee their own needs better than other people. Government officers are not in such a position – their position is on of imposition regardless of local, family, and individual needs. Such is the nature of government and that will not alter.

Now, for those whose immediate concern is that other people do not look after their children sufficiently and that they need to be imposed upon by government action, I would suggest to firstly look at their own home and values before asserting their beliefs and notions of what is right and wrong on others. This is the principle of liberty – or minding your own business! Certainly, individuals and families do not always work efficiently and we can see other people making mistakes as we also make our own mistakes, but a part of the ethical question is who is in a better position to learn from mistakes and hence to improve their position? Arguably, it is the individual and the family: historically, governments create a series of cock-ups; pedagogically, governments follow the line of least bureaucratic resistance and propound fashionable theories that come and go; and morally, unless we are asked, we should be keeping out of other families’ lives.

In more particular term: if one family wished to emphasize a religious teaching and another family an emphasis on science or environmentalism, that is up to them. We can all benefit from sharing such insights and ideas as tried and tested by others, and so we can gain great benefit from allowing each of us in our families to try different kinds of learning. Now, there are principles of learning that involve being motivated, learning bits at time and gradually improving over time, and being self-disciplined. Such principles are the best that we can pass on to our children and they underpin the best educational programmes that have lasted the tests of time; but they work best when education is applied to the individual who is keen and motivated to learn rather than imposed on unwilling, unwitting, or prematurely on immature minds.

To the great liberal thinkers and educationalists of the modern era (1600s to date), such principles were obvious. We learn best when we want to learn, and children learn best when they come to the learning – when advanced skills or knowledge is imposed on them too early, the results are often repressive.

However, in the past hundred years, gradually the state has taken over more and more of people’s lives. The notion of caring for people “from the cradle to the grave” sounds like a caring utopia but it also creates incredible distortions in incentives and responsibilities that our societies are struggling to deal with. As the state took over education – initially by funding it and pushing out the independent and church schools and even banning in some countries the right to tutor privately or home educate - it was inevitable that the state would seek to instruct the schools and teachers what should be taught. It’s not just a matter of political desire to impose standards of sorts, it’s a matter of legislative necessity: if the governing body (Parliament, Congress, etc.) pays for something, its funding is in turn accountable to accounts committees, which means in turn that the committees have to ensure that the money is (a) being spent and on what and (b) being spent in a manner that the governing body decrees.

Now often with government expenditure, principle (a) often goes awry – millions, and sometimes billions ‘go missing’, which is extraordinary in itself. The second principle (b) is the leverage politicians gain from spending other people’s money. To ensure the money is being spent, certain standards are, given public interest and demands, inevitable: the state wants to know (on behalf of the taxpayers it may say) that the monies are being spent ‘appropriately.’ 

Ultimately, that can mean anything; and therein lies the rub.

In a commercial business, the purpose of spending money is to provide a service and there is a powerful feedback mechanism (the market place and its price mechanism) to ensure that the money is being spent appropriately: if money is wasted the company’s profits suffer and its managers and/or owners have an incentive to adapt (or go bankrupt). The feedback is from the customers – ultimately, businesses must serve people and when they don’t, they fail and their resources are bought out by others who may serve people better.

The only feedback mechanism in politics is revolt (peaceful or violent). Government provided services do not have the immediate feedback loop that businesses have. Money is raised through the violent intervention of taxation (do you think violence is not involved? … try not paying a tax bill) and then spent according to the implicit and explicit policies of the government of the day. Money trickles down from the state’s officers into various projects; when the money is not deemed enough, the recipients scramble for more and either other departments must lose funding or the government borrows or prints money to fund the deficits. The clamour for more funds usually emanates from the interested groups spending the monies; and gradually but inevitably (and regardless of the political rhetoric) the quality of the service becomes less important than securing extra funding for the recipients – staff, managers, bureaucrats, and the host of accessory organs that emerge to ‘help’ the state funded departments spend their allotment and secure more for the future.

When the balance tips and the people have had enough of corruption and failure, lenders may impose tighter restrictions on government borrowing, failing that the people take to the streets and demand change. This last resort is of course drastic and horrendous in its repercussions: political revolutions rarely alter life for the better, especially when guided by the corruption of government rather than the principle that government should not be involved in people’s lives in the first place (that rare form of revolution for liberty!).

These, then, are the principles of government spending. Money is raised through violent intervention in the market place and then spent according to the policies of the ruling party or individuals. Over the centuries, taxpayers have demanded that governments be accountable to the monies spent (which is a good thing!) and that they also see where and how the money is being spent (which is also a good thing given the proclivity of people to spend other people’s money without much care!).

Enter the realm of education: it is inevitable and not a bad notion that governments be held accountable in this field. The billions spent on public funded education must be seen to be doing something of use, somewhere, somehow. In the private sector, when schools or tutors fail to offer what parents and pupils want, they are forced out of the marketplace by those who do. (You don’t think the market works here? Google ‘schools for sale’ – incompetent or retiring managers sell their schools while keen school managers are in the market to buy more!) When state schools fail, they often attract more funding and when ministries of education fail the process is more convoluted. It could be decades before changes are imposed for the better, despite the obviousness of failure and current distress amongst teachers and pupils.

The purport of a national curriculum is to obviate the gross problems involved in spending other people’s money to teach other people’s children: since government funds the system, government should thus control the system to ensure certain standards are met. That is inevitable as we have seen; but what is also inevitable is that those standards are necessarily political.

Teachers, parents, and pupils may not realize that they are immersed in a political system because most of the rhetoric provided is all about ensuring that the children are given a ‘decent education,’ that ‘no one is left behind’, that the they are taught the necessary skills to catch up with other countries’ children, and so on.

But what is a ‘decent education’ to take an example?

The minimal requirements for a civilized society, without question, include being literate and numerate, but beyond that what should state schools be teaching becomes controversial.

To those of deep religious convictions much of the secular curriculum their taxes fund may be indecent; like wise the imposition of religious studies on secularly minded parents may also be deemed indecent. Such a binary example is only to highlight the problem; there are also controversies raging in science about the nature of evolution or even the very matter of the universe which are not taught at the lower levels as it would perhaps be deemed confusing for young minds (I’ve not found that true when I’ve described the basics of superstrings or the argument between neo-Lamarckians and neo-Darwinians though).

What about the texts studied for literature? The current UK government proposals insist that two Shakespeare plays be studied between the ages of 11 and 14. Now that’s a quick and sure way of killing any potential love for the bard. I’m a fan of his works but they are very dense and foreign to most youngsters; similarly Jane Austen’s great work, Pride and Prejudice, does not mean much to young people. These are heady books that require a good cultural, literary, and historical understanding to appreciate them. It certainly makes sense to encourage some form of enjoyment of the classics to maturing minds but to demand that pupils study them kills their value. It’s a bit like having fun on the beach discovering crabs, pools, fossils, tidal effects and then having to write up a report on it. Just let the kids enjoy things first – processing and application as we understand it as adults comes in its own good time. However, children mature at different ages – I think there was one pupil in my English form (when we were aged 15) who had some inkling of Shakespeare (at least he laughed at certain points which were incomprehensible to the rest of us!); indeed, the class as a whole rejected studying any  more of whatever play we were dipping into. I returned to Shakespeare when I was twenty one – could not understand much of it then either, but persisted because I knew there was something in the works that demanded attention.

Choice – true voluntary choice – is paramount in education for healthy mental development. Often though, the choice is imposed by the teacher or the state via its national curriculum. Harry prefers imposing Mozart on pupils, while Joan prefers imposing rap and its variants. Jim is a fan of global warming politics, while Anne is a sports fanatic. We all have our passions – but there’s a time and a place for them, i.e., when the pupil is listening. When we enthuse with a crowd, how many really are listening and paying attention? In my one to one practice, I know when the pupil is not interested – I see the eyes glaze over and further soliloquy on my part will be a waste of his/her time and only superficially feed my vanity.  Imposing is different from exposing – exposure to the classics or to our personal passions has a great role in opening up the young mind, but that is not what nationally, politically imposed curricula are about at all.

Many years ago I gave a talk on the primacy of private education to a conference by the Society for Applied Philosophy at Oxford. The three other speakers sharing the table argued for more religion, more environmental studies, more classics … and I agreed with all of their passions, except I argued that if you believe children should have more exposure to the classics, etc., then they should set up their own schools and attract like-minded parents. I believe in the one-to-one approach of personalized tuition, which I have built into my own company, Classical Foundations, and have entered the market place to attract custom. The shock from the other speakers and delegates was quietly palpable – one could almost feel a collective gasp, ‘who let this one into the room?’ No, the other delegates and speakers wanted other people to fund their particular passions and corners of the national curriculum.

The notion that a single ‘expert’ or several ‘experts’ can produce a curriculum to fit all children’s minds becomes incredibly absurd or hubristic – or both. That a committee sitting far from your child’s life and mind could assert what he or she should learn is risible and worthy of Swiftian satire. I watch my elder (who is being home educated) and follow his shifting passions with interest: should an official deign to enter our realm and insist that my son should know what an ‘algorithm’ is (because he’s five, and our current government thinks five year olds should know what one is – although every adult I’ve asked stares at me blankly) I think both of us would laugh and then, if he felt confident, he may inquire if the officer knew the order of the dinosaurs’ eras and which came first triceratops or stegosaurus or what the difference between a pteranadon and ornithocheirus is, the poor chap may be similarly nonplussed.  

People may retort that my son is a product of my intelligence and passion for learning; yes, no doubt my wife and influence his education – mainly in the sense of getting out of the way of his curiosity and then learning with him, but not in the peculiarities of his interests. We expose him to what we think is culturally important, but we leave him to pick up what he found interesting. We do not immerse our children in the electronic worlds of tv or internet gaming – we may watch short videos on volcanic explosions or deep sea divers, as we don’t see any of those in the UK Midlands! We let them play, and avoid imposing rules that we often hear (“no, that’s the wrong way to climb a slide!”); we permit their natural development.

This is not what you get with a national curriculum. A state imposed curriculum is a form of social engineering in which all children (whose parents put them into the school system) have to learn x, y, and z, variables chosen by current ‘experts’ passionate about particular corners or aspects battled over by factions of varying degrees of egoism, dogmatism, and rare dashes of common sense. It’s a long standing joke that when the Labour Party is in office children are encouraged to study the history of the union and women’s movement; when the Conservatives are in office it is to be battles and great feudal style leaders. The current government (Conservatives with a dash of middle of the road Liberals) want exams to be like the exams they took when they were fifteen. Fashionable, political, superficial, irrelevant, and even whimsical become such politically induced policies.

If you wish your child to learn what the current politicians think they should learn then by all means give up yours and your children’s intellectual independence and send them along to the local school and do not question – join the ranks of the unthinking; but if you have an inkling of mental freedom (and you are reading this which suggests you’re still with the argument) or a suspicion that all is not well with such systems that are imposed universally on all children, then for your own sanity and your child’s mental development, and for the principle of freedom, avoid such schools, home educate, howl like a banshee about how ludicrous national curricula are. But if sending your children to school is the only economic and logistical option available to you, then ensure that you broaden their minds outside the school – introduce them to controversies (historical, political, scientific, etc.) and encourage the inquisitive mind that they are born with and, if needs be, learn critical thinking to help them question the more complicated issues of life.

Dr Alexander Moseley, July 2013