The Death of Educational Theory: Curriculum and Exams

Last week I finished my piece by talking about how necessary it is that we have an education system that is really focused on children, on their interests, and on their understanding of themselves. This week I will pick this up in considering the role of curriculum and exams in removing theory from how education exists in Britain today. I first became interested in educational theory as a rather precocious fourteen year-old, and I will never forget reading John Holt’s How Children Fail for the first time. In his conclusion he writes:

We destroy the disinterested love of learning in children, which is so strong when they are small, by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards – gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or ‘A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys – in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else… We kill not only their curiosity, but their feeling that it is a good and admirable thing to be curious.

In 1988 the National Curriculum was introduced. Before this point what was taught in schools was decided completely locally, there were real possibilities that what was being taught was being taught because the teacher thought it relevant to those particular students, rather than simply being handed down from the unfathomable heights of centralised government agencies like slightly naff versions of the ten commandments being brought down from a Mount Sinai located somewhere in Westminster.

In 1991 SATs were first introduced for 7 year-olds, and within eight years they had become compulsory for 11 year-olds and 14 year-olds too. Much of the criticism of the current education system focuses on the orientation towards exams, how it puts students on a treadmill, but that is to ignore the fact that the exams are part of a much greater system of curriculum designed to shut down learning and critical thought. Under the extension of the national curriculum to the government’s ill-fated literacy and numeracy strategies, education was made into a generic process, whilst learning has come to be about facts rather than thinking critically or thinking reflectively.

Schooling has become, through the national curriculum, a means of making children into something resembling a pianola rather than a pianist. Whereas the pianist understands the music when he plays, the pianola plays but understands nothing. It is mechanically competent but cannot tell you anything about the music. John Holt goes on to write:

The notion of a curriculum, an essential body of knowledge, would be absurd even if children remembered everything we ‘taught’ them. We don’t and can’t agree on what knowledge is essential… Instead we should try to turn out people who love learning so much, and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

It is here that we must turn back to educational theory. If it is simply the case that education, like programming a computer, involves certain inputs and desired outputs without any sense of mediation, then of course we can do away with theory. If we concern ourselves only with what children do rather than how they do it then we don’t need theory either. But in reality, if we are to educate children as people rather than machines, if we care about why they think something rather than whether an answer is correct, if we care about their thought processes rather than their abilities to mirror actions, then we must return to pedagogical theory. The national curriculum, or in fact any curriculum that stands external to the child, and brings with it material expectations and standards, will forever be a challenge to a theory of education that doesn’t treat children as objects.