Overloading the Curricular Cart

Posted on | May 24, 2008 | 1 Comment

I used the short piece of video above in my talk to a diverse group of Scottish educationists at Stirling Management Centre on Thursday to illustrate a point about curriculum overload. If the Curriculum for Excellence can be implemented on the basis of its original aims, we have a chance in Scotland to begin to separate curriculum from content, to remove all the superfluous bales and sacks that have overloaded the curricular cart for so long, and, of course, to start to return control of their own educational destinies to teachers and learners.

Unfortunately, I see too many signs that, while the donkey pulling the cart hangs forlornly between the shafts as the bales and sacks are thrown off the cart, there are a number of asses at the back desperately piling all the bales and sacks back onto the cart. From those who fetishize their own subject disciplines to those who cannot envisage a school system without screeds of pointless planning, recording, evaluation and bureaucracy, the cart is being re-loaded as quickly as it is being emptied.

As Professor Brian Boyd, one of the architects of CfE, pointed out in his own talk, the signs of regression are there to see in the mysterious appearance of the eight ‘curriculum areas’ and the equally mysterious appearance of ‘achievement levels’, neither of which were part of the original outline of CfE. I have to wonder if the level of direct control retained by the Scottish Executive over the development of the detail of CfE might have something to do with these deviations from the original simplicity and good sense of CfE (much of the work on CfE is done by Learning and Teaching Scotland, which is the obvious place for such work to be done, but much has also been kept securely within the risk-averse clutches of the Executive, where the dead hand of HMIE can still influence events, despite their supposed arms-length distance from the Executive).

As Brian also noted, the chances are that, like the 5-14 initiative before, CfE will change things in the primary schools and perhaps in the lower secondary years, but the upper secondary will saunter on in its own complacent and backward-looking fashion, citing the need to comply with the ‘gold standard’ of the Highers as an excuse for ignoring the changes needed. The tail will continue to wag the dog since we will still have a system of schooling built squarely on the ridiculous requirement to act as the recruiting agency for our universities.

Technorati Tags: curriculum for excellence, brian boyd, curriculum overload, schooling

Comments