Problems of Public Education (1): Introduction

By Sebastian Egerton-Read

Education Secretary Michael Gove has recently said that the English national curriculum needs to be reviewed with the intention of focusing his education review more on course content and ‘facts’ rather than on teaching methods. Labour and teaching unions have accused Gove of attempting to re-assert 1950s-style education in schools. However, these debates seem to miss the real issue. Our systems of public education are broken, or otherwise their supposed purpose is the real thing that needs to be reviewed. The current two stated aims of the English national curriculum are as follows:

1.   The school curriculum should aim to provide opportunities for all pupils to learn and achieve.
2.   The school curriculum should aim to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and prepare all pupils for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life.

                Interestingly there is generally very little disagreement about these stated aims, in fact if you asked random people on the street this question you would probably get almost unanimous agreement on the two important functions of education. To translate from the ‘official’ rhetoric above; these aims are basically to support personal development of our kids and to prepare them for the rest of their lives after education. The second aim must be stated in the context that students starting their school careers in September 2011 will at the earliest finish their education in 2023. 16-year olds finishing their GCSEs this year started their education in 1998. This is in a world that is changing more rapidly than ever and where predicting the economic climate on year to year is virtually impossible. If we take this aim in context then it can only really be said that education is attempting to maximise human potential in readiness for the world after education, rather than attempting to prepare our children for a specific world. This system is quite clearly failing though, a huge number of people, probably even the majority, leave school not really knowing what they are good at doing or enjoy in their lives, or perhaps simply do not appreciate the usefulness of their talents. These people end up in jobs and even careers that they don’t enjoy and work becomes about day-to-day survival. This is not to say that every aspect of a person’s work should be thrilling or even that work is the most important part of a person’s life. It is just to say that the majority of people who go through our public education systems leave education without really knowing what their particular set of likes and talents are, and consequently often don’t maximise their enjoyment of life and potential as people.

                At this stage it is probably worth noting the origins of our current public education systems. The introduction of public education systems in the late 1800s was a revolutionary idea and it was done to try and cope with the industrialised economies of the western world. This is where hierarchies in subjects are routed with Science, Maths and Technology largely at the top because of their usefulness in these economies. Interestingly, English is another subject that is highly prioritised, above its fellow humanities, and its uniqueness will be discussed in a later blog post. The other major influence on public education systems was the Enlightenment thinking of the previous century, which divided people into two separate groups: ‘the academic’ and the ‘non-academic’. This has resulted in our systems of education being shaped around one very narrow form of intelligence. Of course academic intelligence is very valuable, but human capacity extends far beyond just this, people think in lots of different ways and intelligence expresses itself in many different shapes and forms. Playing a musical instrument requires the same level of intelligence in terms of brain activity as solving a maths problem for example.

                The most recent key phase in our education systems was the introduction of the national curriculum in 1988, which introduced the notion of ten compulsory subjects to be studied throughout primary and secondary school. With the curriculum also came a huge amount of standardised testing and that has continued to increase at all levels of compulsory education. During its 23-year history the national curriculum has under-gone constant change and reform, the most significant of which came from Labour in 1999, where greater priority was put on literacy and numeracy skills in primary schools and citizenship was added as a compulsory subject.

                So, public education systems started with a narrow hierarchal subject structure and a narrow view of human intelligence. The national curriculum narrowed the scope further for education systems. The continued increase in standardised testing has further narrowed the possibilities of teaching methods, not to mention that the forms of testing used (mainly exams) are very limited in themselves. Far from maximising human potential, public education has become far more about simply getting students through a barrage of tests, facilitating a very limited spectrum of human abilities. It is hardly surprising then that so many people leave public education unfulfilled and un-stimulated.

                This series of blogs will argue that public education systems are completely flawed. It will not argue that all problems of society or education performance are routed solely in the education structure, but it will argue that our systems of public education in the western world enhance and play a pivotal role in these problems. Its problems lie both in its content, the methodology used to teach that content and generally the way in which our schools are run. This series will examine: the constrictions of human ability through the way in which our schools are run; the subject hierarchy and the prescriptiveness within that hierarchy; the reasons for differing performances between children from different social backgrounds; the forces against changing the current system and finally the potential of alternative approaches to public education and their possibilities.