The School Curriculum Ten Years Hence - UCET: Universities ...

social sciences, of linguistics and biology, but would do so through
the formulation and refinement of questions.
An ‘educational practice’ would be this struggle to make sense, to
understand, to become more enlightened in matters of personal
significance – but doing so in the light of what others have thought
and said. Within such an educational practice, the teacher is crucial,
for it is the teacher who helps the young learner to bridge the gap
between his or her own personal understanding and puzzlement, on
the one hand, and the wider culture which we have inherited and
which provides the resources for that struggle to understand. In
that way, Denis Lawton was right in insisting that the curriculum is
‘a selection from the culture’ – a selection of those forms of thought
and experience which is judged to shed light on matters which are
of personal and social significance. The curriculum, therefore, is the
interpersonal mediation between teacher and learner of what often
seems the impersonal reflection of that culture (in books or plays or
artefacts) to the personal needs of the student.
There are, therefore, two sorts of danger, as we respond to
Morrell’s ‘crisis of values’. The first is to treat the ‘impersonal’
sources of knowledge as just that – dead texts to be learnt or to be
grappled with, certainly, but not to be treated as resources for the
intellectual and moral development of young people. Or (a version
of this kind of conservatism) would be to treat them as open to
personal significance to only a small minority of young people, as
though only an elite minority is capable of participating in such an
educational practice.
The second sort of danger (what might be called the extreme childcentred
approach) is to be responsive to the personal needs and
struggles of young people but, in doing so, to ignore that evolving
intellectual and moral tradition whose value lies in helping those
young people to make sense of their worlds. Rather is the
classroom the forum in which the teacher brings the two together –
the personal worlds of the learner and the public world of meaning,
expressed in books and artefacts.
Such a view of an ‘educational practice’ is neither novel nor overly
idealistic. It is to be witnessed in the daily teaching of many – the
drama teacher who, through Lorca’s Blood Wedding, helps the
pupils to identify and explore the values embedded within the
complex relations of bride and lover, or the teacher of Othello who
enables the young learner to confront, in a safe but dramatic
context, the powerful emotion of jealousy, or the teacher of biology
who provides a more objective base for the exploration of living
phenomena. And so one could go on. The point is that the links
made by the teacher in such an ‘educational practice’ between the