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

the first ditch as soon as politicians get their hands on education’.
And, in the words of the Minister of Education, Sir David Eccles, the
school curriculum was still a ‘secret garden’ in 1962.
However, since the late 1970s, we have increasingly come to think
about the curriculum (in the words of the last Permanent Secretary,
Mr Bichard) ‘in business terms’ – the setting of clear targets; the
cascading of these targets to agencies, local authorities, schools,
teachers and pupils; the regular measurement of performance
according to targets set; the explicit labelling of target
achievements to maximise client choice; the increasing
responsiveness to that choice within quasi-market conditions; the
increasing responsiveness to the perceived needs of other clients (in
particular, the employers whose interests need to be served).
But such managerial control is the very worst kind of conservatism
for two reasons. First, it makes the assumption that there is a group
of target setters who have the wisdom to say what is good for all
the ‘consumers’ of education – hence, the confidence in the
constant setting and cascading of targets, or in the definition of
benchmarks and standardisation of degrees, or in the detailed
definition of standards for initial training of teachers. But there is no
such group of people with this superior wisdom. In facing the
future, we are uncertain of the world we are entering into and of the
intellectual and moral resources which we need to draw upon in
order to face such uncertainties. And, in the face of such
uncertainties, one must rely upon the maintenance of a strong,
rigorous and independent tradition of scholarship, research and
criticism, created within universities and transmitted through the
school curriculum.
Second, however, even if there were such wisdom at the centre, it
could not anticipate the consequences of its wise decisions and
actions. For these have to be filtered through the professional
judgement of thousands of teachers, and those judgements interact
with unpredictable circumstances, thereby creating new contexts,
new educational situations. The thoroughgoing assessment regime
– the chief tool in the hands of the controllers – does not leave the
situation as it is, does not then reflect the achievements and
failures as they are, or were, independently of the assessment.
Teachers respond in different ways, changing the practices which
are to be assessed, devoting their intelligence and energy to beat
the system.
More seriously and sinisterly, however, is the transformation of the
language of education. A shift in metaphor brings with it a different
way of conceiving and evaluating an ‘educational practice’ – as,
indeed, everything else. Thus, if an ‘educational practice’ is