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

That reclamation of a distinctively educational tradition requires, in
my view, five things – several of which have serious implications for
university departments of educational studies.
First, the role of teachers must shift from that of delivering
someone else’s targets to that of thinking about the aims and
purposes of education, as well as the means. But such thinking
requires rootedness in intellectual traditions. Teachers, too, must be
partners in that ‘conversation between the generations of mankind’,
which it is their duty to convey to their pupils. In preparing the
pupils for their future, the teacher is in that sense rooted in the
past. He or she is the mediator of the very best which our culture
offers in addressing the questions that matter.
Second, education, at its different levels, must find expression in
the many forums where that ‘conversation’ can take place – where
moral values and educational aims are explored and criticised and
revised in the light of debate and of evidence. Such forums are in
classrooms where discussion is central to the exploration; they are
in schools where teachers constantly review their educational
purposes and values; they are in the wider community where
educational values are reviewed in the context of social and
economic realities. Such, indeed, had been the ideal of the Schools
Council, brain-child of Morrell as he prepared the educational
system to face ‘the crisis of values’. But, of course, such openness
and discussion are anathema to those who seek to control, to define
standards, to set precise targets and to ‘audit’ against the
‘performance indicators’. In Northern Ireland, one has seen brave
attempts to move in that direction in the programme ‘Education for
Mutual Understanding’. Jean Ruddock’s work demonstrates the
importance of the pupil’s voice in the development of a meaningful
educational experience.
Third, an educational practice is concerned with the development of
a person within a wider community. There is something odd about
the idea of an educated person whose mind is totally unaffected by
that community or who fails to contribute to it. That development of
ideas, that freedom of exploration, takes place within various
communities. It feeds on those communities, and in turn it
illuminates them. There is much talk about the importance of ‘stake
holders’, but the interaction between community and learning
institutions rarely runs deep. And yet one can see how such beliefs
begin to transform the community, as in the case of the Integrated
School Movement in Northern Ireland. But this is not always
possible. One thinks of Chris Searle in the 1970s, ejected from his
Hackney School because of active community involvement, or of
Eric Midwinter, a decade earlier, whose attempts to see the