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

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encourage students to develop techniques to cope with the unstructured situations of everyday living – that is, curricula and learning processes that help young people to make sense of practical problems and to take responsibility for their own action. 4. We live in a ‘risk society’. Teachers need to be able to help students to understand and evaluate risks in their own environment, making use of relevant scientific and technical knowledge. Elliott (2000) suggests that all four of the above challenges demand new pedagogical processes in schools. We should not underestimate, however, the extent to which the school is deeply entrenched in obsolete traditions. S B Sarason (1990) was so concerned with these problems of school culture that he called one of his books The Predictable Failure of School Reform. The main thrust of the book concerns the inability of reformers to accept that past efforts at change have failed. This inability to diagnose past failures dooms their reforms to failure. The gap between rhetoric and reality is too great. Sarason agreed with John Goodlad (1984) who made the point that schools are amazingly similar in terms of classroom organisation, atmosphere or ethos. School systems are very resistant to change. Schools are very complex - to change them you have to get to know their cultures. It is no use seeing unconnected parts. Another important issue that we should not forget is that despite the disadvantages of schools as they are now, it has often been pointed out that for many young people the school is the most moral institution they ever encounter. What we urgently need to do is to re-think the functions of the school in the 21st century with the intention of changing the organisation of schools so that a caring community is enhanced in an ethos where pupils take more responsibility for their own learning. Not a programme of total individualised self-instruction (because social learning is also very important) but a considerable shift in the balance away from teacher direction to individual responsibility for and ownership of the teaching-learning process. There are many available prescriptions for improving schools, but some are dangerously close to the false gods of technology and consumerism. I would like to build in another hypothesis at this stage: good schools (not effective schools) give their pupils more than efficient instruction in English, maths and other learning areas. A good school and a good curriculum focus on values and beliefs. A good school sees as its main purpose the provision of ideals and visions: sometimes religious but not necessarily so (and some religious schools conspicuously fail in this respect). Schools need to
provide the young with a wider vision of values as well as knowledge and skills. What specific changes might be suggested? How have the best schools already changed? In the 21st century schools need to be: • less hierarchical and authoritarian • more concerned with individuals and individual needs rather than age group needs • concerned with learning as well as teaching • concerned with the kind of learning that is both experiential and, where possible, self-directed • concerned with students who are more autonomous and selfevaluating Andy Hargreaves has suggested that some schools are already changing in the following ways: Schools have • flatter decision-making structures • reduced specialisation • blurring of roles and boundaries I would add a list of desirable changes in teachers: • teachers with the ability to learn with students (ie even if a teacher does not know the answers, he/she should be good at finding out) • teachers who are authority figures without being authoritarian • teachers who are experts in curriculum design (rather than just a narrow range of subject matter) • teachers who are experts in learning styles as well as teaching methods More specifically on curriculum I have elsewhere (1997) made five suggestions: 1. Moving from content and objectives to skills and processes In England the Higginson Report (1988) complained that A-level students spent too much time memorising and recalling facts and arguments rather than acquiring fundamental understandings. Similar comments have been made about the curriculum for younger pupils. And Charles Handy (1997) has suggested that he would ‘have more faith in a national curriculum if it were to be more concerned with process than with content.’ Robert Reich (1993) has discussed the need for much higher levels of thinking skills in the computerised world of symbolic analysts who need skills of ‘abstraction, system thinking, experimentation and
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Page 19 and 20: The curriculum of the future, there
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Page 31 and 32: in schools 1997-1999. (HMI 219). Lo
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central. These aspects could includ
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The session opened with a recap of
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workers, career teachers and others
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these islands. The main benefit der
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