British teach less Churchill, more global warming

Emphasis is now on the practical

Or, as eminent educationist John White puts it: "We don't spend much of our time reading about the Battle of the Nile but we spend a lot of time working out what do about holidays, jobs, children, relationships. We are practical creatures and education should have something to do with preparing us for that." And he doubts whether children can fully come to understand the modern world through the eternal truths of the classics. "Issues to do with the environment are not really treated in Jane Austin or Dickens," he quips.

Mr. White, the emeritus professor of philosophy of education at the University of London's Institute of Education, says the shake-up is important because "for the first time in English history the government is taking very seriously the question of what should education aimed at."

The government has identified three aims: to produce successful learners, confident individuals, and responsible citizens. White says that only recently has the government started thinking about the second and third aims. "If you look at what education should be about, it's issues to do with preparing people to lead a fulfilling, meaningful life, and be a good citizen. Those are obvious aims," he says.

Yet the revamp comes amid deepening concern about the "dumbing down" of studies and exams in British education. Many university lecturers and professors now complain that the school-leaving exams in Britain – GSCEs for 16-year-olds and A levels for 18-year-olds – are far easier than they were 15 or 20 years ago. Every year, results improve across the board, but university professors complain that new students are so weak at the basics that they need refresher courses before they can embark on undergraduate courses.

Quality going down?

"Every academic I have talked to feels an A level is basically a far inferior version of what it would have been not so long ago," says Professor Furedi. "Many universities put on refresher classes on basic math, stats, and teaching people to write essays – things you would take for granted in previous times."

Others are concerned at what subjects will make way for the new syllabus themes. Tellingly, the new curriculum makes no specific mention of towering historical figures like Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin. The QCA says this is part of an overall aim to be less prescriptive and give teachers greater flexibility, and insists the big names of history will get covered. Historians are not appeased.

Chris McGovern, formerly a government education adviser and now headmaster at St. Anthony's Preparatory School in north London, says the latest redesign of the national curriculum will further erode pupils' grasp of history, which is no longer taught as a chronology in schools but as a series of episodic fragments studied as topics.

"We are producing a generation who know little or nothing about the past, and the bits they do know have been carefully selected to manipulate their views of the world," he says. "We have a national amnesia. Go out on the streets, ask English children on Trafalgar square who is on top of that column. They won't know."

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