British teach less Churchill, more global warming
Starting next year British teenagers will face an exotic range of new disciplines designed to equip them with more practical skills.
from the July 24, 2007 edition
Page 3 of 3
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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