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Friday 23 May 2014

Criticising Curriculum for Excellence

"There’s a flurry of debate in Scottish education over standards. The suggestion is that they are being dumbed down. The surprise is that the debate’s catalyst was a letter to the press from a school student."

"Teachers have been cautious about openly criticising Curriculum for Excellence (CfE): no wonder, given the resolutely positive spin being put on CfE by both the Scottish government and local authorities."

"One depute head, a former maths teacher, explained to me: "I loved the ideas behind CfE, the inter-disciplinary learning, the greater depth of learning, not having to teach to the test, cooperative learning, but when it boils down to it, I’m just teaching the same maths I have taught since O Grade."

"I’m teaching it a little differently and, I hope, a little more interestingly – the students are more active learners – but I cannot see why we needed a new exam system. We could easily have tweaked the old exams and not gone to all this trouble."

"A former local authority maths advisor agrees about CfE’s strengths but also worries about lack of rigour in assessment."

"The issue of standards in maths returned last year when the Scottish Qualification Authority’s former maths principal examiner stated that that year’s Higher exam was the easiest ever. The problem, however, far surpasses maths."

"One experienced social subjects curriculum leader explained her experience: "I’m absolutely sure that what we ask pupils to do under exam conditions has become easier and easier and this process started long before CfE was introduced."

"Walter Humes, visiting professor of education at Stirling University, echoes the concerns over "political" considerations."

"It is high time that the complacent rhetoric of Scottish education ("partnership", "consultation", "consensus", etc) was exposed for the sham it is. For too long the teachers who have got on in the system have been deferential and conformist: we need challenging thinkers who ask hard questions."

"It may be that the greater contemporary emphasis on skills and lesser emphasis on knowledge have yet to become established, although even here there is a debate: how can higher order skills be developed if core knowledge is abandoned?"

http://www.sec-ed.co.uk/news/curriculum-for-excellence-kicking-a-hornets-nest

In a Holyrood article, Professor Lindsay Paterson has criticised Curriculum for Excellence. “The problem is the whole drift of thinking since Curriculum for Excellence has been away from rigour,” Professor Lindsay believes ... "Those traditional hierarchies of knowledge endured as part of the Scottish education system far longer than they did in the rest of the UK, or indeed the rest of the world, which began experimenting with curricular reform as early as the 1960s. “A lot of the movement towards comprehensive education was associated in many parts of the world with an attack on what were perceived to be structures of knowledge which were themselves partly responsible for inequalities in aspiration,” says Paterson. “It was claimed repeatedly that certain structures of knowledge that had been commonly taught in high status institutions, like selective schools and universities, were intrinsically alienating to working-class people, or to people from different cultural and religious backgrounds, and even sometimes to girls compared with boys.”

"However, that line of thinking didn’t carry any weight in Scotland – until now. “Curriculum for Excellence is sceptical about the allegedly traditional structures of knowledge. It’s sceptical about the subject boundaries, it’s sceptical about the distinction between theoretical and applied knowledge, its sceptical about the concept of deferred gratification – children should be able to enjoy and be enthusiastic about every aspect of their schooling, there’s not much at all in the documentation about any aspect of education being boring or tedious. It’s all about children enjoying it, engaging with it, and seeing it as immediately relevant in their lives.”

"People... argued that the purpose of democratising education was to widen access to the most hierarchical structures of knowledge, not to change the structures of knowledge, but to give the people that were excluded from them access to them.” Curriculum for Excellence, meanwhile, “is doing what the most radical curricular reformers were trying to do in say London in the 1960s and 1970s in the move to democratise knowledge.” He adds: “The Curriculum for Excellence is really 1960s radicalism, modernised in a way that never happened in Scotland. It’s as if Scotland discovered the 1960s 50 years later.”

"If that sounds like Paterson is damning CfE with faint praise, it’s because he has several difficulties with the new curriculum. “My discomfort with it is that research tends to confirm that point that insofar as knowledge is a form of empowerment, then the way to empower people who are not powerful is actually to give them access to the highest status knowledge in that hierarchy,” Paterson says. “There already exist inequalities of access to cultural ideas in society. The children of well-educated parents either get it through the daily discourse in the home, or through the formal learning their parents income enables them to do. The purpose of public schooling is to give everyone access to that.”

http://www.holyrood.com/2013/06/breaking-it-down/

Also http://democraticgreensocialist.wordpress.com/begun-under-labour-continued-under-the-snp-and-coming-to-a-school-near-you-from-august-the-curriculum-for-excellence-cfe-spun-as-a-radical-and-progressive-reform-continues-to/

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