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Monday 9 June 2014

There is no national curriculum in Scotland

Curriculum for Excellence introduced into schools by the Scottish Government aims to provide children with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes required to live and work in a global society. They claim that this involves a different approach to education. This approach turns out to be less about subject matter and more about generating emotions of caring for and perceiving an interconnected world.

Health and wellbeing, sustainable development and global citizenship are now essential parts of the Scottish Curriculum for Excellence.


Here is Michael Russell MSP, Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning. 
Of course, there is no national curriculum in Scotland. That is a fairly basic piece of information that requires to be known.  Curriculum for excellence is a methodology—it is a means of teaching.
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/sp/?id=2014-03-18.2.0
Curriculum for Excellence - the means of teaching sustainable development, health and wellbeing and global citizenship has been criticized because there is greater emphasis on skills and less emphasis on knowledge and it is questioned how higher order skills may be developed if core knowledge is abandoned.

"The problem is the whole drift of thinking," says Professor Lindsay Paterson. "T
raditional 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..." He believes that it is access to those traditional hierarchies of knowledge which empower the working class, for those who can take advantage.


 
Along a similar line, the University of Stirling report found that Curriculum for Excellence  "does not clearly articulate questions of what should be learned and why" and warned against pupils being taught "skills" instead of academic knowledge. Many teachers are worried the first pupils experiencing the new system are "guinea pigs" whose education will suffer,...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/9198231/Scottish-teachers-floundering-over-Curriculum-for-Excellence.html

The Scottish Government has responded by explaining their `methodology`. "Developing global citizens can bring together the totality of all that is planned for children and young people in a coherent and meaningful way " - which really does not explain much at all, but sounds incredibly sinister. What is the all that is planned?

http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/Images/DevelopingGlobalCitizens_tcm4-628187.pd

Perhaps we need to look further afield for clarification since teachers in Scotland, as well as parents, are still confused about what it is teachers are expected to teach and parents are expected to support.  So here we have Target 5, one of the new United Nations global education targets:

Target 5:  By 2030, all learners [will] acquire knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to establish sustainable and peaceful societies, including through global citizenship education and education for sustainable development.

There it is . It is Curriculum for Excellence and Michael Russell`s totality of all that is planned for Scottish children - without bothering about the details of a syllabus.
All governments are now asked to support these targets in national, regional and global consultations on the post-2015 education agenda and in the ongoing discussions in New York at the Open Working Group on the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Next year, the proposal will be put forward for approval at the World Education Forum in the Republic of Korea in May and at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The proposed new overarching education goal aims to drive the international community...
Whilst collapsing its education system, Scotland is playing its part in the United Nations agenda to drive the international community towards the one world sustainable economy.  Well, why did Michael Russell MSP not say so - as if we need to ask?

http://efareport.wordpress.com/2014/06/04/the-muscat-agreement-new-proposed-post-2015-global-education-goal-and-targets-announced-today/#more-4652

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