As long serving teachers understand, education fashions and innovations come and go and every 4 to 5 years, usually timed when there is a new minister for education, schools are forced to respond to yet another transformation guaranteed to raise standards, improve outcomes and ensure Australian students are world’s best.
In the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s inquiry-based and process learning were imposed from on high alongside “child-centred learning” where the teacher, instead of being a sage on the stage, was expected to be a facilitator and guide by the side.
Competency based learning soon followed where the emphasis, instead of being on essential content, was on generic, transferable skills calculated to produce 21st century multiskilled and adaptable life-long learners.
Illustrated by Kevin Rudd’s $2.4 billion Digital Education Revolution initiative launched in 2007 schools over the last 18 years have been expected to embrace computers, laptops and the internet on the basis students are digital natives and knowledge navigators.
Given the impact of cultural-Marxism and critical theory, at the same time digital technology was embraced, the curriculum became infected with a black armband view of history, climate alarmism, radical gender and sexuality theories and the belief Australian society is sexist, racist and heteronormative.
As detailed in the publication ‘A knowledge-rich approach to curriculum design’ (published by the Australian Education Research Organisation AERO) the most recent educational panacea involves schools adopting a curriculum that promotes deep knowledge and that achieves excellence, equity and life-long learning.
At the same time schools embrace a knowledge-rich curriculum the AERO publication tells teachers to forsake progressive pedagogy in favour of explicit instruction and mastery learning. After years of memorisation and rote learning being condemned traditional approaches, based on cognitive load theory, are now back in fashion.
As with the range of educational fads and innovations that have bedevilled schools over the last 50 or so years the most recent example involving a knowledge-rich curriculum and deep knowledge is misconceived and flawed.
The first criticism is that AERO’s definition of curriculum is superficial, vague and meaningless. After stating the term curriculum can be interpreted in various ways the authors conclude “in this report, curriculum refers to what students are expected to know, understand and be able to do”.
Such a vacuous definition fails to offer anything substantial, enriching or culturally significant. It’s obvious the authors know nothing about the ongoing curriculum debates occurring in Australia since the release of the Curriculum Development Centre’s ‘Core Curriculum for Australian Schools’ in 1980.
If those responsible for the AERO report had undertaken a proper analysis, in addition to the CDC report, they would have referred to the ‘Manifesto For A Democratic Curriculum’ published in 1984 in ‘The Australian Teacher’.
Here, the authors refer to an education where “everyone gains the kind of knowledge which helps them participate productively and meaningfully in the general culture”. The definition of curriculum adopted is a broad one involving essential knowledge as well as “teacher-student relationships, assessment, decision-making, discipline and school organisation”.
Victoria’s Blackburn Report published in 1985 details at some length what constitutes a worthwhile and beneficial curriculum. The argument is put that young people are “culturally deprived if they emerge from 12 years of schooling without even the most rudimentary knowledge of the history, art forms, and philosophical underpinnings of their own society”.
As such the curriculum should be designed to introduce students to humanity’s “best validated knowledge and artistic achievements”. Such a curriculum, instead of being narrowly focused and utilitarian, deals with “literature, music, art and other cultural forms representing ‘humanity holding a great continuous discussion throughout the ages and across the world’”.
The idea of a conversation mirrors Michael Oakeshott’s belief, detailed in ‘The Voice of poetry in the conversation of mankind’ that the purpose of education is to introduce students to and become familiar with a conversation that began in the mists of time and is ongoing. Oakeshott argues “Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasion of utterance, and in which we acquire the intellectual and moral habits appropriate to the conversation”.
When designing a curriculum one of the major challenges is deciding what to include and what to leave out. AERO’s statement that “Content is chosen purposefully for each subject, in alignment with a vision of education”, once again, is vacuous as nowhere in the report is there any detail about what such a vision should involve.
To suggest a knowledge-rich curriculum upholds “Australia’s commitment to educational excellence, equity and lifelong learning” as well as enabling students to perform “complex tasks and apply skills in context” in no way represents a vision.
Such a bureaucratic and utilitarian view of the purpose of education pales into insignificance when compared to the Blackburn Report’s argument any “discussion of curriculum must begin by asserting the primacy of essentially common and cultural purposes”.
Neil Postman in his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology puts a similar argument when writing the to be educated entails becoming “aware of the growth of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced”.
Such a view harks back to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy where Arnold refers to culture as “being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best that has been thought and said in the world”.
It should be noted, in opposition to those educators who argue Arnold’s view is ossified and old fashioned, he goes on to suggest a liberal view of education turns a “stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically”.
On reading the AERO report it’s obvious those involved are not curriculum experts. If they were they would have been aware there is nothing new or surprising in their observation that to think critically and creatively students need to have a rigorous and substantial grounding in the key subjects and areas of learning.
As argued in How People Learn Brain, Mind, Experience, and School published in 2000, “Research on expertise in areas such as chess, history, science, and mathematics demonstrate that experts’ abilities to think and solve problems depend strongly on a rich body of knowledge about subject matter”.
In 1996 E.D.Hirsch Jr in The Knowledge Deficit makes the same point when arguing “Cognitive scientists agree that reading comprehension requires prior ‘domain-specific’ knowledge about the things that a text refers to”.
Hirsch Jr also argues in order to be successful learners students needed a “coherent knowledge-based curriculum” where, in order to be culturally literate, students need to be familiar with the body of knowledge, often taken for granted, that informs public debate, discussion and dialogue.
While it is true the AERO report ‘A knowledge-rich approach to curriculum design’ is superficial and trite it does make a number of useful observations. By necessity, a curriculum must introduce students to the essential knowledge associated with key subjects. It’s also true that generic skills and competencies do not exist in a vacuum.
Memorisation and rote learning are vital if learning it to be committed to a student’s long term memory, thus, freeing up short term memory to the immediate learning task at hand. The curriculum, in order to be teacher friendly and able to be implemented in the classroom, needs to be selective, coherent, carefully sequenced and specific and clear.
Where the AERO report, as well as the current push to force a knowledge-rich curriculum on schools, falls short is its failure to address the purpose of education and to detail what constitutes a worthwhile and beneficial curriculum.
This article was first published on Quadrant Online.
