This is manifest in a shift in emphasis from traditional subjects to a more functional, utilitarian agenda: equipping children with "skills to learn", responding to globalisation and obligatory use of IT in the classroom.īut if education is about negotiated surrender to economic change, the corpus of knowledge possessed by teachers is, by dint of their age, obsolete. If schools must always adapt their material to contemporary circumstances, education becomes simply a mechanism for coping with modernity. That imperative has, according to Furedi, a pernicious consequence. Pedagogy, meanwhile, has come to look more like therapy, with motivational and psychological techniques coming to the fore, along with a fashionable horror of allowing children to get bored. By extension, teachers have become mediators in a process of socialisation – policing "values" rather than directing thoughts a secular political clergy with the education secretary as pope. Too much teenage pregnancy? More sex education. Obesity epidemic? Teach children about healthy eating. The curriculum, in Furedi's analysis, has come to be seen by policymakers as an easy tool for the correction of wider cultural and behavioural problems. As a result, their proper function – as transmitters of the accrued wisdom of humanity from one generation to the next – is squeezed out. This process, Furedi argues, signals a politicisation of education that makes schools responsible for the correction of social ills. There has been some new law or initiative every year since: literacy hour, "Every Child Matters", academy schools, Early Years Foundation Stage, the "Gifted and Talented" programme, personalised learning etc. It was famously Tony Blair's top three priorities before the 1997 election. No one could reasonably claim that education has suffered from a lack of political attention in Britain. His core argument is that the aspiration to fashion children's souls according to political criteria is not really education at all at least, not as he thinks that word should be understood. Some of these goals are made explicit in the curriculum for children as young as two.įuredi does not necessarily object to the values implied by those requirements (although he is oddly dyspeptic about green issues). Teachers are also supposed to instil such useful attributes as environmental consciousness, emotional candour and respect for racial and cultural diversity. Furedi devotes several pages to the ill-conceived citizenship agenda, but as just one example of the way our classrooms have become inadvertent laboratories in queasy liberal social engineering. That Leicester classroom came back to me when reading Wasted, Frank Furedi's onslaught on schooling policy. A statutory duty to inculcate civic mindedness had somehow equipped British teenagers with a pseudo-jihadi notion of terrorist murder as historical quid pro quo. A 14-year-old pupil proved he had internalised this long view by explaining that, while the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks were bad, they were also, in a sense, "payback". One history teacher explained to me how she had met her citizenship obligations by placing al-Qaida terrorism in the context of CIA support for Afghan mujahideen during the cold war. I was told how the citizenship "agenda" was woven through the rest of the curriculum – sequins of political liberalism sewn on to the fabric of other subjects. No one seemed to have any idea how, pedagogically speaking, to make citizens. This was a subject only recently invented by government in response to nagging national anxiety over "social cohesion". A few years ago, I visited a school in Leicester that inspectors had declared to be outstanding in the provision of classes in "citizenship".
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