School children should no longer be taught traditional subjects at school because they are “middle-class” creations, and “mere stepping stones to wealth,” says an adviser to the British government (Finder’s fee: Joanne Jacobs).
Lessons will cover a series of personal skills, if Professor John White gets his way, reports the Daily Mail. “Pupils would no longer study history, geography and science but learn skills such as energy- saving and civic responsibility through projects and themes.”
White, a member of a committee set up to advise Government curriculum authors on changes to secondary schooling for 11 to 14-year-olds, favors a shift away from single-subject teaching to theme or project-based learning. Aims should include fostering a student who “values personal relationships, is a responsible and caring citizen, is entrepreneurial, able to manage risk and committed to sustainable development.”
Tory schools spokesman Nick Gibb said Professor White’s view was “deeply corrosive”.
“This anti-knowledge, anti-subject ideology is deeply damaging to our education system. It is this sort of thinking that has led to the promotion of discredited reading methods, the erosion of three separate sciences and the decline of mathematics skills. I just find it astonishing that someone with his extreme views has been allowed to advise the Government on education policy.”
Words fail me.
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Here’s an apropos passage from Demiashkevich’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1935, pp. 282-283):
“We are told that the regime is absurdly anti-pedagogical under which the child has for the first period ‘Acids’; for the seecond, ‘The Merchant of Venice’; for the third, ‘The Civil War’; for the foruth, ‘Coffee’ (Brazil); for the fifth, ‘Percentage’ (Arithmetic). It is doubtful, however, that he would be happier or would learn better under the methodical arrangement which would treat him without any periods to one ‘integrated’ subject, though that subject be a lovely daffodil. A teacher relates that she organized the entire instruction in one of the grades around the daffodil project. She devoted her time, first, to the anatomy and physiology of the daffodil; then, to its geography; after that, to the drawing of the daffodil; next to the poetry about it; and finally, to dancing around the flower bed. We do not know how much or how little the students have learned through it in terms of information and mental habits; this depends very largely on the ability and culture of the teacher, whom we do not have the pleasure of knowing personally. But we are wondering if the majority of the daffodil project students did not finish by hating the daffodil and waiting as for deliverance for ‘the clang of the school bell,’ which some new educationists would do away with as the sinister symbol of the conventional school which ’shatters valuable attitudes.’”
He does not scoff at all projects in schools. He goes on to say: “Panoramic learning can be of value only in so far at is a synthesis alternating with an analysis, which, of course, demands some kind of division of subject matter as well as systematic study of it, that is, study proceeding in a certain definite order.”
Dear Brits, before you make any rash decisions, please read Demiashkevich.
What a great quote, Diana! And from 1935? There really is nothing new under the sun. I’ve long held that there’s not a single good idea in teaching that doesn’t become a bad one the moment it hardens into orthodoxy. Project learning is one of those. What undoubtedly started as a terrific way to engage students turns in to the true and only heaven, and educators forget that the point was the project was meant to illuminate the curriculum, and not the other way around.