Learning, Curriculum and Life Politics: the selected works of Ivor F. Goodson
Nations at Risk
A second version of central curriculum would prescribe in detail what is to be taught, learned and tested. There would be little allowance for choice on the part of teachers and students. One caricature of this version would be the mythical French Minister of Education who could look at his watch and say what every child in France was studying at any given time. This version of common curricula would go against the grain of 20th Century UK experience.
That the 1988 UK national curriculum in fact represents the second model of central curriculum says a good deal. It reflects the response of a political establishment that has experienced more than four decades of precipitous and accelerating political and economic decline. In such circumstances the replay of paranoid fears within the domain of the school curriculum seems an understandable, if indirect, response.
The unprecedented expansion of powers over the school curriculum has not gone unnoticed or unchallenged. The Cabinet's intention in the report on history has led the Historical Association, an august and conservative body representing history teachers, to question whether the government has any 'constitutional right' for such detailed intervention.
The major expansion of state power over the curriculum and over assessment leads to a parallel diminution in the teachers' power and therefore has associated implications for pedagogy. At one level the new power over curriculum and the battery of tests represent a substantial push to make the details of teachers' work accountable to the state. The experience of the 1960s where teachers were judged to have superior expertise in assessing the educational needs of their pupils has been rapidly dismantled.
Much of the commentary on the new national curriculum has been sympathetic and optimistic about the results of the expansion of state power. For instance, The Times carried an editorial on the passing of the 'True Education Bill', which argued 'most important, a national curriculum, accompanied by attainment targets and tests at key ages, will ensure that a large proportion of young people leave school literate, numerate, and more broadly educated than they are now'. Standards in short, will rise. That is because 'teachers will have a clearer idea of what is expected of them' (The Times, 1989). In short, greater accountability (and less power over definition) leads to clearer objectives and better work habits. This is a crude simplification employing an almost-Taylorist optimism about a strategy for tackling a most complex enterprise.
