The Sad State of British Education

The United States has long viewed British public education as stodgy but benevolent, a system steeped in history, relevance and genuine national identity. Though this attitude endures, it is largely because of our ignorance of the recent emasculation of Britain’s curricula.

Little attention has been given in the US to the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s successful drive to eliminate rigor from British secondary education. This is not a surprise; American educators are overwhelmed with confusing national standards of our own and few are familiar enough with the details of the British system to make sense of more than a headline.

But Westerners, particularly those in the United States, should take heed. The QCA’s sapping of national education standards serves as the writing on the wall for curricular development in the US. Unfortunately, this writing is more like yobbish graffiti than the verses of Shakespeare.

Changes in the UK’s national curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds have been implemented to align public schooling with necessary skills for adulthood. In addition to these “life skills,” teachers will be given more flexibility with their course material and more freedom with how to present it. Touting relevance and autonomy presents on the surface a convincing argument for overhauling an outdated curriculum. Students will be allowed – and encouraged – to tweak their studies to fit better their personalities, abilities and interests.

This means that studies in healthy cooking can replace chemistry, understanding mortgages can bump trigonometry identities, and a student will be more likely to read Louis Sachar’s “Holes” than anything by Edmund Burke. Most disturbing is that a young Briton will be better versed in a peculiar guilt for his forefather’s misdeeds than in the proud history of the West’s pre-eminent society. That guilt will further compromise the shoddy foundation of constructed British identity the QCA has built into the curriculum.

The QCA’s penchant for combining flawed constructivist philosophy with Burger King’s “Have It Your Way” slogan will create a generation of Britons who will not only be ill-equipped for further studies, but also filled with contempt for any content that doesn’t have obvious and immediate relevance to their individual lives. While some lament rightly the proliferation of the “me first” culture in the United Kingdom, the QCA is pipelining fuel into the “I ain’t bovvered” fire. I pity not only their future employers and professors, but also the young British ladies who will be frustrated in their search to find a mate whose long-term view in life extends beyond the calendar year.

As the United States‘ most trusted ally, the fate of your public education is important to us. Secretary Balls, educators and Britons need to commit to reinvigorating the national curriculum with content that reflects a seriousness of purpose and the historical rigor of Western culture. We in the US have long understood that scratching the skin of an Englishman reveals hair; regrettably, the skeleton below that hair appears to be weakening rapidly.

One can only hope that knowing that an American educator is embarrassed and ashamed for the future of your public education system will resonate throughout the isle.

For a deeper look into the current state of British education, I recommend The Corruption of the Curriculum [Robert Whelen, ed., Civitas, 2007]. Jeffrey Howard of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation writes:

U.S. concerns over the hijacking of public school curricula by anti-American progressives find a mirror in Britain, where ridiculous reforms have plundered from public schools both tradition and rigor–and left a radically leftist agenda in their place. So says a new compilation, edited by Robert Whelan, deputy director of the British think tank Civitas, in which six prominent essayists (scholars, mostly) address these problems. The reader doesn’t know whether to cry or laugh while reading chapters such as “Geography Used to be About Maps,” by Professor Alex Standish. Truth becomes farce. Standish, for example, describes a British education official who argued that the purpose of geography education was to “further … the activities of the United Nations.” Mathematics instruction in the UK has, according to this volume, become incoherent and plagued by goofy pedagogical theories, and the alleged need to situate scientific learning in the context of pressing social problems has deflated what was once a rigorous curriculum in biology, physics, and chemistry. The book’s message suffers a bit, though, from inconsistency: one chapter laments that “critical thinking about ethnicity” rather than national solidarity was the curricular response to the July 7 terrorist attacks. But the very next chapter preaches how foreign-language education has done much good by “breaking down barriers between people and countries and promoting a sense of universalism in an individualised world.” Nonetheless, the book is a welcome (albeit troubling) stare into America’s curricular mirror across the Pond.

This reminds me of something about Britain and physics…