Under the auspices of UNESCO’s Section for General Secondary Education, RogerFrançois Gauthier analyses the content of secondary education around the world,
illustrating how issues of content, long neglected or taken for granted, are in fact of
strategic importance for the success of educational policies.
This work draws the attention of decision-makers and teachers to the vast scope
and importance of a subject which must be dealt with clearly, methodically and by
consensus if the young are to be provided with the best possible combination of
knowledge, skills and values.
The content of secondary education around the world: present position and strategic choices
“P
rimary education for young children concentrates on literacy and the
acquisition of skills defined without giving rise to any controversy; higher
education aims at specialized knowledge. What kind of education should be
provided between these two stages? The predominant feeling at present is that this
stage is of capital importance, since it is the stage at which the future worker, citizen
and adult must be trained. Who, then, can deny that it would be a grave mistake to
overlook the issue.”
The content of secondary
education around the world:
present position
and strategic choices
by
Roger-François Gauthier
Secondary education in the twenty-first century
The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout
this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever
on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country,
territory, city or area or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitation
of its frontiers or boundaries.
The author is responsible for the choice and the presentation of the
facts contained in this text and for the opinions expressed therein,
which are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the
Organization.
Cover illustration: “Bookrest 1” by Gordana Dodig-Crnković
(oil painting)
Section for General Secondary Education
Contact:
Education Sector
Fax: +33 (0) 45 68 56 30
E-mail: [email protected]
Printing by UNESCO
ED-2007/WS/15 (CLD 629.7)
THE CONTENT OF SECONDARY
EDUCATION AROUND THE WORLD:
PRESENT POSITION AND STRATEGIC
CHOICES
by
Roger-François Gauthier
© UNESCO 2006
Foreword
What are young people being taught in secondary school today?
The official answer to this question may in most cases be found in the education
policy of each country’s Ministry of Education, along with a more or less detailed list
of the subjects taught; yet this does not always give a clear account of the knowledge
and skills that young people are supposed to be acquiring, the objectives sought and
the kind of person – as a worker, as a citizen and as an adult – that education is meant
to produce.
Indeed, though very many countries have in the past undertaken to reform their
secondary education (many times, in some cases), these reforms have almost entirely
concerned systems, structures and methods, while education policies generally fail
to address educational content. When it is actually put into effect, the renewal of
educational content often touches only the surface and continues to give pride of
place to academic knowledge rather than to practical skills, especially those required
for everyday life (or “life skills”).
Trying to explain this state of affairs is no easy matter, especially at international
level where situations differ, sometimes immensely. These questions are nonetheless
important to an understanding of the present situation and a review of the content
of secondary education. This requires consideration of the history of secondary
education and its complex inheritance, and an analysis of the various education
systems and policies, and their shortcomings.
One of the main goals of this work is to highlight the strategic importance of
the content of secondary education. Its relevance to the needs of young people and
to those of the society that they will have to build is crucial, especially against an
international background of increasing globalization in which indispensable initiatives
to promote sustainable development, combat poverty and build a knowledge-based
society are now unanimously regarded as priorities for all.
The fact is that the number of young people enrolled in secondary education
has risen sharply in recent years while the quality of education remains a major issue.
It is quite evident that quality education will never be achieved unless a policy is in
place to reform its content. Furthermore, as the author shows, many systems have
failed to reform education because the question of content had not been addressed
seriously; secondary school pupils become bored and many of them fall behind. It all
wastes resources, puts children off school and harms a country’s people.
UNESCO is the lead organization for coordinating the EFA movement –
education for all. Its mission includes, accordingly, commitment to quality education
and the provision of intellectual and technical assistance to its Member States so that
they may develop innovative societies that build solid foundations in education and
training and invest in people and skills. That commitment naturally puts particular
emphasis on the younger generation, and this means that the content of secondary
education must be examined in depth.
Roger-François Gauthier brings to this task a wealth of experience in dealing
with secondary education in his own country, as well as his internationally recognized
expertise in this as in other fields of education, illustrating his comments on successful
experiments and “classic” mistakes and drawing on the work and publications of
UNESCO, IBE, OECD, the Council of Europe and other international organizations.
Here he both analyses and overviews content and reform of secondary education; he
describes current international trends and the main challenges faced.
Last, and this is no doubt the work’s essential aim, he lays down a sound basis
for further thinking and offers some pointers and practical guidance which, we hope,
will be of immediate use to national authorities, especially curriculum planners who
want to succeed in reforming the content of secondary education.
Sonia Bahri
Chief of Section
Section for General Secondary Education
4
Contents
1
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT? 9
Indifference rooted in the past: a challenge for today…
10
A partial explanation: selection has often been more important than learning… 11
2.
3.
4.
Secondary education often deaf to calls for knowledge or from the outside world
12
A media environment which exalts ever-changing “form”
over never-changing “content”
15
An unfavourable intellectual climate
16
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
19
The importance and boundaries of “strategic” concerns in education
20
The content of secondary education: a core issue of the “knowledge society”
21
Meeting the most pressing challenges on the knowledge front
23
Secondary education: a worldwide social challenge
27
Conditions for the emergence of strategic considerations
30
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
33
Education and the past: continuity and discontinuities
34
The complex heritage of secondary education
35
Patterns of thought that need reconsidering
38
What to do with “disciplines”?
39
Inventing intergenerational time
43
REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
45
The highs and lows of the State as an educator
46
Global Utopia – to benefit people or the market?
52
Decentralization and related ambiguities
55
Content with multiple references
58
Step by step towards universality
59
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL
STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
61
Content within general education policy
62
Should content be universal or diversified?
63
The question of the “ultimate” standard
68
The making of the curriculum
73
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING
OF CONTENT
77
Entering the world of human knowledge
78
Capabilities worthy of humans
81
What knowledge for coaching which pupils?
87
Constructing secondary education
92
ENCOUNTERS WITH SOME REMARKABLE FIELDS OF KNOWLEDGE
95
Languages and human cultures
96
Public knowledge and private beliefs
98
Knowledge in action
100
Barely explored potential of artistic knowledge
101
Scientific knowledge
102
The question of information and communication technology (ICT)
104
DECISION-MAKING ON CONTENT AND BUILDING A POLITICAL
DIALOGUE
105
Who should have the last word?
106
The quest for expert responses
108
What kind of debate? Who should do what?
110
CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE SUCCESS
OF CONTENT POLICIES
113
Content and assessment
114
The circumstances in which content is implemented
116
The training and position of teachers
118
School systems and establishments
120
10. SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES
AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
123
Making the content of education the strategic core of quality: what are the policy
implications of such a resolution?
124
Creating favourable conditions for decision-making on educational content
126
Implementing new patterns for handling content: how to increase their impact 130
BIBLIOGRAPHY
133
LIST OF TEXT BOXES
8
1.
The legitimacy and value of academic knowledge
15
2.
Science challenged
17
3.
Secondary schooling – a crucially important stage
23
4.
New pupils: a challenge for schools
24
5.
Protection from the dangers of extremism
24
6.
An invitation to share in human knowledge
28
7.
Changing content that fosters prejudice
29
8.
The exorbitant cost of inadequate content
31
9.
Conservatism and renewal
35
10.
An inheritance to be mistrusted
36
11.
Bringing together rather than separating forms of knowledge
39
12.
Knowledge must refer to something concrete
43
13.
Centralization of content
48
14.
The danger of politicizing knowledge
50
15.
The International Baccalaureat
52
16.
Avoiding “Balkanization” while retaining respect
for “local” considerations
54
17.
Some disturbing questions
59
18.
Justifications for secondary education
72
19.
Connections between branches of knowledge
79
20.
The realm of debate and tolerance
80
21.
Which life skills?
87
22.
Learning a language – looking beyond oneself
96
23.
Secondary education often fails to teach about action
100
24.
Art at the centre of secondary education
102
25.
Is content transparent?
117
26.
Implementation issues
121
27.
Implementation questions
126
1
WHY DO
EDUCATION
POLICIES
CONSTANTLY
NEGLECT
CONTENT?
9
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
Indifference rooted in the past: a challenge for today …
Many people in the past, and even today, do not consider the content of
secondary education to be a particularly important or particularly difficult education
policy issue. Often the prevailing wisdom is that decisions about content are a matter
of “common sense” and call for no particular discussion: secondary education, often
of a long-established pattern, is just “there”, generally arranged in “disciplines”
which are regarded and viewed as “self-evident”; in a sense, many people feel that
educational reform should not include educational content.
Everyone recognizes genuine issues such as the provision of secondary education
to a particular new section of the school-age population, selection in grouping pupils
together, streaming and the age at which the core curriculum gives way to specialized
tracks, but the question of what content should be taught within these structures is,
by contrast, far more seldom and far less readily discussed.
The overall purpose of this book is to show in what respect the question of
secondary education content, though complex, is of strategic importance in most
of the world’s countries and that the illusory belief that it can be neglected may, all
things considered, prove extremely costly and have harmful consequences on pupils
who will fail in huge numbers. The relevant question is what lies behind this apparent
lack of interest.
A relatively new question
The first point is that in many education systems the issue is a relatively new
one: primary education has, indeed, been established without the question of
content ever being specifically raised. It is not that it has taken exactly the same
form everywhere or at all times, or that there have been no hesitations (in European
primary schools, for example, it was long a matter of debate whether writing should
be taught or whether reading was enough); rather, in most countries a balance was
often struck among the “three Rs” of reading, writing and arithmetic. Admittedly
there is still some debate in many countries about the appropriateness of an initial
introduction to science, for instance, or of learning a foreign language in primary
schools, but such discussions hardly disturb the hard core of relative certainty about
the three rudiments. And it is those practical skills, denoted by the three Rs, rather
than any particular factual knowledge, which are targeted.
In secondary education, the question of content is immediately and objectively
more complex, and is a new issue for many countries, as they develop their education
systems and start to put secondary education in place, whose officials have not always
been prepared to address such matters.
10
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
Rare moments of inventiveness
This observed difficulty and lack of familiarity, however, cannot on their own
explain the relative lack of interest in the issue of content, for the same phenomenon is
generally found both in countries with long-standing secondary education traditions
and in those where such education is more recent.
The explanation is no doubt both systemic and historical: in many civilizations
secondary education was viewed as preparation for higher education, and had no
real content-defining status of its own; there have even been civilizations such as that
of Islam which developed a widely admired higher education very early on, without
finding it necessary to define any particular model of secondary education.
True, in various eras and places in history, people have invented and innovated
in designing content for the secondary level: in the sixteenth century, for instance,
the Catholic Jesuit order established “colleges” worldwide, taking no account of
nationality and defining content in a “syllabus” (the ratio atque institutio studiorum
of 1599); at the time of the French Revolution, Joseph Lakanal and others set up
“central schools” in 1795 which were the first to place emphasis on science rather than
Greek and Latin. Such moments were rare, however, for the “central schools” were
a failure precisely because their novel content was deemed unacceptable, while the
Jesuit colleges “succeeded” by setting a model curriculum that remained unchanged
for centuries! Generally speaking, there have been few occasions in history of open
discussion about the content of secondary education.
Why? Is this mere chance or, on the contrary, a highly significant fact?
A partial explanation: selection has often been more
important than learning …
The main reason why little importance has been ascribed in education policies
to the content of secondary education must seemingly be sought not in the vagaries
of history but much more deeply, in a matter of direct importance to today’s policymakers: secondary education has often, in various countries, fulfilled a fundamentally
social function discharged by neither primary nor higher education – that of selecting
the elite.
From their emergence, at different dates and in different parts of the world,
industrialized societies with their attendant bureaucracies had to create and legitimize
various new forms of hierarchy; as primary education clearly could not perform this
role, secondary education has often been organized in such a way that it established
cultural and social hierarchies through a whole system of streams, levels (if only
between “junior” and “senior” secondary levels) and certificates.
11
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
Emphasis was on sorting…
No thought was given to content for this reason: in many cases, the important
thing in secondary schooling – historically, but its memory is still very much alive in
the tradition – was not so much to provide content-specific training to a population
(or even a section thereof ), but rather to sift that population to find a potential
elite on the basis of various assessed abilities. This does not mean that the sorting
was done badly – far from it; it means that sorting – classification into a hierarchy
– was indeed effected. The question of content, controlled more or less to permit
hierarchical classification, became secondary, indeed superfluous. Moreover, once
selected, the pupil could simply forget everything learned.
or on mental exercise…
In a more democratic society such as that of the United States of America,
where secondary education has long been more open than in most countries in the
European tradition, some people also felt that it was most important for secondary
school pupils, not so much to learn facts or acquire “useful” skills – which may
seem paradoxical since the country is generally regarded as pragmatic, but to develop
intellectual strength, so to speak, through mental “muscle-building” exercises: it
mattered little which exercise the pupil used to develop mental “muscle”, as content
in this setting was merely the exercise.
The first consequence of this relative disparagement was naturally a rapid and
unimpeded obsolescence of such content, often to the point of being utterly out of
date, which apparently did not trouble the authorities in many societies at all.
Secondary education often deaf to calls for knowledge or
from the outside world
Yet that approach to secondary education, designed to last forever as long as it
discharged its function, was challenged and strongly criticized. In all countries there
was a pressing need for knowledge and people began to think that young people
in secondary schools should learn science or modern languages – and not only the
classics – or acquire, for instance, some preparatory vocational skills.
Accumulation rather than reform
Subsequently – and this still obtains today – as no one had the key to the
box of content taught and no one could reset the list of requisite disciplines whose
justification was lost in the mists of tradition, new content and new disciplines were
simply added from time to time. As the absurdity of this development was often
quite obvious, some officials attempted to act on teaching methods, as if they could
12
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
somehow make a menu, composed by merely combining dishes and without taking
any dietary rules into account, more digestible.
The historical circumstance which caused, and still causes, the greatest problems
for secondary education was not so much the explosive growth of the knowledge
that had to be assimilated, but rather the opening of secondary education to new
sectors of the public. Neither the long-standing debate on the “democratization”
of secondary education which is still under way in many countries, nor the ways
in which it was resisted, primarily through the lingering claim that the mass of the
people or some people or some categories of people could not be educated, shall be
discussed here. Nor shall the way in which the role of secondary education in basic
education has occasionally been downplayed, even at the international level.1 Only
the approach taken in addressing these issues from the standpoint of educational
content will be considered.
Doors opened, but content unchanged
The most significant feature of the democratic opening of the door to secondary
education is that the process has been carried out without any consideration being
given to how content should be changed. It was indeed somewhat absurd, not to
say negligent, to act as if the new pupils, from social backgrounds untouched by
modern forms of knowledge transmitted by schools, would be moulded readily
to an alien culture. Even in South Africa after the end of apartheid the heads of
educational institutions, most of whom had agreed to open their schools to black
pupils, considered that this should lead to no change in the existing curriculum and
clung to the idea of integration in terms of intake only.
Not only was this opportunity for rethinking content generally missed, but
there was also a general refusal to consider the new pupils’ relationship to knowledge;
that relationship was by definition foreign to the view of content that had been the
tacit but shared understanding of most traditional secondary pupils that its primary
purpose was selective. As more pupils gained access to increasingly “comprehensive”
secondary schools, educational content grew in importance as the selective function
gradually lost ground.
In some countries the illusion that the wider spread of knowledge was merely
a matter of pupil numbers has been the underlying cause of some highly persistent
difficulties: newly independent countries have not been eager to discontinue and
reconsider secondary education content inherited from colonial times, apart from a
few untenably inadequate disciplines.
1
Colin Power, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education, said in 1999: “We in UNESCO
have put much emphasis into basic and higher education, and have neglected the young people in the
middle”. The World Bank, by contrast, has taken even longer to recognize the importance of secondary
education.
13
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
No one was trained in that field and even the international technical assistance
from the North has not always provided the necessary tools for these countries to win
their independence in the domain of the curriculum.
Secondary education is no abstraction: in every country there are men and
women who may have been secondary pupils, professionals, such as teachers, who are
involved in secondary education day by day, and a number of advisers with varying
degrees of expertise, either subject specialists or more wide-ranging intellectuals.
Whatever their political commitments, this relatively well-organized public opinion
is conservative on the subject of content and not disposed to reconsider what is often
regarded as its heritage, which should not be touched.
Nevertheless, in regard to the content of education, one may well feel that in
many countries secondary education has been opened up to the masses under an
illusion that it was enough “to rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic”. There have
been, and there still are, many victims.
Inventing a “comprehensive” culture is no easy matter
The question of secondary education content has often been avoided or
circumvented by policy-makers no doubt because it is one of the most intractable
issues that could ever arise, for it is, more than any other policy issue, concomitantly
burdened by the weight of the past, since one of the functions of education is obviously
the transmission of culture from one generation to the next, and the future, since it
determines the knowledge and skills that children and young people will acquire.
Economic and social developments and the drive for knowledge have gradually
obliged secondary education in more and more countries to cater for all young
people and not for a social or academic elite only: change has sometimes been fast,
but often extremely slow (in France, for instance, it took almost the whole of the
twentieth century to finally settle the political debate about opening the “junior
secondary” school to all) even for a structural change only and a decision simply to
“open a door”. Where education has opened up – with secondary education for all
becoming a reality in more and more places – curriculum goals and the reference
culture have not in many cases been effectively redefined. A “comprehensive” culture
is even more difficult to define and establish than a “comprehensive” school because
it is at this point that the cultural differences among communities, the various forms
of social selfishness, the ideological choices of individual groups, and the different
ways of relating to knowledge and schooling finally come to light.
The difficulty of the issue will only be highlighted at this stage, before any
attempt to analyse or resolve it. It will be recalled that many people believed, at least
ostensibly, that education could be developed and, in particular, be opened up to
new sectors of the public, without changing its content.
The question was not one of working out basic tools (as in the case of primary
education), or of following the logic of the development of scientific research (as in
14
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
the universities), or even of closely following the evolving skills required for a craft
or profession (as in vocational training), but rather of attempting to define what
humanizes human beings, individually and collectively, to the utmost.
Could any task be more ambitious, difficult and necessary?
A media environment which exalts ever-changing “form”
over never-changing “content”
The attention paid by societies to what is taught in their schools varies
considerably depending, firstly, on their conception of education and, secondly,
on the extent to which that conception is consistent with predominant cultural
ideas. There have been times when society and schools have developed in step, in a
relationship of mutual “osmosis”.
Educational content and the culture of zapping
Many no doubt deplorable
The legitimacy and value
but nevertheless real aspects of the
of academic knowledge
globalization of a mass “culture”
consist of the proliferation of
The situation here is more complex
communication “signs” and media
nowadays: in most countries, secondary
(including television, advertising,
school enjoys a high status with the
digital networks and the organization
public, which wants its children to
of world sport, show business,
have a school education and is easily
or meretricious adulation of the
upset and frightened by the spectre of
celebrities of the moment) which
“academic failure”; at the same time
matter more than the content
the perceived legitimacy and value of
conveyed. Marshall McLuhan’s idea
“academic knowledge” in society are low
that the medium itself is increasingly
by comparison, for instance, with those
the real message which our societies
of “the news” disseminated by the media
exchange, though old now, has
or the “information” conveyed by the
come true and it is thus increasingly
other main vehicles of mass culture.
difficult for education to continue in
such circumstances to transmit not
only a “form” but above all “content” which it regards as important and purportedly
defines irrespective of the tools used to convey it. As the curricula used in schools
in the various countries always champion particular values and determine which
concepts and skills are indispensable, are highly distinctive in a world whose discourse
generally “zaps” constantly from one source of information to another and form one
opinion to another, generally with immediate results. In a world where change for its
own sake is becoming a value, there is little objective support for education, which
15
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
must on the contrary ensure that particular knowledge or values endure, when it
comes to “legislating” on the content of such enduring material.
An unfavourable intellectual climate
The “philosophies of suspicion”
Since the nineteenth century various philosophers have, from their standpoints,
taught us to doubt the apparent meaning of words: ever since Freud has shown that
thoughts could be dictated by the subconscious, and Marx that they reflect one’s
position in the organization of wealth production, while Bourdieu has explained
that, under cover of its supposedly liberating, or at least neutral, content, education
was in fact a mechanism of social reproduction, it has clearly become harder to
support the rationale behind educational content.
Similarly, a number of sociological customs and methods may be mentioned,
such as questions asked to gain insights into what permits educational progress
– about the “institution effect”, the “teacher effect”, the “class effect” and so on,
sometimes obscuring the fact that what the pupils learn does not depend only on the
people involved, but also on the quality and relevance of the content taught.
The philosophies of suspicion have thus also raised doubts about the assurance
with which schools seek to transmit knowledge, spread values and champion and
illustrate ideas. These currents of thought ought not to dissuade us from acting:
while they appear to make our task harder, or have perhaps helped occasionally to
raise doubts in schools about what they want to teach, our problems in this area must
nevertheless become our friends – and they can.
For, all in all, what could be better than to have to teach content that has
first been scrutinized by such philosophies and has thus been “purified”, critically
evaluated and even “renewed”.
“Postmodernism”
It is generally accepted, however, that support for the rationale behind
“educational content” is threatened by another type of relativism which arises not so
much from the impact of ideologies that sought to explain the world as from their
decline. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the somewhat rash proclamation of the final
triumph of a market economy defined according to laissez-faire dogma have led some
to believe in the “end of history”. More generally, the “postmodern” environment is
marked by the end of those grand goal-oriented historical “narratives” such as that of
scientific progress as liberator or the Revolution. While it is true that some religious
movements today may in some cases take the place of the great ideologies that have
marked modernism, the spirit of the age is often one of relativism and an inward16
WHY DO EDUCATION POLICIES CONSTANTLY NEGLECT CONTENT?
looking individualism – which does not make it any easier to define collective and
reasonably self-assured educational content.
Irresponsible science?
Science itself, which education
Science challenged
might well expect to be its natural
ally, is not without responsibility
Science often seems to disregard moral
here, for it now fosters hyperor political issues, oblivious to François
specialization among its devotees
Rabelais’s warning that “science without
and often seems to have adapted to
conscience is but the ruin of the soul”.
“progress in knowledge of the parts
It is precisely secondary education,
and paradoxical ignorance of the
which provides pupils with an allwhole”.2 It often seems to disregard
round education, which touches the
moral and civic issues, oblivious to
conscience and addresses the meaning of
François Rabelais’s warning that
knowledge.
“science without conscience is but
the ruin of the soul”. It is precisely
secondary education, which provides pupils with an all-round education, which
touches the conscience and addresses the meaning of knowledge.
Here again, perception of difficulties should not engender paralysis; rather, it
should serve as support in determining exactly what can and should be expected
from education in these circumstances.
Should schools be abolished because they seem to be increasingly distant
from the discourse of the world or because science does not always shoulder its
responsibilities? Or has the time come to understand better than ever before just in
what respect education is indispensable and what should be taught? Or of seeing how
strategically important educational content is today during the adolescent years, the
best time for people to become human?
2
Edgar Morin, Seven complex lessons in education for the future, UNESCO, 2001.
17
2
HOW IS THE ISSUE
OF CONTENT
“STRATEGIC”?
19
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
The importance and boundaries of “strategic” concerns in
education
“Strategic” is a term that should always be used with care – especially in
education. The educational action of any community is seemingly always “strategic”
since it is goal-oriented. This is all the more so in regard to educational content,
as the policy-making body in question may well regard as “strategic” its intention
to make radical changes to the knowledge, skills or even the state of mind of the
population that it serves.
The importance of goal-orientation
It is important that this should be so and there is no question of denying the
importance of goal-oriented positions which are indeed strategic in nature. The
Preamble to the UNESCO Constitution provides a good example of strategic goal
orientation when it declares that since “wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the
minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”.
The risk, however, is that education may attempt to advance too quickly in the
belief that, as it is to mould tomorrow’s adults, it can achieve everything and that, all
over the world, officials in charge of secondary education, in which enrolment rose
from 40 million to 500 million pupils in the last 60 years, hold the keys to the world
in their hands!
School does not act alone
It is true that education is enormously influential and instils many skills and
“ways of thinking, feeling and speaking”3 which characterize a society as a whole
and structure it by differentiation into individuals and groups. Nevertheless, the
impact of educational content on population groups is usually associated with many
other non-educational policy decisions, which are not always taken at the same level,
and with the cultural, media and scientific environment as a whole. Of course, the
school system and decisions on content may affect the economy, the dissemination
of techniques, the attention paid to the environment, the quality of the democratic
process, public health, relations among groups and peoples and so on, but education
always acts “in context” in the various fields: its achievements are important, but do
not include full employment, the establishment of healthcare, poverty reduction or
the administration of justice.
In determining educational content, officials exercise to some extent powers with
which they have been vested. If they were to open educational content more to, say,
considerations of justice, its limits would soon be reached: a school system can remain
wholly unjust despite content that addresses justice and, above all, such content cannot
reduce injustice in the world, whether the school system is unjust or not.
3
20
Jerome Bruner, Culture, Mind and Education, in Moon, Bob, op. cit.
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
Even though the exercise of the school’s content-derived strategic function is
thus linked to a decision-making context, the outcome of the school’s failure to use
its strategic position to the full, in particular to anticipate, is often perceived to be
negative. Failure by the education system to perform its strategic function entails,
for instance, ignoring the issue of the relationship between a country’s dominant
educational culture and the culture of minorities or vulnerable groups and being
forced to improvise, for lack of foresight, as in the United Kingdom in 1981, after the
Brixton riots, when a multicultural dimension was added to curricula. Again, failure
by the education system to recognize its strategic position means that it will not deal
preventively with the countless issues that society, in all its diversity, expects to be
“added” to its educational content, which then resembles a supermarket shopping
list.
The strategic position of education in regard to the content of secondary
education may be determined precisely under three headings, namely the advent of
the “knowledge society”, educational challenges relating to the issue of knowledge
and the education system’s capacity to promote greater justice.
The content of secondary education: a core issue of
the “knowledge society”
If a “knowledge society” must emerge or is emerging at the international or at a
lower level, does education have a part to play in that development, or not?
Education for all: a right to content
If “knowledge society” means one whose aim is to “spread” knowledge to
everyone, then it can indeed have major implications for education: it clearly means
that all forms of education – that is, both the structure of education systems and the
content taught, which is under consideration here – whose sole function is to select
a small group of pupils who alone are to receive the knowledge that matters must
very shortly be wiped off the map. The notion of “knowledge society” can be found
in the context of education for all, as proclaimed in the 1990 World Declaration on
Education for All (Jomtien, Thailand), which rests on the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. Under this concept, the knowledge and skills widely disseminated
in a given society should meet “basic” educational needs. By no means limited to
primary education,4 the needs defined at Jomtien raise the issue of education content
in each context, a question that automatically becomes a strategic one.
4
Jomtien Declaration: “Basic learning needs comprise both essential learning tools […] and the basic
learning content (such as the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes) required by human beings to
survive, to develop their full capacities, to live and work in dignity, to participate fully in development,
to improve the quality of their lives, to make informed decisions, and to continue learning.”
21
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
The concept of education for all (EFA) refers not merely to a fixed target in
terms of number of years’ schooling but also to an expected outcome that is necessary
for all, which means EFA content becomes a right, and this gives it a much more
central status.
The content of initial education in the context of lifelong education
The “lifelong education” project, launched by UNESCO since the 1970s,
which has since developed gradually into “lifelong learning”, is part of the knowledge
society project and increases the importance of the content of secondary education,
in that such content is no longer deemed to lead only to a qualification that gives
access to work or further education, but constitutes the foundation for and key to
later “lifelong” learning. Moreover, does it not presage a reduction in the importance
of diplomas for life and in the emphasis in initial education of the selective function
which, as indicated above, has often drawn officials’ and stakeholders’ attention away
from educational content?
Competitive efficiency or fairness?
No doubt the concept of knowledge society is fairly complex ideologically in
that it is mentioned in various, even divergent situations. The approach to educational
content under the concept, in the two scenarios usually adopted by education
systems, will now be considered.
• In the first scenario, education systems seek to facilitate the establishment
of the knowledge society by developing competition among systems,
establishments and pupils: they are thus concerned about the quality of
education and learning and the educational content that will assure the
quality sought.
• In the second scenario, education systems consider that it is both more
effective and more efficient to redouble efforts to achieve greater justice
by giving access to secondary education to sectors of the population who
previously had no access, since such investments have a higher rate of return
than investments on population groups that are already enrolled. A system
that takes such a course of action cannot fail to be aware of the core issues
that the goal of justices raises in regard to educational content.
22
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
In short, every country encounters a serious
difficulty which permeates the whole issue of the
content of secondary education, as soon as it seeks
to assert its place within
an international society increasingly known as
“knowledge societies” (the
concept is of course too
loose, but the difficulty is
real enough nevertheless).
Secondary schooling – a crucially
important stage
Primary education for young children concentrates
on literacy and the acquisition of skills defined
without giving rise to any controversy while higher
education aims rather at specialized knowledge.
What kind of education should be provided between
these two stages? The predominant feeling at present
is that this stage is of capital importance since it is
the stage at which the future worker, citizen and
adult must be trained. Who, then, can deny that it
would be a grave mistake to overlook the issue?
Meeting the most pressing challenges on the knowledge
front
There is nothing ethereal about the knowledge that secondary schools can
consider teaching: questions about them arise in several contexts, three of which are:
general history, epistemology and science.
It will not be claimed here that secondary education was designed easily in other
epochs; from Ignatius of Loyola to Auguste Comte, to mention but two dissimilar
Western traditions, human ability to determine which forms of knowledge should be
taught to deal with the problems of the times has been remarkable.
The situation today is difficult because it is unprecedented on at least two fronts:
•
secondary education now serves new sectors of the public more varied
than any order of teachers has had to cope with ever in the past, anywhere
in the world;
•
people, having woken up from a variety of great Utopian dreams, aware
of how complex the world is and exposed to many sources of information,
have never been so sceptical about the way in which schools explain the
world.
Making room for the new clientele in teaching content
Of course, the extraordinary increase in the diversity of persons served affords
an opportunity for education to place greater emphasis on humanity. It is also a great
challenge and a heavy responsibility.
The organizations which handle education in post-conflict situations or
refugee camps5 often point out that their pupils, who have just emerged from or
23
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
live in nearly intolerable conditions are
urgently looking for education which
gives meaning to a world that no longer
seems meaningful.
For instance, they express a greatly
heightened sense of fairness, to which
educational content must be responsive.
It is supremely important not to
disappoint them; but it is not easy.
Our schools face demands for an
explanation of the world
New pupils: a challenge for
schools
Children and young people from
poor backgrounds, for instance, are
now reaching secondary education, at
least in the countries where enrolment
is very high; they bring with them
questions and demands about what
they learn at school which are often
far more disruptive than those of the
traditional secondary pupils from
more sheltered backgrounds.
On another scale, the new phase of
human history which began at the end of the Cold War has rendered the need for
societies to make decisions on educational content even more fearsomely agonizing
than before. The Cold War, by dividing the post-Yalta (1945) world into two blocs
with opposing ideologies, provided each
bloc with a relatively simple world view.
Protection from the dangers
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,
of extremism
ending that system and the “balance
of terror”, many local conflicts flared
Now that the systems no longer offer
up in Europe, Asia and Africa, so that
pupils a plausible account of the world,
stakeholders faced less urgent problems
young minds no longer “protected” by
than in the previous 50 years such as
them are in danger, in some cases, of
nationalism of various kinds and intersigning up to one desperate extremism
ethnic conflicts. The world has become
or another. Proper secondary content
an enduringly more complicated place:
should whenever possible shelter the
so too have the task and responsibility of
world’s youth from these counsels of
those whose duty is to explain the world
despair.
to the younger generations.
More generally, the collapse or at
least the erosion of the major world explanatory systems mentioned above – the
account of unending human progress through science and technology, for instance,
or through the predicted victory of a particular political ideology – is a hallmark of
our age and, as a result, people are in a sense no longer “sheltered from reality” by
these major systems. This in itself increases the responsibility of education systems.
Paradoxically, while advocates of “the market” or even of democracy – which
cannot be placed on the same footing – appear to be in the ascendancy in the world
today, they do not provide an account of the world that satisfies young minds:
5
24
See UNESCO’s Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE).
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
neither of these accounts can, for instance, hide the fact that they constantly increase
inequalities, in the case of the market, or that they often fail to combat injustice
effectively, in the case of democracy. The systems that dominate today’s world
experience great difficulty in providing satisfactory explanations of the world and in
responding in terms of values. This further increases the responsibility to be borne
by education.
Education to counter the excesses of mass culture
In regard to the way in which people now relate to available knowledge, the task
of secondary education has also become more demanding. Today’s schools are active
in an epistemic landscape that is more complex than ever before. Whereas in the
past, the school’s only possible “competitors”, though not in all cases, were religion
or the family, there is now an undefined “mass culture”, monitored by no authority
and most often the outcome of market forces alone, which constantly competes with
education.
Mass culture is no stranger to the world of knowledge: it gives an idea of one
kind of relationship with that world, one that is seemingly often easy, immediately
gratifying, free from the burden of knowledge systems devised by human beings and
from academic constraints and timetables.
The aim of mass culture is not to further human progress or to answer questions
raised by humanity, but to meet cultural consumer needs artificially created for market
purposes. If education officials fail to deal effectively with the issue of educational
content, then the content of mass culture, with all its irresponsible seductions and
zapping-mode offers of the moment, will fill the void left by the public authorities.
Now while the content of mass culture should not be regarded as unworthy of
notice, as will be noted below, it is strongly felt that it should not be allowed readily
to exert any monopolistic influence on the public mind.
Secondary education does more than provide basic tools
Another danger is that if officials fail to address the content of secondary
education in the light of its strategic importance, a host of false solutions will be
proposed which could commit education systems to paths whose dangers may not
be immediately apparent. The conception of knowledge for secondary education
consisting, for instance, of a small number of “basic skills”, barely distinguishable
from those to be acquired during primary education, poses a real and insidious threat:
it is not irrelevant, however, that some schools systems, traumatized in some cases by
the glaring failure of secondary education to serve some sectors of the public, react by
calling for education to go “back to basics”, symptomatic of a lack of understanding
of the issues.
This book’s realistic explanation of issues will dissuade officials from taking any
approach to secondary education that entails such a conception.
25
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
The task of identifying and organizing academic knowledge
The empire building of mass culture or the legitimation of third-rate education
are dangers that must always be considered whenever officials have an insufficient
grasp of the issues relating to the content of secondary education – the most pressing
issues arise from the very heart of the adventure of human knowledge. Secondary
education is indeed in an ambivalent position: in one sense it has a firm hold on
knowledge that it helps to disseminate, while being highly dependent on the state
of such knowledge, and in particular on its educational value, which may be more
or less assured. Two strategically relevant characteristics of contemporary knowledge
may be mentioned in that regard.
• Firstly, the huge mass of rapidly growing human knowledge has quite recently
been characterized by multiformity and fluidity, but the days are gone when a
small number of universities and libraries could function as both conservatory
and reasonably comprehensive laboratory of all available knowledge. The
presentation – and above all the circulation – of the elements of knowledge
by means of electronic networks produce complex and constantly changing
knowledge maps: secondary education has long had the duty, which will be
discussed below, of selecting and transposing from the body of academic
knowledge, ultimately defining knowledge to be learnt in school.
This issue is a strategic one today, for if secondary education, whose primary
objective is training, does not acquire the means of finding its bearings in the world
of academic knowledge, continually reshaped by electronic networks, then the
knowledge disseminated by its schools is unlikely to be anything but arbitrary. The
task of navigating and mapping out content selections required in every education
system involves a considerable amount of work and might gain from some sharing
between systems, perhaps using major documentation tools that organizations such
as UNESCO might be commissioned to produce.
• Secondly, the feature of contemporary knowledge which poses a problem
regarding the content of secondary education is its extreme Balkanization.
The world of academic knowledge is not organized according to educational
goals but according to research goals that are generally highly specialized,
and this has been criticized repeatedly by Edgar Morin.6 The gap between
research and teaching is wider than ever before: research is no longer made
available to education systems as a coherent and consistent whole; the school
system therefore now has the great responsibility of not only establishing
benchmarks but also of building relationships – which used to come readymade – among the highly Balkanized items of research knowledge and will
be obliged to secure a coherent body of knowledge for education purposes.
The world of education has a high level of accountability which it cannot
discharge properly unless it introduces new functions to ensure that there is mediation
6
26
Edgar Morin, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, op. cit.
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
between the worlds of research and education; such functions might, here again,
advantageously be shared, on account of the cost involved.
Science education is a strategic issue in itself
In dealing with knowledge, other strategic issues are linked more directly to
scientific content: if virtually all human communities agree on the importance of
secondary education, it is indeed because, in the main, science and technology can
legitimately be expected to provide a number of solutions to the problems facing
today’s world. This applies to many problems to which technological developments
wrought by the human species has given rise. Science education must be developed
everywhere, and this raises a universal strategic question, as does the widely
canvassed issue of sustainable development. Humanity’s ability to deal with some of
its most serious problems largely depends, then, on the future content of secondary
education and on its ability to guide the finest minds towards the sciences and
sustainable development and to use its talent to transform science education to make
it stimulating and relevant to existing problems.
Secondary education: a worldwide social challenge
• Important though they may be, the strategic challenges in regard to the
content of secondary education in view of the advent of the yet ill-defined
“knowledge society” and the questions raised about knowledge pale to
insignificance beside the issue, which has major social implications, of
whether secondary education, as it develops, should be marked by more
inequalities and injustice among individuals, social classes, nations and
regions of the world or whether justice, or at least equity, should be included
in its curriculum. What is the importance of content in this regard?
An immense promise to a vulnerable sector of the public
Even where secondary education is developed because the authorities see
it primarily as a factor of economic development, capable of providing a labour
force endowed with the skills and flexibility that will raise productivity,7 secondary
education has yet another function: it proposes, for the first time in human history,
to invite all young people, whatever their gender, social class, family wealth, religious
identity, caste, nationality, family origin or primary education attainment, to share in
human knowledge, complex skills, enlightened citizenship and culture!
7
As mentioned above, in economic terms the highest returns have been yielded by investments in
education for the most disadvantaged groups: see Martin Carnoy, Globalization and Educational
Reform, IIEP-UNESCO, Paris, 1999.
27
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
The responsibility, for those who open these doors, is an enormous one, for
it amounts to a revolutionary promise to all young people, who take heed, that
education will give them the right to enter the Human City to work, make decisions
and promote human development. This promise cannot go unnoticed by those who
have previously been excluded, not only from a minimum of material comfort, access
to knowledge, skills, culture, work and social mobility, but also from the exercise of
citizenship and the awareness of their rights.
Secondary education’s new clientele is often composed of young people who
have become very vulnerable owing to the interplay of social and international factors and, at the same time, they
constitute a clientele of strategic
An invitation to share in human
importance: their enrolment
knowledge
will largely determine opporSecondary education has yet another function:
tunities for humanity to make
it proposes, for the first time in human history,
progress in improving mutual
to invite all young people, whatever their
understanding and in avoiding
gender, social class, family wealth, religious
outbreaks of violence within or
identity, caste, nationality, family origin or
among nations which would be
primary education attainment, to share in
unleashed if such youth were
human knowledge, complex skills, enlightened
rejected.
citizenship and culture!
Instances of injustice in
the world are countless, affecting whole regions, economically exploited social groups,
various minorities, girls, migrants, refugees, disabled pupils, and others. Education is
not, of course, at fault, but it must be understood that it could easily be at fault if it
does nothing to use the tools at its disposal to combat injustice.
Ensuring that democratization causes no more injustice
The problem is that all too often one thinks that education will promote justice
through structural decisions, individual pupil attention, good teaching methods and
so on, losing sight, here again, of the strategic character of educational content. How
can the next two difficulties not be evident?:
• Many research findings have shown that if the “democratic” widening of
the secondary education intake is not matched by a proportionate increase
in employment or higher education opportunities, the result is often fiercer
competition and anxiety among pupils, as the children of economically
modest and culturally ill-prepared families are not assisted as the others are
and fail more often at school. Such “failure”, if measures are not taken to
guard against it, is caused by the mismanagement of democratization!
• Paradoxically, when secondary education is no longer the preserve of an
academic and/or social elite, its role becomes increasingly clearly one of
selection, previously wrought by social forces. This means that failure, if no
28
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
preventive action is taken, is not systemic, akin to a one-off manufacturing
defect, but entirely component-related!
If education is to avoid increasing injustice in the world, it has to struggle
against itself as much as against the world. It is clearly the content of education that
will be impugned on the ground that the content of secondary education, inherited
all too often from a time when democratic values formed no part of the secondary
school ethos, has not been miraculously transformed in the interim.
Academic failure, which primarily affects pupils from vulnerable groups, takes
a variety of forms but stem mainly, according to the pupils themselves, from disaffection with what they consider to be pointless and unnecessary knowledge and
culture transmitted by schools. Conversely, their vision of the world as “poor” people or minorities, their language, their migrant culture and their artistic practices
are all ignored or regarded as
matters to be kept apart from
Changing content that fosters
the “real” content of secondary
prejudice
education. Moreover, secondThe educational content of former colonies
ary education does not readily
and of countries where secondary education
hand over its keys, leaves many
has for decades primarily been a “certificate
of the skills needed for success
of bourgeoisie” often still spreads the same
unmentioned, inexplicit, since
prejudices and the same closed cultural
they are assumed to have been
views, thus constituting the source of much
acquired elsewhere. Content
of the difficulty faced by “new” pupils from
that is required but not taught
communities that have never endorsed the
is a source of injustice.
content selected.
The more favoured parts
of the school intake, on the other hand, are readier to accept the school curriculum
without asking too many questions, for two sometimes contradictory reasons: some
of them have understood that education is designed primarily for selection and that
whatever the content, good marks and good results in the various selection tests are
of the essence, while others become interested in knowledge in and for itself.
The “newcomers” realize that in the selection process they are seriously
disadvantaged economically, socially and culturally and that, instead of endeavouring
to provide them with adequate intellectual nourishment, the education system all
too often seems to give up offering them anything but scraps of knowledge, rote
learning and the daily accomplishment of “tasks” as pupils.
Violence is often done to the more vulnerable pupils by the very content of
education and on the basis of the type of relationship to knowledge proposed: for
many of them boredom, failure, increasing truancy and in the end “dropping out”8
without any qualification, are often the hallmarks of failure at school, in society and
in life.
29
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
Among countries and in each country, there is a need for justice and the very
extension of education holds out an even stronger promise that the need will be met.
Disregard of the fact that education holds out an idea of justice in the content it
imparts and in the relationship that it creates between pupils and knowledge amounts
to creating conditions for academic failure as educators and to preparing the ground
in various societies for violence, which in some cases might even seem justified.
Conditions for the emergence of strategic considerations
Many countries or educational authorities have long been aware of all these
issues for years: the United Kingdom, quite against its educational traditions, decided
to establish a National Curriculum in 1986; Estonia has changed its curriculum three
times in a decade; Latin American and African countries have earnestly engaged with
these issues; and UNESCO’s Member States have raised the issue of the content and
quality of secondary education again and again at the 43rd International Conference
on Education (Geneva, Autumn 2004); Madagascar and Italy, among others, have
expressed new, and even iconoclastic,9 opinions: all this is clearly evidence that greater
attention is being paid to these matters.
Many countries see, moreover, that the quality of their secondary education
also determines the quality of training received by primary school teachers and that
the educational content imparted to secondary school pupils will determine whether
they are capable of planning the further development of primary education. France,
for instance, continues to teach science to the non-science streams in secondary
schools on the grounds that many future primary school teachers opt for those
streams and it is therefore desirable that they should be reasonably familiar with the
experimental sciences.
International comparisons of performance: an insufficient basis for
strategies on content
Some do take the view that one can concentrate very pragmatically on the
quality of education without dwelling too much on “content” in the abstract.
A growing number of countries would therefore rather measure “results” or
“capabilities” domestically and indeed internationally, especially in the light of work
done by OECD. Such surveys obviously provide interesting pointers, but owing to
their focus on quantifiable comparison, the data are not all-inclusive: for the sake of
30
8
French speakers are probably more familiar with the English term “dropping out” than with the
suggestive expression “décrochage” or “getting off the peg” popularized by French speakers from
Quebec.
9
The Italian President of the Council, in defining educational content, at least showed that he appreciated
some of the issues and stressed the guiding role of the three “I”s: “impresa” (enterprise), “inglese”
(English) and the “Internet”! Most significantly, “Italia” was not included.
HOW IS THE ISSUE OF CONTENT “STRATEGIC”?
comparability, especially across countries, only very general outputs may be shown
and thus, here again, the researchers’ and policy-makers’ attention is directed more to
comparable educational conditions, structures, the management of pupil flows, and
so on, than to the selection of educational content.
If a survey is confined to these indicators, one is likely to lose one’s bearings:
after their dismal results in the TIMSS10 mathematics survey, the United Kingdom
and Australia decided to bolster their rather rigid prescriptions on the content of
mathematics in the hope of catching up with South Korea and Singapore … just
as those countries were phasing out those mathematics yardsticks which, it was felt,
stifled pupils’ creativity!
Secondary education systems are unlikely to achieve their organizational goal
(of enrolling 500 million young people and work effectively with them) or their
social objective (of accommodating a very wide variety of pupils, often from areas
far away from the prevailing culture in which secondary education is provided) unless everyone fully recognizes
two facts: first, that secondary
The exorbitant cost of inadequate
education can only succeed if
content
its agenda includes quality and
Nothing costs more than inadequate content.
specifically, that the quality of
It is costly for the system, which spends its
the content taught and learnt
resources on it inefficiently, costly for the
is of the essence; and secondly,
pupils who waste their time on it or drop
that the need for equity, the
out of school early, costly for society and
goal of justice are likewise of
the economy which derive no benefit from
central importance and perknowledge untaught and the skills unlearnt.
force require consideration of
Effective content has development and above
educational content.
all implementation and support costs that
are not commensurate with the waste caused
by irrelevant content that either prevent real
learning or lead to insufficient learning.
10
Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study.
31
3
EDUCATIONAL
HERITAGE AND
THE DUTY TO TAKE
STOCK
33
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
Education and the past: continuity and discontinuities
Education, as with all human activity, never writes about its developments on
a blank page: it must on the contrary display awareness of the past whose action it
carries forward, and evince understanding of that past, to which it is not bound.
In education, however, relations with the past are particularly complicated and
officials must be particularly aware of this, if they are not to lose a firm hold on the
future because of an ill-digested past.
The two things that need to be handed on
Education systems very often require schools to transmit knowledge, skills
and values from one generation to the next. This is by no means anecdotal or oldfashioned: schooling, just like the learning done at home, is designed to give children
the rules of various codes, including language, on the one hand, and to relay to them
such knowledge of the world as the grown-ups have managed to gather and preserve,
on the other.
In the case of the codes and the rules governing life in society, it is obvious that
such transmission is essential and that the school is not being asked to change the
code in any way but to teach it: the product of the past quite properly constitutes
the law in this area.
In regard to the transmission of knowledge, here again, no school can work
as from a clean slate, for it is definitely one of the school’s tasks to help the minds
entrusted to its care to scramble onto “the shoulders of giants” – all those inventors,
scholars and explorers from the past. Transmission of heritage is arguably one of
the school’s core functions in all those societies where families have become used to
delegating it to the school, and have themselves lost the art in consequence.
This is, then, a feature of the human condition that education, and in regard
to knowledge, secondary education, must accommodate: the responsibility of the
human species not only to “train” the young, but also to transmit a great deal to
them, is far greater than that of any other species.
“Transmission” – a cause of conservatism or a leaven for innovation?
One could, however, make a variety of inferences from this: if human beings
do aim, in virtually all historical situations, to transmit all that is necessary to their
children, this means that each generation can make its mark on what is handed on,
so that it will never be exactly the same in any two generations.
This is powerful leaven for innovation, conducive to transmission. Would it be
understandable if, for instance, secondary education in the early twenty-first century
were not only to ignore the scientific developments of the last generation, but also
fail to teach pupils about the totalitarian ideologies that loomed so large over the
34
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
previous century, or the crimes of “ethnic cleansing” which marked the previous
decade? Here, too, safeguards are available.
Insightful inventory of the heritage
The heritage, in terms of educational content, currently held by secondary
education officials worldwide will thus be reviewed with these considerations in
mind. The dominant impression is not one of pellucid transmission of a recently
updated corpus compiled in a manner and for reasons known to all, but a much
more frustrating transmission of heritage whose origin is not really understood by
stakeholders, which looks more like a mere accumulation transmitted witlessly and
without change for generations, all rank and order lost!
In some cases, often in
Conservatism and renewal
regard to content and options
offered at upper secondary
“Do you have anything at all to hand on from
level, fluctuations within a
one generation to the next?” one is tempted to
single system may give cause for
ask officials who are in such a hurry to change
concern. It is therefore necessary
everything or make everything optional!
to take stock of everything
Unreasoned conservatism should give as much
offered under the banner of
cause for concern as pointless innovation.
“heritage” so as to bring it back
to life: content is so important a matter, so crucial to the success or failure of entire
systems in which communities, sometimes the poorest communities, invest so much
of their resources, that for this reason alone nothing should be accepted without
scrutiny.
The complex heritage of secondary education
The first point regarding the heritage in terms of form and content is that “the”
inherited content of secondary education is narrow and meagre and at the same
time rich, varied and easily contradictory. Narrow and meagre, because it has been
produced and used as educational content by civilizations, societies and social groups
which represent only a fairly small portion of human experience; but rich, varied and
contradictory because those same civilizations, societies and groups have amassed a
range of experiences and built up a range of ways for pupils to relate to knowledge,
without any stock-taking by each and every generation.
The point is one generation does not inherit only lessons to which it may add
its own content; it inherits complex layers of content that have not been questioned,
re-organized, sorted or rearranged clearly for centuries.
35
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
A heritage with a particular history
This inherited content, which has put its stamp so unmistakably on secondary
education, comprises first of all content inherited from the history of knowledge
within the civilization of Europe, the model shared or imposed around the world ever
since the great European expansion during the Renaissance. That content is urban,
rather than rural, sustained by enthusiasm aroused by the development of science
and technology, an enthusiasm that on occasion turned into scientistic delusions; it
is content “of the North”, rather than “of the South”, and in many countries, content
that belonged to the colonizing power.
This “European” content became established and recognized in Europe’s day of
triumph, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the age of European powers
with their warmongering nationalism. Such content can easily become dangerous,
for it is potentially full of nationalist, white-supremacist and colonialist scientistic
and industrialist references.
In those days secondary education in European countries was only for the
more privileged social groups, for whom it served the purposes of selection and
recognition, and so the content that has been inherited is also the content “of the
rich”, socially distinguished but ignorant of popular cultures in the rich countries
and of the cultures of peoples subjugated by or remote from the European “centre”.
It is content for pupils whose studies are perceived not as directly useful, but as
falling within the ancient category of “leisure”11 and beneficial for the heirs of earlier
aristocracies.
In many countries, also,
the content of secondary education has been developed in
a secularized setting, as if matters of religious faith had been
driven out of the public sphere:
but the reality is that this (inherited) conception of education that takes no account of
religion has perhaps no universal or definitive value.
An inheritance to be mistrusted
With the benefit of hindsight, it is now
obvious for the first time that the very
European nations which had invented the
main forms of knowledge dissemination
by secondary education among their elites
were also the nations which in the twentieth
century organized not only the massacre
of the First World War, but also the most
disastrous totalitarian regimes in the whole of
human history: there is indeed every reason to
mistrust the heritage received from such times
and peoples!
Lastly, whenever a conflict came to an end, the “victors’ content” came to the fore
among European countries
themselves, or between them and colonized nations. When Europe gave the world
a model of secondary education, which many regions have adopted, it did not also
11
36
The Greek word from which our “school”, “école”, “schüle”, “scuola” and others are derived is “scholè”,
and it means “leisure”.
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
give it the “antibodies” to ensure, for instance, that the syllabus of some disciplines
in post-conflict situations would not shore up and give legitimacy to what has been
won by force.
The tradition of “liberal culture”
Another element of the heritage, in part combined with the first, is of course
that of Humanism, or the “liberal” culture,12 a tradition followed by the social elite
but which became prized well beyond its original social setting.
According to the humanist tradition, pupils stand to gain if they maximize their
experience, in particular by becoming familiar with the great works of literature since
these are true distillations of experience. As they do so, they learn about the world
and about morality. Mastery of desire is manifestly more important than knowledge,
and the aim is to “manufacture” a Human Being who knows what is Good and
is capable of speaking well in public debate.13 This tradition of knowledge that is
“impractical” but enables people to engage in skill-building human experiences is
perfectly illustrated, for instance, by the definition of the prerequisites for the Indian
Civil Service in the British Empire, namely “a fairly good instruction in Latin and
Greek and a facility for composing verses in those languages … and a good training
in horsemanship”. It took the United Kingdom a very long time to discard the
humanist and anti-pragmatic model of culture so characteristic of the Victorian era,
after its adverse effects on economic growth became obvious.
Several strands of the heritage, linked to the ones above, involve the long-held
contrary view that the acquisition of “knowledge” was the ultimate goal of secondary
education.
Traditions geared to the transmission of knowledge
The first point is that the cognitive goal, which seems to be taken for granted
in many systems today, is in fact a feature of particular historical circumstance and
has appeared in a considerable variety of guises: secondary education officials in
the twenty-first century encounter words such as “encyclopaedic”, “classic(al)” and
“disciplines” whose past should be examined to determine how they may be used
today.
• One ancient model of knowledge with a most illustrious lineage is
“encyclopaedism”. “Encyclopaedic” is often used to describe pointlessly
cumbersome disciplinary content, cluttered with “untouchable” irrelevantly
and unreasonably accumulated facts from a mythical period when secondary
education was inconceivable without a weighty corpus of subject matter.
12
“Artes liberales” and “technaï eleutheraï” are the terms used in Antiquity and, mutatis mutandis, are
covered by the concept of “culture générale” in French, “bildung” in German, or “learning for its own
sake”, which are all part of the anti-utilitarian tradition.
13
The standard Latin formula is “vir bonus atque dicendi peritus” (the respectable and articulate man).
37
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
“Encyclopaedism”, which originated in the Hellenistic Schools, did not,
on the contrary, involve teaching a “discipline”, but the idea that the pupil
should study round a “circle” of subjects in order to acquire a general “allround” culture from fields of knowledge that were “equal” in status rather
than organized in a hierarchy.
• Another major feature of the educational legacy is the notion of “(the)
classics”, works that are suitable for “classes” since they represent a heritage
that the school is required to transmit. This reference to works that also
permit communal self-rediscovery and self-recognition is interesting in itself:
suffice it to consider its origins – young Greeks studied Homer’s works as
“classics” because of their value as poetry, certainly, but at least as much
because they could learn about the world, from astronomy to navigation,
“scientific” education being unknown at the time. This type of relationship
to reference literary works is now utterly out of date, of course, in that
schools teach science in a different and better way today. This means that
when officials call for “the classics” to be included in the compulsory syllabus
as part of their “heritage”, it is necessary at the very least for them to state
their goals clearly.
Patterns of thought that need reconsidering
In addition to the major models of transmission inherited from bygone
educational worlds whose echoes can still be clearly heard in today’s debates, content
designers and education stakeholders have often inherited a number of mental and
cultural maps which are highly influential but do not always give an accurate account
of the issues at stake, or any reliable assessment of their merits.
• For example, a distinction is traditionally drawn between content for
“primary”, “secondary” and “higher” education. Between the primary and
lower secondary levels, for instance, approaches to the various fields of
knowledge may differ quite considerably. In some systems failure rates are
very high during the first year of lower secondary school. The same applies
between secondary school and the first few years of higher education. This
is not to say that there can be no healthy break in the academic system, for
growth, indeed life itself, is marked by discontinuities. It must be ascertained,
however, that such breaks exist because they are required for the learning
process itself and not merely because “that’s how it’s always been done”. In
fact, it is probably necessary to identify substantive changes to the content of
basic education at any given point, perhaps even more forcefully, drastically
and explicitly than at present; but in this as in other matters addressed in
this book, the worst happens when reality is set in stone because it is not
understood.
38
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
• It is also noticeable that policy is influenced by a number of major dichotomies
imposed on educational content, apparently due to the power of tradition:
in some countries, for instance, it seems “natural” (in accordance with an
age-old practice and people’s mental characteristics and besides it matches
the ways different minds work) to have “literary” content distinct from
“scientific” content. In this regard, as on the others, it is not for this book
to decide matters, without considering the various contexts; attention is
merely being drawn to the potentially negative impact of such patterns on
the overall quality of an education.
What to do with “disciplines”?
Nevertheless, the most
Bringing together rather than
characteristic way in which
separating
forms of knowledge
tradition governs the structure of secondary education is,
It will be seen that the separation between
of course, by arranging it by
“academic” and “technical” or “abstract” and
discipline. This must be ad“practical” content produces serious gaps in
dressed in greater depth. While
pupils’ skills, even stunting disciplines such
“disciplines” are much less in
as sciences that provoke no thought about the
evidence in primary education,
world; and it is particularly vacuous to argue
which concentrates on “rudisuch situations persist because of “tradition”,
ments”, and play no structural
since history shows that, on the contrary,
role in higher education, which
people in the past were educated first in the
consists of courses, disciplines
arts and then in the sciences.
feature and pose problems in
virtually all secondary education systems: but also appears to cause them some difficulty: an astonishing number of words have been coined in order to avoid them, so
that it is now necessary to define “interdisciplinary”, “multidisciplinary”, “transdisciplinary” or “metadisciplinary”.
Where do these difficulties come from? In many situations education is
structured as from the lower secondary level, around a dozen “disciplines”, which
are shown on pupils’ timetables and are regarded as part of the educational heritage,
claiming as such to be entitled to a “place in the sun” in secondary education.
In many cases, teachers specialize in one or two disciplines, and even where
this is not the case, the secondary teacher is “identified” primarily in relation to a
discipline: such a teacher is, in many systems, first a “mathematics teacher” and then
a “teacher”.
It must be emphasized that these disciplines which are often claimed to be
“natural” or derived directly from the architecture of human knowledge are in fact
39
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
endogenous to secondary education and are not, strictly speaking, creatures of the
world of science, culture or economics.
It may be necessary to make a cost/benefit assessment of such use of
disciplines.
The basic ambiguity in the notion of a “discipline”
The word “discipline” (like its counterparts in other languages) is used
concurrently with the word “subject”; but “discipline” in itself says a good deal
about the conception of knowledge it implies, since it denotes a form of “intellectual
gymnastics” rather than a division of the real world that is to be taught. Herein
lies a fundamental ambiguity, since one never knows whether “discipline” refers to
mental “muscle-building” exercises, for which any exercise could basically be used,
or to the acquisition of specific knowledge or skills in a particular “discipline”. This
ambiguity contributes significantly to the difficulty encountered in reflection on the
disciplinary heritage. What, then, is to be expected?
The advantage of such structural arrangements…
Disciplines, however, have the advantage of providing a complete frame of
reference, with its own set of rules, vocabulary, well-identified exercises and the halo of
antiquity. This framework has been transmitted from one generation to another, and
sometimes from one country to another,14 and accordingly constitutes a reference for
families and pupils in that they know whether or not the curriculum includes physics
or the fine arts. The main idea is that working at a discipline increases one’s mental
experience and ability to think, and such acquisitions are worth much more than
the discipline itself, the discipline being both epistemic (targeting the acquisition
of specific knowledge and skills) and “formative”·(targeting intellectual acquisitions
that are expected to be reinvested elsewhere).
…and the charge sheet
The list of faults found in the structuring of secondary education by discipline
looks longer:
• first, there are without doubt too many disciplines, within the heritage itself,
which leaves little room to cater for new requirements and even prevent
the introduction of a new discipline! In many countries, economics, law,
sociology and geology are waiting in the wings, ready to join the dozen or so
recognized “disciplines”;
14
40
Some disciplines have spread throughout the world and are practically identical everywhere. However,
the deceptively similar names often hide significant cultural differences that illustrate how different
systems have created their own authentic versions, or interesting “creole” forms, of the various
disciplines.
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
• secondary teaching appears to be a juxtaposition of disciplines, yet, it has
often been noted that no one has addressed the synthesis, specific to each
pupil, that results from exposure to all of these disciplines and constitutes
the pupil’s knowledge or culture; such synthesis will never be effected by
many pupils and the subjects learnt will remain discrete rather than a body
of knowledge that is unified or is at least becoming unified;
• as they have emerged from a context that was concerned with liberal exercises
and have not been designed in terms of objectives, disciplines do not facilitate
the task of those who are endeavouring to reorganize secondary education so
that it may attain set objectives;
• as they are relatively closed units with well-defined concepts and aims, new
subjects or themes cannot be addressed within the disciplines, even in an
emergency. The rudiments of nutrition and agriculture, for instance, are only
very rarely addressed because teachers are not trained in such subjects and,
above all, because such subjects cannot be included in any discipline at the
secondary level;
• the same is often true of health: traditionally, the natural sciences are taught
to instil knowledge and methods relating to life and the human body, not to
give pupils control over their health, and that has now become indefensible;
here too, the available stock of knowledge held by a school’s teachers is often
limited to the sum of knowledge of the various disciplines, with yawning gaps
in relation to subjects that do not fall strictly within specific disciplines;
• disciplines are generally by nature geared to the teaching of abstract rather
than applied science, though this tendency to the abstract is more marked in
some countries than in others. They tend to widen the gap between science
and application, which is dangerous; the same is true of the political or moral
implications of knowledge, which they hardly address since they are all more
or less amoral in principle;
• there is sometimes a tendency at the heart of secondary education to see each
discipline as an end in itself and to regard the mental exercise aspect that
characterized its ambiguity: as a result they either take a higher-education
approach – too abstract, and sometimes confined to scientism – or a strange
approach to pre-vocational training, as if history, physics or literature were
learnt in secondary schools in preparation for a career as a historian, physicist
or writer and to acquire the main skills of those professions;
• as units with their component timetables, weighting factors and wellinformed teachers, disciplines are easily subject to lobbying within the system
on issues that reflect the selfish concerns of institutional groups rather than
the interests of pupils;
41
EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
• the timetable requirements and examination weighting factors have often
resulted in a hierarchy emerging more or less unconsciously and rather
infelicitously among the disciplines: art, for instance, is thus often taught
as a token subject because it is allotted very little time on the timetable and
low weighting factors. Opinions are shaped in depth by such a state of affairs
and it is known that knowledge hierarchies often serve to disguise social
hierarchies;
• as disciplines are “inherited” and have inherited, as indicated above, a
canon of classroom experiments and exercises, they do little on their own
to encourage innovation; on the contrary, they encourage conformism and
parroting of the same old formulae; they are not usually assessed (as to
whether they achieve their goals, promote fairness, entrench cultural and
academic inequalities, or arouse and hold pupils’ interest), which makes
them a “blind spot” in the vision of education designers;
• even though their discourse always rests on their original ambiguity – aiming
at restricted fields of knowledge but also providing a mental toolkit that
will be useful outside those fields – there is seldom any proof of this being
done. In that regard, it is advisable to be very modest and to observe pupils’
learning attainments experimentally, but there is no proof that a particular
form of reasoning or intellectual attitude cultivated within a discipline can
readily be applied elsewhere. Yet the illusion that they can have sometimes
been pushed very far indeed by the champions of tradition, who have
for instance argued the necessity of acquiring language proficiency in the
Classics (in the “European” past, Latin and Greek; but the same questions
must be raised regarding other traditions extolling classical languages, such
as Sanskrit or classical Arabic) in order to develop similar proficiency in
modern languages;
• disciplines may also be criticized because they stand as fully constituted bodies
of knowledge and encourage the belief that they are taught in a continuum
with higher education: they are quite ready to “erase” all the necessary work
of transposition between “academic knowledge” and “school learning”, a
transposition which in fact often amounts to a thorough reorganization.
After this indictment, no argument will now be advanced in defence of
disciplines; it will simply be acknowledged that they exist and dominate the structure
of secondary education to such an extent that very few decision-makers question
their continuance, even if it were desirable to do so. Furthermore, there has so far
been little proof that such an organization by disciplines can be discarded: when
systems have, on occasion, opened the door to other forms of learning, they have
brought in elements that have seemed to have even more layers than the traditional
disciplines, without making the whole more meaningful.
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EDUCATIONAL HERITAGE AND THE DUTY TO TAKE STOCK
Conversely, awareness of the dangers of a structure based on disciplines can
assist in averting its adverse effects and in devising counter measures. Yes, they are
often outdated, frozen in time; yes, they are often sadly unaware of their own history;
but it is felt that the only tenable position that may be taken in regard to disciplines is
to refuse to give them the key to the house and to do so by placing them within the
much wider objectives of education (see Chapter 6), while giving teachers control
over them once more and showing that they are not an untouchable heritage that
must be upheld whatever the cost, but an artificial construct that may be adapted to
meet pupils’ educational needs.
Inventing intergenerational time
The above has shown how much the educational agenda is burdened by its
complex past, and how important it is to think about this in order to be free from its
most negative forms of interference. In addition to this indispensable critical stocktaking, it is also necessary for content developers to take a long-term view in their
work, for they must have background knowledge of school learning, as a lack of such
knowledge will affect and hinder their action. They must also call constantly into
question transmission from one generation to the other and should thus challenge
the heritage in the light of future needs.
As Michel Fabre has felicitously stated, it is the duty of education officials to
avoid nominalizing the verb “to know”, making it into a noun, which can easily be
mythified and become practically untouchable.
Knowledge must refer to something concrete
What needs to be known?
Why does it need to be known?
What is the history of this particular area of knowledge?
Which world issues has this knowledge helped people to define?
Which pupils can it help to gain a better understanding of the world and their
interactions with it?
43
4
REARRANGING
THE DELIVERY
OF ACADEMIC
KNOWLEDGE
45
REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
How confused twenty-first century geography is – and how confusing! This
is not the fault of education: our age is no longer the age of States, nor is it that
of Empires, nor is it certain to become the age of some “global village”, or that of
“Regions” or even that of “small countries” with brightly coloured maps. Yet States
have never had so many responsibilities, Empires have never been so powerful and
sure about their model, and no one knows whether the “global village” – on its
advent – will be a market without trust or law or a place fit for humans, or whether
new “regions” might lead to some new feudal division.
These questions will be left to others. The question that will be addressed is
whether such uncertainty and vagueness do not make it highly desirable for people
to be forthrightly initiated into the complexity of geographical organization: the
school is no doubt the cornerstone here as well, at least in preventing the minds it
trains from uninformedly or unthinkingly supporting a simplistic and inappropriate
model. The aim, however, is not to consider who “ought” to manage the world’s
education systems, but to promote reflection, in regard to educational content and
the complexity of entities involved in that context, on the most appropriate levels at
which it could be developed, on the models available, whether they are competitively
exclusive and whether combinations are conceivable.
The highs and lows of the State as an educator
An astonishing call for State intervention today
All over the world, the State is generally becoming weaker, both internationally,
much to the benefit of several categories of international organization or the market
and its destablizing fluctuations, and internally through challenges to the Welfare
State model and through the emergence of new levels of decentralization such as the
European Union “regions”. Conversely, for the purposes of determining educational
content, the State is increasingly being called upon to act.
This call for State action is of course understandable in the case of new or
fairly new countries: a newly independent country faces an objective need to become
master of its own education system without neglecting educational content. It will
be recalled that Julius Nyerere stated in 1971 in Tanzania, “If I leave to others the
building of our elementary school system, they [the people] will abandon me as their
responsible national leader”.
The call to strengthen the State’s role in regard to the curriculum in the
developed countries is more surprising. The United Kingdom adopted a National
Curriculum in 1986, which had previously been considered unthinkable. Denmark
has had national curricula since 2000, when the State took over a responsibility
previously held by local authorities. Even in the United States of America, it is not
46
REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
rare for officials to regret that each of 15,000 districts may select its own content for
each subject.
This is due, no doubt, to a variety of reasons. In some of the world’s regions,
societies are faced with a particularly fast-growing and diverse intermingling of
population groups owing to various migration flows triggered by economic need,
the misfortunes of war, persecution, or the opening up of borders within regions
or continents: ethnic diversity immediately raises questions about educational
content since it can endanger social cohesion at least temporarily, make the existing
social contract meaningless or even expose old social hypocrisies that the national
discourse had concealed. States, as in the old days, even rely on educational content
of education to help them to revive foundational myths or, in a more forwardlooking way, to form a new social contract. Several countries are producing goaloriented content more than in the past to ensure that community values are learnt
at school: Sweden, for instance, has recently incorporated its own value system into
curriculum, establishing such principles as the inviolability of human life, individual
freedom and integrity, the equal value of all people, equality, solidarity with the weak
and vulnerable, understanding, compassion, free discussion, internationalization of
Swedish society and empathy with the values and condition of others.
International economic competition, which to some extent works to weaken
States and diminish the importance of borders for the benefit of multinational or
stateless enterprises, also does the reverse in some ways: concern about possible
unemployment often turn into individual concerns about access to good vocational
qualifications and at an earlier stage to good training to enhance job market
opportunities, whatever the uncertainties. Though major economic interests are
often not held by States today, only national governments may in many cases provide
education (and make war); their citizens insist more impatiently than ever, therefore,
that they give young people access to the desired qualification, which means that they
should first be given the best possible general education or vocational training, just
as the British visitors to the Paris International Exhibition in 1867 realized that they
had to revise their system of technical training and just as the Sputnik orbital flight
in 1957 spurred the United States of America on to overhaul its school organization,
so too is economic competition encouraging States today to pay attention to their
people’s skills and knowledge now that States are feeling the brunt of economic
competition! When the European Union decided on the goals of the Lisbon strategy
in March 2000, it stated, albeit at the supranational level, its ambition to develop
“the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world, capable of
sustainable economic growth”, but in fact required its Member States to compete
in the first place among themselves, under a sophisticated benchmarking system,
through their diverse approaches to schooling, so that they would all be stronger
against the rest of the world.
47
REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
The advantages of content determined by the State
Hereafter, the term “State” will refer to political entities with general powers,
whether the State be centralized, federated or even federal.
First of all, the designation of a high political authority to take responsibility
for the content of secondary education is desirable in the view of all those who
think that one of the functions of education is to unify the society, as stressed by
Durkheim. This advantage is all the greater where the society is breaking up, which
occurs frequently when trade and economics slip away from national control, when
the labour market becomes international and when, whether as a consequence of
these two developments or not, domestic injustices increase.
The State determines only
Centralization of content
those aspects of content explicitly concerned with inculcating
The advantages of centralizing content are
the country’s shared values in
clear to users, too: standardization throughout
some cases and determines all
the country is assured, enabling families to
educational content in others,
relocate for work without prejudice to the
the idea being that if a society is
children’s education since they find things
to be fluid and not merely a ficfamiliar despite the move; a smooth continuity
tion, it is vital that a common
throughout the school career is also assured,
core of knowledge be acquired
because the curriculum is designed as a
up to the end of secondary educoherent whole.
cation. The proponents of this
view maintain that for the sake of fairness and social cohesion, for instance, everyone
should be equipped with the means of taking part in civic life and major political
debates on certain fundamental issues (basic familiarity with economics, ecology,
science, social codes of behaviour and, above all, languages); but it is also in the interest of vocational training after secondary education and the quality of the labour
market. Education and market stakeholders appreciate the guarantees extended to
the entire population regarding knowledge and skills acquired in secondary schools.
It should be noted, though that the practical value of these advantages may vary:
if the State determines only the final outcome of education in terms of “output”,
and schools are free, as is often desirable, to determine the various stages and how
the objectives are to be built into the school career, then some of the benefit of
centralization in terms of family mobility will be lost. Likewise, it is not certain that
a centralized system is as coherent as claimed or hoped: it may very well fail, for
various reasons, to bring together the various approaches to teaching in particular
types of institution or at particular levels of education (primary school, for instance,
or upper secondary) which have different historical or social roots.
Parents, too, may perhaps feel that when content is determined by the
appropriate public authority they are entitled to contribute to the process, since it is
public sector matter and therefore transparent: here again, there is no guarantee that
48
REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
the advantage will be enjoyed in all cases, for, in this “republicanization”,15 there is
nothing to prevent vested interests from taking control of educational content and
removing it from civic scrutiny.
Another advantage of centralizing content is the clear benefit in terms of
management:
• it becomes possible to compare schools, which can help to improve them;
• teacher training can be designed in a standardized way, and experimental
schemes set up as necessary: this is often a strategic aspect;
• pupils’ performance can be studied on a significant scale and a population’s
average performance identified as well as the extremes (best- and worstperforming groups); this allows more informed and possibly more effective
policy-making.
There is also a political advantage which should not be overlooked: if the issue
of content is indeed regarded as strategic by the education authorities, this means
that educational content itself will be a subject of political debate. Such debate,
even if attended by all the guarantees mentioned in Chapter 8, will not permit an
effective consensus in every case: there may come a point at which particular sensitive
questions have to be settled by taking a democratic stand – or even a vote, with
winners and losers. What other authority, apart from the State, can guarantee that
such a debate will take place, will be democratic, and that the majority decision will
be taken without either crushing or disparaging the minority point of view?
The dangers of State intervention: nationalism and abuse of power
It is well known from history, however, that the State is seldom an abstract entity:
it is embodied, it appears in different guises and it is used by various interests.
In many instances the State has been given the historic duty of bearing the
idea of a nation as well as that of the “res publica”. Since “nation states” are often in
fact artificial constructions based, as the case may be, on a shared history, language,
ethnicity, religion and so on, it is not surprising that the “State as educator” has often
been used to give them legitimacy in people’s eyes: on various occasions the nation
has been brought in either to promote unification and respect for complex human
realities or, on the contrary, to build intolerance or hatred of domestic or external
enemies.
Moral awareness, as confirmed by the wars in the former Yugoslavia, of the
extent to which nationalism can relieve its servants of all moral awareness of their
actions, provides some measure of the scale of the absolute danger that the State can
pose in regard to educational content, if it disguises its nationalistic stance. As people
need myths in order to make progress, especially if their real goals are in fact clouded
15
This refers, of course, to “republic” in the etymological sense of “matter of public concern” and not to
any type of political organization of powers.
49
REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
by uncertainty and hard to
The danger of politicizing knowledge
outline scientifically, it seems
particularly important to
Various forms of nationalism have at different
protect educational content
times used educational content to spread
from the enduring attention
prejudice and national or ethnic hatred: that
of constantly renewed mythwas achieved either through particular subjects
making. Action currently besuch as history and geography, which are more
ing taken, both in Brussels
susceptible to such distortion and can be used as a
and in individual European
basis for mythical stories or mythical boundaries,
Union Member States, to
or through all subjects generally and even in the
encourage European citizens
justification of subject-matter taught to pupils
to support Europe, involves
when the avowed objective is to prepare, as a
use of the old methods which
community, to be stronger in order to fight
consist in imagining the past
against the hereditary enemy.
that Europe has never had as
justification for Europe as it stands today.
The other question concerns the exercise of these powers within the State.
Situations vary depending on whether the executive or the legislature deals with
content and whether the government is democratic or not. In any event, State powers
are never exercised in a disembodied way, but always within the context of party
politics and according to changing political fortunes. When Mrs Margaret Thatcher’s
government decided to establish a National Curriculum, there were, of course, the
avowed reasons relating to a “new deal” for learning in the United Kingdom, but
there was also the aim of wresting control of schools from the Local Education
Authorities, over which the Labour Party exerted considerable influence.
There is an evident danger of “politicizing” knowledge, that is, subjecting it
not to the outcome of discussions conducted in the finest traditions of political
debate, but to partisan preferences. This would clearly have adverse effects if, for
example, educational content were conceivably to change whenever there was a
change of government. That would clearly be unacceptable, if only because content
would then be reduced to the status of an utterly subordinate set of rules without
the slightest scientific or moral legitimacy and thus totally ineffective in any event
because educational content cannot be time-bound.
In fact, there are situations in which the State has responsibility for content but
protects itself against some of the vicissitudes of politics by vesting that responsibility
in the legislature, as is the case in Japan. In such circumstances, content does not
fluctuate, but it is particularly difficult to make changes, since a parliamentary
decision is required.
Other countries where content is centralized, such as France, have surprisingly
opted to give this responsibility to the most ephemeral, and easily the most partisan,
of public authorities, the government and, indeed within the government, to the
Minister of Education alone. In general, prudence prevails and, for various reasons
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
related to the give and take of politics, it cannot be said that in France the executive
abuses its power to “write the curriculum”. Yet paradoxically it is in France that
the legislature, which is not usually concerned with content though there is no
constitutional rule forbidding it to do so, has recently acted in a way that threatens
the scientific character of educational content: on 23 February 2005, the French
National Assembly passed a law providing that “ … curricula shall in particular
recognize the positive role of the French presence overseas, in particular in North
Africa, and shall give the history and sacrifices of those from overseas territories
who fought in the armed forces of France the place of honour to which they are
entitled”.16
The conventional objection to centralized educational content is of course that,
contrary to the requirements of good teaching, it is rigid. The question of “adapting”
content to the diversity of local circumstances will be addressed later.
Perhaps the two greatest potential dangers in State determination of content,
though, lie less in these fairly visible risks than in two more insidious phenomena
which stem not so much from occasional perversions of this State function as from
its existence in the first place:
• when an authority of any kind has a monopoly in a given field, the system
it manages is not particularly likely to innovate since innovation quite often
involves struggling against the entire establishment, whose parts tend to
close ranks in mutual support;
• if issues concerning educational content are all dealt with outside the school,
this obviously simplifies the teachers’ tasks since they are not bound to be
individually creative, but the long-term consequence of this could be a lack
of teacher accountability or even the deprofessionalization of teachers, for
they may lose control over content management which is currently their
only means of adapting their teaching in response to their pupils’ specific
characters.
The merits or demerits of national educational content will not and cannot be
determined here: situations vary and working methods used in one context may be
inappropriate in another. It is advisable, however, to:
• monitor State action when the State acts as Educator, bearing in mind the
mistakes that can on occasion be committed in its name;
• be demanding on the State when it is involved, insisting that education be
truly a “public matter”, open to guidance in the general interest and through
democratic means: if the public authorities are to provide educational content,
then it may justifiably be required to provide the best and, in particular, to
ensure that content is wholly permeated by perception of the general interest
16
This led to protest by historians and secondary school teachers, oddly enough, against the very principle
of the legislature’s action on the issue, but not against continuous action on the same issue in the same
country by the executive! The article was subsequently removed from the Act.
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
and against not only special interests, negative traditions, and the various
lobbies, but also against the lies in the name of “the nation” or “society”. Is
government capable of inventing a genuine education system or does it only
manage forms, and sometimes empty forms, of an education system?
Global Utopia – to benefit people or the market?
Globalist traditions
Education has long been familiar with the paradigm of “globalization”; whether
within the remit of a particular State or of bodies which themselves had a worldwide
mission, education has on many occasions offered models designed by persons who
could not reasonably have intended them to apply to only one part of the world. The
“nationalist” content of French education at the end of the nineteenth century was
“globalized” throughout France’s colonial empire and the great religions – Islam or
Christianity for instance – have for their part generated many models of education
down the centuries which they have established or at least sought to establish
throughout the world. Soviet socialism exported specific educational content to
many regions of the world and, strangely enough, even when such movements have
historically ceased to exist they
have sometimes left their mark
The International Baccalaureat
deep within the various systems:
The slow development in the twentieth century
the underlying inspiration of
of an international society designed to counter
the culture disseminated by
exacerbated nationalism and work for peace
the “lycée” of the sovereign
and development has, under the influence of
republican France of 2005 can
the International Bureau of Education, initially
be traced back to a religious,
part of the League of Nations and now part
royalist and internationalist
of UNESCO, led to other considerations and
institution, the Jesuit “college”.
proposals tending to challenge the national
Again, the changes in
character of educational content. This is
Europe which began with
true of all organizations, both governmental
gradual advances known as “the
and non-governmental, which deal with
Renaissance(s)”, based largely
education and exert influence to make the
on the achievements of Arab
content of education more homogeneous. In
scholars who bridged the gap
this context, for instance, the “international
between the ancient and modern
baccalaureat” open to pupils from all countries
worlds, thus transcending the
and containing no “national” references, was
restrictions imposed on human
established in Geneva in the late 1960s.
curiosity during the Middle
Ages, led gradually to the development of non-religious educational projects with a
worldwide mission.
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
As early as the seventeenth century, the Czech philosopher Comenius
advocated a worldwide education system in his “Panorthosia” or “universal reform”.
Scientific knowledge, in turn addressing reason rather than the conversion of the
will, “naturally” laid claim to universality.
Paolo Freire’s teaching philosophy, from its home in Brazil’s North-Eastern
province, claims in another manner to be applicable not only to the Latin American
context where it began but also to the industrialized countries, because its efforts
concern the most human aspects of every human being and because oppression does
not differ by nature in the North and in the South even if it takes different forms.
However, while reviewing the main features of the various currents of
civilization or culture which have offered schemes of “worldwide content”, the limits
of such developments must be borne in mind: indeed, the major continent-wide
bodies emerging around the world, such as the European Union, which deal with
education, are particularly cautious about the internationalization of content. The
tacit understanding is that “content” is riddled with unavoidable national peculiarities,
though these are assumed rather than empirically demonstrated, and feature more in
design than in practice: discourse continues to relate to the sovereignty of each State
which settles educational content issues as it sees fit.
The de facto globalization of some content
Some educational content crosses national borders and oceans in a most
pragmatic way:
• this has long been true of the content of science education, whose development
is certainly more closely watched by the academic community;
• it is also true of content connected with modern learning techniques
involving information and communication technology (ICT);
• it is increasingly true of the educational content of modern foreign languages:
it is even becoming generally accepted that the level of proficiency expected in
a language learned as a foreign one should not vary from country to country,
and even that those countries where the language in question is the native
tongue may contribute to the setting of proficiency levels; this gives many
closed and inward-looking education systems one of their first opportunities
to make comparisons with the wider world;
• furthermore, English is also increasingly taught throughout the world as a
result of the globalization of educational content, and this trend is quite
strong in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe.
It is doubtful whether these developments will continue to be isolated instances:
whatever those in charge of national systems may decide, nothing can prevent their
people – especially, in many countries, the better-off, who often set trends that others
then follow – from showing how interested they are in the globalization of content:
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
•
the issue is raised through demand for educational qualifications likely
to be of value in the world labour market, access to that market being
conditional on content. Such qualifications are generally issued in a
particular country, bear its “brand” and can be a means of spreading its
influence; but it is arguable that they will increasingly involve “off-shore”
content, for instance, from agencies and universities whose primary aim
is to sell courses and certificates;
•
accelerating globalization also results from the means by which knowledge
is spread today; traditional publishers can make savings whenever
textbooks, which require major production investment, can be marketed
in more than one country and when content is disseminated online which,
by definition, encourages use that disregards State borders.
Why is globalization of content not an appropriate solution at this stage?
For centuries, many people have dreamed of a way of educating children that
would break out of the narrow boundaries that restrict human lives and history.
Today there have been real advances towards the international determination of
content – yet national systems still are, and no doubt must for a long time remain,
the norm. Why is that?
• First, it is illusory to believe that a change of scale is in itself beneficial: the
problems faced by all communities in ensuring that everyone has access to
knowledge and basic education are not abstract problems, but arise in very
different cultural, economic and social settings, and will surely be better handled
as closely to the people as possible. The very idea that some “world content”
might be the answer for
everyone flies in the face
Avoiding “Balkanization” while
of our human diversity,
retaining respect for “local”
which demands a
considerations
diversity of responses to
Dangerous tensions are emerging in connection
its education problems.
with issues relating to ethnicity, language and
• The preparation of
history. The danger is that communities may
“world content” would
similarly become inward-looking in relation
presuppose the existto educational content, losing sight of the fact
ence of some authority
that education and knowledge are of greatest
capable of specifying
value only if they afford pupils an opportunity
such content – that is
to rise above their immediate surroundings,
technically conceivable,
discard clannish prejudices and stand back
with UNESCO – but
from local views. How can proper provision
more importantly of
be made in these circumstances for people’s
imposing it; and interdiffering concerns for “local” issues at various
national society apparlocal echelons.
ently is not yet ready
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
for the emergence of what would actually amount to a function of world
government, not even in an area such as education, in which at least all governments agreed on the priorities.
• There is also a case for saying that it could be dangerous for content to be
specified by any world authority, however excellent, since this would reduce
educational diversity and would ultimately aggravate the risks mentioned
above in connection with State centralization; it might be preferable to try
to improve the quality of educational content by drawing on experiments
conducted in the great worldwide laboratory, namely today’s diverse systems.
This book is designed primarily to assist States and other stakeholders in the
transition from a mere de facto diversity to diversity that is more accountable
and of a better quality.
• Above all, the present context of globalization – through economics and the
market – does not create the right conditions for identifying and handling
this kind of problem. In fact, there is every reason to fear that any accelerated
globalization of content would be geared to the widespread competition
among individuals and systems that characterizes liberal discourse. There
is no adequate counterweight to this ideology internationally although
countervailing arguments emerge more naturally within States.
The concept of a “knowledge economy” is too vague at present to provide an
adequate specification of content. If liberal thought has the field to itself, it may very
well favour competition over standards, on the one hand, and “skills” dissociated from
cultural knowledge on the other. Yet, as noted above, humanity requires that pupils
learn referential content that permit much more than a headlong flight designed to
outstrip neighbours, whether they be persons or countries.
Decentralization and related ambiguities
“Globalization”, inapprehensible, yet pressing ahead, as all can see, amid
confusion, contradiction and even anarchy, has brought immediately in its train the
challenging of States and widening economic and cultural divides among the world’s
various regions.
As countless groups and individuals face the uncertainties and hazards
wrought by relatively unregulated market forces, the consequences are a worryingly
fragmented society and the adoption of an inward-looking stance by individuals and
small communities, in short a “Balkanization” of the world.
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
The pupil as the ultimate educational fractal
At the other end of the globalization spectrum, while the idea of setting the
same learning targets for all of the world’s youth is viewed not only as Utopian but
dangerous in that, however pure its intentions, it is portentously totalitarian, there
is a host of educational theories that champion the notion of the individual pupil’s
absolute independence of world forces.
This model has, of course, its own historical antecedents and philosophical
justifications and it brings to mind both the education provided to the aristocracy in
the past by personal tutors and the longstanding educational method that prevailed
in the United States of America, requiring pupils to progress individually as they
thought best with the help of textbooks. This also reminds one of Émile, through
whom Jean-Jacques Rousseau defended the legitimacy of curricula tailored to the
individual – it should be noted, however, that he did this mainly because he lived
in a despotic society in which public authorities could hardly be trusted to educate
people to be virtuous and free.
Curricula designed by reference to each pupil are increasingly frequent today
for the following reasons:
• digital communication media give access to such a mass of resources that
pupils may conceivably determine the sequence of their studies themselves
online, without constraint; the growing popularity of “home schooling” is in
part a step in this direction;
• the grip of some aspects of mass culture broadcast worldwide is such that
some people feel the need for some counterbalancing diversity;
• the theme of education tailored to the individual also shows that people no
longer support the collective significance of education: everyone would thus
be free in the jungle of available knowledge and skills, freedom being the
ultimate determinant.
What is one to think of these ideas and trends?
• The anarchism (literally) in regard to content is of course sustained by
illusions about the practical feasibility of such a project for the millions of
pupils enrolled worldwide who are the first in their families to go to school.
Such solutions obviously deepen inequalities in circumstances in that some
pupils would turn the jungle into a paradise of independent learning, while
others would simply lose their way and drop out.
• At the same time, as these ideas do express a real concern, it should be
remembered that the pupils’ progress through collectively determined content
must be planned at the echelon that is closest to the individual. Educational
outputs differ from pupil to pupil across the world and such differences are
not gaps to be closed but a rich resource in themselves. Countries, such as
Japan, in which secondary education has long been excessively uniform, have
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
experienced the adverse effects of such uniformity, in terms of dropping out,
loss of pupil interest and lack of originality or creativity among school-leavers.
Serious thought should be given to the possibility of every curriculum being
refined, adapted and, within limits, negotiated with each pupil considered
as a unique individual: education must encourage, within the common core,
the diversity of individual paths.
Community-wide solutions
Owing to their concern about education, people expect more from the State,
call for the globalization of content or to home schooling. In many cases they express
their distress and confusion by turning to “communities” whose main feature is that
they are distinct from the general public in that they bring together families which
share a common religion, origin, language, ethnicity or way of life. Some communities
have been formed by history, as in French-speaking Belgium, for instance, or in the
Netherlands, and are relatively stable and habitually involved in education, others,
such as the community of families that choose a particular type of school for their
children on no other grounds than the likelihood of better treatment, are less clearly
defined: in post-communist Hungary there are those who actually want the State
to disengage itself from education, to “liberalize” the system entirely; the exercise
of responsibility for education in the absence of pre-existing communities would
thus become a matter for each “customer base” consisting of the users of a particular
school.
There are both advantages and limitations to such solutions.
• In many cases, families are not such strangers to the school under these
arrangements; they take an interest in it and their voice is heard; schools
organized in this way are likely to “talk to” their pupils more easily.
• The main danger, though, is that such a mode of functioning only involves
one part of the population, while other parts cannot always fit into the
“community” structure. Now that world trends are leading to growing
individualism, it may be paradoxical to think that people can identify with
communities, except in an artificial way.
• The biggest risk arises, of course, from the fact that educational content in
such an arrangement relates to a closed society, the law of the clan, and issues
by definition will not be addressed in terms of citizenship: if the community
in question cultivates a high awareness of the needs of society as a whole, then
such educational content may be salutary; but nothing guarantees that it will
be the case if a community decides to cut itself off through sectarianism,
intolerance or general unawareness. It is a dangerous means of avoiding
debate on the content required for all: people individually withdraw into
themselves, education is impoverished by intellectual and cultural inbreeding,
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
and society runs the risk of being able to deal with differences only through
conflict.
“Adapting” content to “local requirements” – from the region to the
school
Owing to the concern that content should be “close” to the people for whom
it is intended, solutions have been sought by maintaining, when implementing
nationally determined content, for example, a “local adaptation” element, but in
a public rather than a community framework: France and Argentina have both
conducted experiments along these lines, with rather little success in general, for
once initial enthusiasm has died down, local officials do not always succeed in giving
direction to the adaptation of content. Things are different, of course, when such
developments coincide with emergent or resurgent expressions of national feeling, as
in Catalonia and the Basque Country in Spain, for instance.
The important question is not so much whether historical or mathematical
content can be “adapted” to a particular “region”, but to think about how to leave
room for action by individual schools entailing a high level of responsibility for
educational content.
If decentralization is necessary, is the school not the appropriate level?
On this point systems which hold schools responsible for fine-tuning a
curriculum that has been broadly laid down in external directives may be distinguished
from those in which individual schools have no curriculum-related responsibilities
at all because content is determined in detail elsewhere. The latter generally reduces
and adversely affects learning outcomes.
Content with multiple references
The school and the image of “the other”: a vital concern
The geography of schooling is therefore tentative. Those in charge cannot wait
for human geography to become “tidier”, for decisions must be taken on solutions to
the above issues concerning educational content. It may, however, be concluded that
while the idea of “worldwide” content does not seem the right choice at this stage, it
is at least a known fact that the specification of content at any given geographical level
(the State, the community, an entire continent, etc.) entails the risk of “excluding”,
even unintentionally, those pupils who do not belong at that level, or have not
belonged there for long enough.
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
A set of complex, interlocking references
The certainty is that there is no point to endless debate on which geographical
benchmark, from the family to the whole world, ought to be chosen as the reference for
pupils. The point, albeit not new
in itself, is to be considered in a
Some disturbing questions
new light given the proportions
How much room is made for foreign or
of the population that are now
different cultures in general, by comparison
concerned in these times of
with the standard culture?
geographical disarray: people’s
identities consist of increasingly
How much room is made for the culture of the
complex combinations, often
foreign children actually attending the school?
with tension between them, of
How much room is there for cultures which
multiple identities.
are not those of the dominant group(s)?
The young Punjabi who
How much room is there for the poor?
goes to school in Glasgow
will have a Scottish identity, a
How much room is there for religious beliefs
Punjabi identity, and will feel
or philosophical views other than those of the
Indian, but outside the United
dominant groups?
Kingdom will be a Briton
Disturbing questions for nearly every system;
first and foremost. A young
but it is well worth being open to disturbance!
Berber in a Marseille school is
concomitantly Berber, Muslim,
Algerian, Arab (in others’ eyes), French, Mediterranean, European – and a Marseille
Olympique fan. These situations, previously the exception, have now become
the norm. Is it not pointless to discuss endlessly which of these identities should
structurally determine the content of school education, when the real issue is how
education can help pupils to cope with complexity and combine different identities
together? It can do so by providing the necessary knowledge and references.
Step by step towards universality
This study does not point to a single solution to the question of overlapping
educational authorities, but it points to the need for a critical approach to the
advantages and limitations of each authority. While solutions may not yet be
applicable worldwide, the questions addressed to content designers, whether at
national, community or school level, must be universal.
Promotion of “subsidiary” sovereignty
It would be worthwhile for each level at which content is determined to consider
in a resourceful and informed manner the question of whether a particular type of
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REARRANGING THE DELIVERY OF ACADEMIC KNOWLEDGE
content should be determined at its level or whether it would be advantageous to
take as a reference a slightly broader geographical level without any loss of wealth.
In determining the content of history education in Bavaria, should decisions be
taken at the Bavaria Land level or would a broader, more comprehensive view with a
richer content of human experience not be achieved if it were determined in Berlin?
Or perhaps it is risky to lay too much stress on German history and disparage other
inputs. In Brussels, then? It does not yet have the competence to do so, and there is
also the risk that content would then be tilted towards European references that are
more mythical than historical. Conversely, while a number of European countries are
ready to think about a shared history syllabus, that is certainly an interesting prospect,
as borne out by the recent French/German history textbook experiment. Similarly in
the Balkans the Council of Europe’s initiative concerning a joint history curriculum
for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Croatia is slowly
gaining ground.
The idea, then, would be to achieve a sort of “inverted subsidiarity”: instead of
specifying content at the State level – with a few exceptions, difficult to justify and
implement, of content designed on a broader geographical scale – each authority
responsible would have to produce sufficient justification, at least to itself, whenever
it chose to act otherwise and to use its own rather than the common content.
Promotion of inclusive rather than exclusive knowledge
The important thing at this stage is perhaps not so much that content should
be determined at a different geographical level (as noted above, every level has its
particular interests and limitations), but rather that officials should become aware
of the limitations of the current method so that they may redress its adverse effects.
For instance, the UNESCO-led development of international, interregional and
intercommunal comparison of content is important and forms part of strategies to
understand the Other and oneself that everyone needs in this context.
Education authorities may thus effectively assist communities in ending the
isolation that often restricts educational content and in determining on an ongoing
basis whether the knowledge taught is indeed inclusive knowledge whenever they
can avoid exclusive knowledge.17
17
60
Jean-Louis Derouet, Les politiques des savoirs, réflexions croisées, in Franco-American Conversations on
Education Research III, INRP/CPRE, Lyon, 23-27 May 2005, unpublished.
5
EDUCATION
POLICY:
QUESTIONS ON
THE GENERAL
STRUCTURE OF
CONTENT
61
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
Content within general education policy
The concept of an “education system”
It can be too easy, by talk of “the school system”, to give the impression that the
schools on offer to the people of a given area form a set of components designed to
work together as a coherent whole. This is seldom the real position, partly because
in many regions there is more than one school organization belonging to more than
one authority (national or local government, religious bodies, incorporated private
interests, etc.), but above all because only very rarely have all the functions which go
to make up “education” been conceived as a whole, or designed on one occasion with
one clear logical vision that embraces every level. In many cases there is only a set of
items which “make up a system”, or in other words work out their own combination
without any organizing authority to impose consistency, which, in order to do so,
have adapted, modified and sometimes even perverted their own vocations: these
“pseudosystems” are in fact the commonest condition for educational structures.
So far as content is concerned, the problem is that if it is designed without being
coordinated with certain other functions, then education policies will assuredly fail.
Policy-makers have many decisions to take because an entire education policy is a
complex thing; and it is no part of the present work to prescribe what the very first
decisions should be, the ones which are to order the chain of decision-making: here
everything must depend on place and circumstances, which are infinitely variable.
For instance, decisions to open up access to secondary education, or to put off subject
specialization until the higher secondary level, are truly “prior” policy decisions, for
social, political and financial reasons: such decisions are understandably made before
the authorities turn to the question of content, and therefore have no place in the
present discussion.
Upstream and related decisions
In considering the ways in which education policy and content policy interact,
the distinctions below must be drawn.
• There are situations where the authorities take general education policy
decisions without considering content, that is, without taking account of
the fact that education policy decisions must immediately be followed by the
question of what is to be taught within the new framework. The question
indeed is whether it would not be preferable for a community to decide
what it wants its members’ common knowledge, skills and values to be before
structural educational policy decisions are made.18 At the very least decisions
18
62
The way in which international institutions such as the Council of Europe, UNESCO, OECD or, to a
lesser extent, the European Union make recommendations to national governments on issues concerning
values, content or skills to be taught whatever the countries’ chosen education structure or policy decisions
may not be regarded as heralding in or as a move towards the organization of systems by content.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
about content which the authorities have recognized as strategic ought not
to be at variance with general policy.
• There are situations where policies on content are not necessarily at variance
with general education policy decisions, but are not supported by other
decisions on related matters which are necessary if the policies on content
are not to fail and cause the general education policy to fail as well. These
may include policies on the training of teachers and administrators, on the
development of materials and education resources and on pupil assessment.
Should content be universal or diversified?
One general education policy issue specific to secondary education is, of course,
that of curriculum diversification.
• Systems can readily be categorized according to the age at which pupils are
separated into different subject streams – earlier, as in the school systems
based on the German tradition, or later, as in those of Scandinavia.
• Another distinction is between those systems which at the specialization stage
allow pupils to choose among many different subjects, in any combination
(the English A-level course is a typical example), and those in which pupils
specialize in one of several predetermined routes, as in the countries which
hold baccalauréat examinations.
These issues are in which both structure and content are relevant. If they are
addressed in terms of content, two other problems emerge: firstly, if differentiated
streams are introduced at a particular point, does it matter what content is selected
for teaching before differentiation occurs? Secondly, when specialization occurs, is it
desirable to offer a particularly wide choice?
Determination of common knowledge and skills
It has been thought, in various societies and at different times, that a common
core of subjects could be taught only to a cohort of children learning the rudiments
of education in primary schools. The idea has gradually been accepted, however, that
the aims of general welfare, economic growth and personal fulfilment require basic
education for all beyond primary education. Educational policy has however been
very hesitant in deciding whether secondary education for all entailed, even at its
earliest stage, the provision of the same content for all.
Some systems, as mentioned above, have decided on an early choice among
different study paths (as early as the age of 10), but even for those which have opted
for a common core syllabus, in the lower secondary at least, the problem has not,
however, been solved. The question is whether the content of lower secondary
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
education should be determined with a view to the requirements of future upper
secondary education, the risk being that the prerequisites applied will be those of
the most elitist stream, or whether “middle schools”, as they are known in Italy, for
instance, should provide genuinely secondary education content for all, whatever
their future educational choices.19
The universal provision of even lower secondary education without explicitly
raising the question of common content for all would seem to be a misguided
educational policy and a paradigm factor of academic failure. The next two chapters
will discuss the possible content of such a common education core: the point made
here is that whatever the secondary education policy adopted, a common core
syllabus is essential.20 This is so because:
• it would be wrong to consider that society’s unifying task based on common
values is over at the end of primary education, before the major questions
that inevitably come with adolescence arise;
• it would be wrong to consider that at the end of primary school there are
no more areas of knowledge and skill that all pupils must develop, however
varied their future walks of life;
• it is precisely through the content that is not automatically identified with
the cognitive or cultural development of an elite that all the pupils in a
cohort have an opportunity to feel more involved in learning and are thus
more likely to succeed;
• if the common core of secondary education is primarily concerned with
access to this shared knowledge and skills, pupils will have fairer opportunities
when they are required at the end of the common core to follow specialized
courses.
The concept of teaching a common core of knowledge and skills to all secondary
pupils performs an outstanding function as a reference for a secondary education
system, and indeed for a society in that it indicates directly the baggage without which
private occupational and civic life in a given society may be extremely difficult.
The dangers inherent in applying this idea must, however, be identified, as set
out below:
• as mentioned above, the concept could lead to emphasis being placed on
instrumental knowledge;
• consequently the concept, meant to be a tool for rationalization and
democracy, might be understood in some schools as covering knowledge and
skills to be acquired as quickly as possible by all capable pupils, as the others
64
19
The question is easier to answer, of course, in the Scandinavian systems, where the fully-integrated (or
“comprehensive”) option has been chosen for all of compulsory schooling.
20
Even if – to take the most extreme case – this common syllabus is actually taught in different
establishments.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
are not invited to venture beyond this minimal and no doubt uninspiring
offering;
• even more seriously, the common core of knowledge and skills may even
constitute not a genuine “common minimum” but a special menu for those
who will go no further. This is particularly true of social or personal “life
skills” or very general pre-vocational skills that may quite appropriately be
included in the common core of knowledge: families whose children seem to
be destined for higher education and have been academically committed and
socially competitive from a very early age tend to consider that such content
is not for their children, and this is a crucial point;
• the specification of such common knowledge and skills may de facto exclude
those who cannot acquire them as quickly or by the same age as others;
• conversely, the concept may simply cover curricula previously taught to the
elites, under another guise.
To conclude, a further two points may be made on the idea of a common core
of knowledge and skills:
• they must genuinely be knowledge and skills determined for and consistent
with the goals of secondary education: a community that builds a good
common core may conceivably use it not only for lower secondary but also
for the whole of secondary education;
• the more people realize that the social, cognitive, symbolic and cultural
functions of secondary education are so important that they ought to account
for most of the syllabus up to the age of 18, the more necessary it will be to
offer, at least after a few years of secondary school, options “in addition” to
the subjects taught in the common core. That issue will now be addressed.
What choice of content should pupils have?
The reasons for leaving secondary pupils a wide choice in what they have to
learn are well known.
• The purpose of secondary education is not only to train pupils, but also to
help them to choose from a variety of study and career opportunities and,
consequently, to allow pupils either to try particular areas of knowledge and
skill before making a decision, or to start learning in the field chosen.
• Can pupils be better motivated than by choosing, on the basis of their
own personal tastes, talents or career ambitions, what they want to learn?
Can educators trust their emerging independence of mind? in the “central
schools” established in France during the Revolution, pupils were free to
“pick” subjects, in view of the very liberal approach taken to education.
65
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
The degrees of choice offered by education systems in fact vary greatly: utterly
free choice of subjects, choice among more or less narrowly defined “streams”, choice
of optional subjects in addition to the common core, options in addition to the
chosen “stream” and so on. Some options are “compulsory” (the pupil is obliged
to choose an “option”) or “voluntary” (the pupil is free to chose no “option” at
all); choices are sometimes free (pupils are free to follow their tastes and interests),
sometimes restricted by the institution (which makes the choices instead of the
pupil, in accordance with institutional capacity or, more usually, various selection
criteria).
The problem is that the way to hell is paved with good intentions, and extreme
caution is of the essence when choices are being broadened.
• Are these choices indeed being made at a point at which indispensable
common knowledge and skills have really been acquired, or will acquisition
be deferred under a quasi-contractual plan between the pupil and the
school?
• Have these choices indeed been sufficiently weighed up, and are they being
made for good reasons? Some disciplines are often in vogue, which can
ultimately produce bottlenecks or unemployment or “distinctive” effects
which can make pupils choose “glamorous” options which serve only as a
tacit sign of acceptance by a social elite or, conversely, a “resignation” effect:
“choice” is sometimes used to designate consent in the absence of “guidance”
and thus does not amount to any real motivation and is bound to lead in
many cases to failure.
• Has care been taken to ensure that the results of pupils’ choices, within a
given school or among the schools in a given area, do not surreptitiously
rank the various pupil groups into a value hierarchy and in the end destroy
all efforts to make secondary education fair? For in such a situation not only
are the pupils in danger of being effectively “judged” prematurely without
having time to make a proper choice, but also it is now recognized that
the self-image of those initially in the lowest-rated groups, in the scale of
academic and social values, is damaged as a result, which has adverse effects
on the learning outcomes of those who are already the weakest, since they are
isolated and stigmatized.
Another point to be taken into account is that giving pupils choice generally
entails high educational organization cost, since it involves remunerating small
groups whose demand for new options is likely to grow. These are therefore rather
“deluxe” solutions, and their benefits may be highly uncertain, depending on the
situation.
All in all, it would seem that pupils can be offered a choice of content, within
financially acceptable limits, provided every precaution is taken and all assessments
66
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
made to avoid the above-mentioned perverse effects that often undermine a system’s
balance.
The more successful education systems are in dealing with the common core of
knowledge and skills, the more transparently, fairly and properly study options will
be chosen, and the more, accordingly, they will be able play their part in motivating,
forming character, and mapping out school careers.
Only avoidance of contradictions between the function of the common core
and that of optional content will ensure the quality of education systems, and
this should be achieved by clearly specifying what is expected of each of these two
educational aspects.
Diversity in vocational training or convergence of content?
The issue of whether content should be standardized or differentiated is naturally
even thornier when it comes to vocational training: some countries have opted in
the past almost exclusively for “general” secondary education, leaving the provision
of vocational training either to employers (this was long the predominant situation
in Japan, for instance) or to specialist schools; conversely, many countries developed
early vocational training systems, taking in pupils at a particular stage of secondary
education. Policies vary greatly in other ways, from the German “sandwich” system,
providing most vocational training in firms while pupils continue to attend a school
or college part-time, to the system found in France and elsewhere, in which the
schools provide vocational training, with relatively little recourse to employers, since
they have their own workshops which “imitate” real work situations.
In almost every case, the start of vocational training mainly involves specializing
in a trade or profession, while undifferentiated learning known as “general education”
is discontinued. A system of trade-oriented vocational training will therefore develop
and offer a whole range of courses and qualifications – many hundreds of different
diplomas, for instance, in the case of France; and such a range is most attractive
on the surface, for it suggests that ideally there will be a shoe to fit every foot. This
diversity of vocational training nevertheless raises a number of problems, quite apart
from the problem of cost, which will not be considered here.
• When they enter vocational training, pupils quite often do not feel that
they are making the most of themselves by specializing, but rather that they
are narrowing their horizons compared with other pupils who remain in
the general stream: a vocational choice is good when properly weighted and
desired, but bad if it is imposed or taken up by default – and that is often the
case with early vocational training choices.
• Employment-geared training provided by education systems is increasingly
a never-ending race: vocational skills change fast and are less and less tied to
a specific trade or profession; the acquisition of highly specialized skills was
67
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
an indisputable advantage in the old days, but today only worsens exposure
to the risk of unemployment.
• Likewise, in countries with developing economies, the requirements of
the world of work are mainly informal and cannot be encapsulated in the
detailed specification of vocational skills: as in the more developed countries,
advanced skills are worthless if they are not built on a more widely applicable
foundation.
The reality today is that in most situations the primary qualities required in a
particular job often apply to a whole spectrum of professions and include problemsolving skills, initiative, creativity in designing new procedures and activities, ability
to find necessary information, effective communication with others, use of modern
communication techniques and teamwork. These skills are strangely similar to those
that general education aims to develop and, as recently recommended by UNESCO,21
it could be suggested that, instead of depleting their resources by building specialized
vocational training, which is likely to lag constantly behind technological progress
or changes in the labour market, the system’s officials should aim at convergence
between “general” education content and the acquisition of the kind of vocational
skills mentioned above. That would of course mean opening up general education to
these less than strictly academic skills.
The provision of common content to all pupils for the longest possible time
seems therefore to be an aim which would improve fairness, through greater equality
of opportunities, and quality for all.
The question of the “ultimate” standard
What should be “central”?
This question has been asked for as long as people have considered what should
be taught. There is no need, though, to describe its long history, but rather to look at
the way it arises in most systems today.
It is usual to contrast the following ideological outlines.
• The traditional position is that content itself is “central”, defined essentially
in the form of bodies of knowledge: the function of schools is to transmit
a requisite body of knowledge, arranged in disciplines and supported by
closely related canonical exercises. Oddly enough, this conception which
appears closely connected with content studied “for its own sake” is often
mainly concerned in fact with cultivating the intellectual faculties. It rests on
21
68
UNESCO, Secondary Education Reform, Towards a Convergence of Knowledge Acquisition and Skills
Development, UNESCO 2005.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
a particular view of the pupil as the master’s disciple who undergoes a course
of learning and exercise with a view to mastering a field of knowledge which
will eventually rise to the level of independent thought. Success eventually
brings independence. Academic failure is no rare occurrence, no doubt, since
content is imposed and sometimes inaccessible, but it is not highly visible:
one mounts higher or less high, but is never an utter failure.
• For some time, under the combined influence of certain trends in psychology
and certain skill-teaching procedures in the world of work, there have been
attempts to define learning on the basis of “targets” set outside the school system.
The main concern is for the usefulness of what is acquired, the aim being to meet
the needs of society, or of the individual, or of the labour market. Syllabuses
are designed to reach these targets, and content is less important for itself than
as instrumental in reaching them. Now “targets” entail measurements to show
how far they have been met in each individual situation: and such procedures
are bound by their very nature to identify failing pupils, or even to manufacture
failure. Whereas in the earlier model the idea was not to discuss content, which
was a fixed canon, the “targets” of this second model are not necessarily the same
for all, and it is even possible to imagine pupils being given a say in the choice of
their targets – which would imply a relative “independence”, in quite a different
sense from that of the first model.
• The third model is that of pupil-centred content, in the tradition that began
with Rousseau; knowledge is not handed down by a master but is built up by the
pupil with the teacher’s assistance: a grasp of method is more important than the
actual knowledge or skill itself. The pupils’ independence (in yet another sense)
is central. Weaker pupils can easily be put in a difficult position by this system,
which requires personal talents and a desire to learn which not everyone has.
The above overview shows that none of these three approaches is an ideal response:
neither the quality of the resulting knowledge nor its fair distribution can be automatically
assured in any of the models. In practical terms, it can only be regretted, therefore, that
they have been allowed so often in history to indulge in full ideological war with each
other, with talk of putting “knowledge at the centre” or “pupils at the centre” or “skills at
the centre”, as with various occasionally intolerant or irreconcilable religions.
In fact it seems these three models are all mistaken in regard to decision-making; in
the case of the ill-defined subject of the supposedly pupil-centred model, the canonical
content of the next model, or the readily measurable targets of the third, the relevant
question may well be what constitutes the ultimate basis for a decision. It is a delusion to
think that everything can come from the pupil when the task is to teach the pupil about
the world; it is a mistake to believe in any canon of content with a truly transcendent
legitimacy and it is folly to think that an eclectic collection of targets could ever amount
to education.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
Neither the pupil, nor any pre-existing body of knowledge, nor any collection
of requirements can suffice as a basis on which the authorities may decide on content:
the question must be put at a higher level, which will really consider rather than
circumvent the issues.
Targets, standards and pupil outcomes as criteria
While seeking valid criteria – or, as it were, justification – for their content
choices, education authorities often have another concern which interacts with that
initial one: they need to work out criteria by which to assess “learning outcomes”.
Questions of assessment (of pupils and of systems) will be dealt with in Chapter
9; at this point, however, it would be as well to introduce a few concepts which are
often used in education systems and which serve retroactively in the construction of
criteria for content.
• The idea of “targets” feature here also: there is a temptation for those concerned
with assessment to think of content in terms of targets, since it simplifies
evaluation, which then concerns simple skills. The same temptation applies
to those who organize teaching methods: for if there are clear targets and
modes of assessment it will be easy to distribute relatively standardized tools
to help teachers to succeed.
The difficulty is that over-emphasis on what can be evaluated ultimately leads
to total neglect of what is less, or less easily, or less “scientifically” amenable to
evaluation; also, if learning is presented to pupils as a set of targets merely placed side
by side with no interconnections in terms of meaning, the overall result is likely to
be highly demotivating.
• Another approach is to prepare for assessment by making content specification
part of the logic of “standards”. These standards may be concerned with
knowledge, methods that are to be learned, or levels of performance, each
of which can involve a specific body of relevant information: they are
simple “statements” of what must be achieved, or what in French are called
programmes d’enseignement, while in the United States the actual word used
in this sense is “standard”.
Now whereas in the case of “targets” evaluation is naturally defined in terms
of criteria that match the targets, the forms of evaluation possible in the case of
standards can vary from system to system: they may be defined beforehand, as in
the case of the American “standards” or the “programmes” of those countries which
use that technique; or they may be deduced from the observation of real pupils’
capabilities and possibilities;22 they may be absolute (though defined on the basis
of experience, standards in England become absolute once used for preparing tests),
22
70
That is the sense of “standards” used in the United Kingdom, where there is talk of “raising the
standard” if earlier results allow.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
or they may be determined by reference to an average,23 as they are for instance in
French practice (in which a given pupil is assessed by comparison with the mean
performance of the others, and a given school by comparison with the mean of other
schools, etc.).
In both cases (targets and standards) there are external criteria, though, and
a fairly mechanical conception of teaching and learning: pupils acquire knowledge
(according to standards of content, or targets which are more skill-oriented); pupils
have knowledge and are assessed on the knowledge they have learnt.
Unfortunately this neat mechanism does not at all reflect how real learning
actually works and the real goals of secondary education.
In regard to the kind of results that school activities aim to achieve, the notion
of “outcome” seems useful. This notion is meant, according to Colin J. Marsh,24
to denote a broad description of students’ capabilities which reflect their longterm learning and the meaning of such learning beyond the school. Those whose
interest in the efficiency of education systems is rather short term generally object
to the attention that is drawn to education outcomes, that do not enter into their
calculations; but the next chapter will try to show how secondary education can and
absolutely must equip pupils to understand the point of what they learn, and to put
their efforts into applying it throughout their lives.
It should be clearly understood that these limitations of pupil-centredness,
or of a collection of targets, or of imposed content or standards, are in no way to
be regarded as reasons for eliminating these notions: depending on the systems,
they can indeed be useful. The point is rather that the secondary education which
humanity needs cannot let itself be restricted by any reductionist straitjacket.
Secondary education costs a great deal of taxpayers’ and families’ money: expected
returns on this investment must be high, and should not be limited according to the
assumptions of any particular ideology or to what is most readily quantifiable.
23
A critical examination of such references to others’ average results will be found in the French general
inspectorate’s report listed in the bibliography.
24
Op. cit., see bibliography.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
Enlightenment through objectives
If humanity really believes that the knowledge, skills and values learnt by billions
of young people in the coming decades are of truly strategic importance and will really
affect the chances of a fairer, more peaceful and happier world, then it can surely agree
that the basic principles underlying the choice of content that its education systems
teach must be a matter of the
very highest consideration.
Justifications for secondary education
It is time for education
authorities to give a central
position – as they did in those
times and places at which the
great cultural exemplars sought
answers to the world issues
– not to mere training targets,
but to the ultimate objectives
assigned to education.
What is the objective of this “service” which is
provided during seven or eight years of every
young person’s life? On this point, it is vital to
avoid:
• the facile solution: avoiding controversy by
drawing up a “list” of content that makes
no reference to any explicit values;
• referring to values that too readily claim
universality, when they are in fact just the
product of one civilization out of the many
that constitute humanity and belong to
particular economic, ideological or religious
groupings.
These objectives can and
indeed must, if they are genuine,
vary from one community to
another, but the important
thing is that they should exist to
provide landmarks of principle
by which to guide decisions about education, all the way down to the most practical
level.
Every community of human beings constantly selects from among the various
value systems in the world those by which it wishes to live. The relative weight it
wishes to give to the value of “performance”, for instance, as it is advocated by the
organizers of production, or to the value of “competition” praised by the marketeers,
or the “virtue” canvassed by moralists, the “holiness” by which the religious set such
great store, the “creativity” held up by the world of art and culture as an example,
and the concept of “the general interest” which is supposed to flourish in civic life
– and there are others.
The present question is whether, when a community chooses the content of its
secondary education, it submits that choice entirely to its system of values or whether
content is relatively autonomous and has its own value system. The following two
ideas might assist in tackling this question.
• First, every community needs at least to ask itself the question “Do we or
do we not agree that there may be certain meta-values that might, like the
keystone of an arch, be set above our proposed secondary education?”. One
might then think of projects such as cultivating the repulsion of anything
that is inhuman, or fostering constructive efforts to develop happiness, or an
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
interest in reciprocal communication, or the courage to do one’s duty both
private and public, or a taste for truth and self-awareness in relation to others,
especially historical self-awareness. Certainly if the community establishes
one or another of these projects as an educational objective it will find its
subsequent path smoother. It is also very possible that the community will
not recognize any such values, or will not regard them as sufficiently practical
to serve as guides for building its future.
• Second, it might be better in that case to say more pragmatically that if
the community is to spend money on building up secondary education
together, it is entitled to require that the pupils enrolled receive baggage – a
set of accomplishments and tools – that lasts. For the young people who
benefit from it, as for the society which funds it, secondary education has a
cost in terms of suspending the work of production, consumption and the
satisfaction of wants. Might the objective not be to obtain some return on
these investments?
It is this way of thinking which is central, and must be the first question: what
lasting preparation can be found for the young, that will justify the individual and
collective sacrifice that secondary education represents? After all, if the objective is
merely to give the young the knowledge and skills they need until the end of the
year, to meet their momentary needs, then there is no need to invest in secondary
education; the objective, on the contrary, is to equip them for life, through all of those
vital lessons learnt after infancy. Infancy has been a time for learning instrumental
lessons and also those things learned at one’s mother’s knee: language, religion
perhaps, daily habits and, most importantly of all, emotions. The question that needs
to be asked is “What should the rest of the equipment be?”. One thing is known:
the extension of “education for life” to the whole of humankind has now helped to
change the situation.
Only a clear vision of an overarching project for education will allow effective
thinking about the educational mandate of the various parts of this whole, and
the various constructions needed within secondary education, whether in terms of
capability or knowledge objectives, or of “disciplines”.
The making of the curriculum
“Curriculum”, this anglicized Latin word, has astonishingly featured prominently
in discussions of teaching content. It originally denoted the “path” which each pupil
followed, quite individually at schools which did not exactly define “standards”, the
only goal being success in the examinations organized by independent centres with
which British schools freely decided to be associated. It took on a rather paradoxical
aspect when the idea of a “National Curriculum” emerged in the United Kingdom in
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
1987, but it has begun to be used in a wide variety of education contexts to designate
something that seems to have become indispensable.
Mastering content policy
The word has been defined in many ways. Shapour Rassekh’s definition is
used here because of its all-inclusive character: the curriculum is “the whole of what
manifests itself in the course of the education process: the purposes, objectives,
learning activities, learning outcomes, human and material resources, evaluation
procedures, opportunities for change and innovation, the classroom practices and
school culture”.
It is important to move from a conception of education policy in which content
is rather an “afterthought” to one in which it is the basis for many policy elements.
Decisions on content would become part of an admittedly complex structure properly
organized in a hierarchy based on real objectives. The “curriculum” would involve
pupils’ actual experience throughout their school life and all the courses that they
are required to follow. There would thus be no more patchwork, mazes or ill-defined
accumulation of material, but a well-ordered whole, as described shortly.
The importance of clarity in content choices
There are two consequences when content is designed as a well-ordered whole.
• Once it is recognized that content is strategically important if the school’s
function is to be properly defined, the “curriculum” will no longer be some
magical standard of reference whose origins are a mystery to everyone, but
on the contrary a matter of constant public record, debate and justification,
and all stakeholders will be in a position to know what choices have been
made by decision-makers and – even more important – the reasons behind
those choices. Cecilia Braslavsky25 defined the “rich” curriculum as one
which refers not only to what has been taught, but also to the purpose for
which it has been taught, the moment when it was taught, the context, and
the persons taught.
• Since there is no longer any “magic” in educational content, stakeholders can
appropriate it and adapt it to their particular teaching situation, group and
pupils’ pace of learning. This is a great advantage to those countries that use
the concept, as compared with those which have a rigid conception, handed
down from on high, of “teaching programmes” that have been described
as a garden in the French style: the curriculum offers material that can be
reworked or negotiated locally, providing opportunities for stakeholders to
appreciate and appropriate it. Fears of a rigidity raised in the earlier discussion
on a common core of knowledge and skills may reassuringly be dispelled
here: the clearer the objectives of the whole and the educational tasks of
25
74
Op. cit., see bibliography.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ON THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF CONTENT
the parts, the better the professionals can play their educational role for the
benefit of their pupils.
Background curricula
However clearly and universally the matter is presented using this conception
of the curriculum, though, there will not really be any beneficial effect if other types
of “curriculum” – openly avowed or tacitly assumed – are allowed to diminish the
scope of the curriculum adopted by the education authorities.
• It has long been established, of course, that there are discrepancies between
the “officially prescribed”, or sometimes “self-prescribed” curriculum and the
curriculum effectively taught, or between the curriculum assessed and the
curriculum assimilated by the pupils. Such differences, sometimes inevitable
(it is often impossible, for instance, to evaluate the entire curriculum),
must constantly be measured and clearly acknowledged at the level of
the individual, the institution and the education system as a whole; plans
must be drawn up in an attempt to minimize them, and those efforts must
themselves be evaluated.
• More intractable are what are known as “informal” or “hidden” curricula,
highlighted by Ashok Gangouly and others. They constitute everything
about education that is never explicitly stated, practices taught outside
the classroom (the institution’s “life”) and non-curriculum knowledge or
abilities that pupils are implicitly expected to master; but they constitute
unfair standards because it is not hard to see which pupils will acquire
such content because of their social background. This is another case of
curriculum management by default, in which performance will be dragged
down in those schools with a socially underprivileged intake. Such curricula
are also parasitic, illegal, and more highly valued by some families than
the official school curriculum; they arise from certain signals of approval
by prestigious institutions – in university selection procedures, for instance
– leading to a proliferation of private tutoring or after-school centres. These
parasitic curricula naturally raise widespread education policy problems in
many countries; but the solution to those problems does not lie in issues of
content – or not entirely.
75
6
EDUCATION
POLICY:
QUESTIONS
ABOUT THE
MEANING OF
CONTENT
77
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
The idea of baggage that lasts immediately raises many questions. The first
concerns the identity of those who are to be so “equipped” and the second relates to
the policy implications of the idea.
• Who is to be “equipped”? Here again the question is only more important, not
less, because its answers are bound to vary from community to community
and from one civilization to another: if there is a definition of what it is
to be “human”, as for instance in those civilizations which are connected
with a religious culture (an “anthropology”, so to speak), then it will in one
sense be easier to know what the pupil is meant to be moulded to; but if
the ideological context is that of “modernity”, which has spread through
and dominated Western cultures since the Renaissance and has provided
the essential specifications of their secondary education, then there will no
longer be any idea of the proper condition for being human apart from that
of freedom, nor will there any longer be a “general anthropology” to call on:
it will thus be harder to determine content in order to train and equip the
individual.
• Nevertheless, it can be generally agreed that such baggage ought to equip
people “for life”, meaning that one way or another it should entail learning
“about life” as its central issue; also, that this lasting preparation should be
appropriate to the young of a species which conducts its dealings with the
world in a multifarious combination of ways, including not only scientific
knowledge but also a number of codes that regulate human relationships,
beliefs and cultural or religious standards which may or may not claim
universal validity.
The conclusion to be drawn from these considerations is that it is the task of
secondary education to “equip” its pupils in a variety of ways: “knowledge”, both
scientific knowledge and knowledge of the proper codes and of other people, seems
indispensable, but so are “life skills” – because living is ultimately what is at stake.
Entering the world of human knowledge
Every education system has a wide area from which to choose its secondary
education content but it is worth considering whether that area is infinite, or whether
education authorities are constrained by the fact that some content belongs to the
secondary education level while other content does not.
It is perhaps not the content itself which can be classified thus, but rather the
way pupil and content interrelate, which, implicitly or explicitly, informs the choice
of content.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
Since content itself is complex, this
relationship must be complex too; yet
it seems that there are some common
features in what is taught that could
define secondary content: “knowledge”
of various kinds does indeed play an
essential part in what secondary pupils are
supposed to learn, but that knowledge is
associated with values – and indeed itself
embodies values.
The existence of a realm of
objective knowledge
Connections between
branches
of knowledge
There is no immediate resemblance
between “knowing” a law of physics
(knowledge that claims scientific
validity), “knowing” a language
(mastering a code which does not
primarily appeal to the faculties of
reasoning) and “knowing” about the
Second World War (which draws on
reasoning but also requires the ability
to interpret a situation). Is it then by
convention and for mere convenience
that secondary education is organized
to bring together learning about these
different areas of knowledge?
Secondary
education,
unlike
primary education or vocational training,
starts from the proposition that there
is such a thing as objective knowledge
which describes a real and observable
world outside. The infant’s world is one
in which the primary needs are for protection and reassurance, since human young
are born comparatively immature; the world of secondary-school knowledge, on the
other hand, is no longer a motherly one in which words matter more than things:
from this point on, that particular form of enchantment is lost.
The supreme model of knowledge about the world is, of course, scientific
knowledge: its hallmark is the relationship with the world built by reason and it
breaks with the “spontaneous” world of childhood. Bachelard considered that break
to be foundational for one’s personality: “When first introduced to scientific culture,
the mind is not young; it is indeed very old, as old as its prejudices. To gain access
to science is ... to accept a sudden transformation, one that necessarily contradicts
the past”. No secondary education may conceivably fail to include the idea that
knowledge is discontinuity, non-automatic, and of value to a human being not only
because of the information it conveys, but also because of the transformation it
brings. The knowledge and value interact from the outset.
Another closely related idea is that knowledge contains information about things
which is worth more than the pre-existing lack of knowledge. Knowledge is enthroned
as such at a particular moment: in this respect, the relationship to knowledge which
consists in surfing networks such as the Internet on which everything is of equal
worth, even with assistance from a secondary school teacher who would be only a
companion, not an arbiter, is clearly quite foreign to the spirit of secondary education.
Nor is that education something only of a particular moment: the basic premise of
secondary education is that there is such a construction as “human knowledge”, which
has grown historically to its present state and is constantly reviewed, reorganized and
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
restructured – and that construction
is also “positive”, in the sense that
though there may be no such thing as
human progress, there is indeed such
a thing as scientific progress, which
can bring progress to humanity.
This “value” attached to knowledge
is twofold: knowledge has value not
only as awareness of information,
but also as a possible basis for social
agreement (a muffled echo of the
scientists’ “agreement of minds”) on
the value of such knowledge and its
dissemination.
The realm of debate
and tolerance
Secondary education must not be tribal;
it has to recognize the existence of “the
Other”; it tries to offer explanations and,
wherever possible, a shared view of reality,
a common culture for the human world,
as in the model of scientific knowledge. If
it cannot do this – which it often cannot
given the wide range of subjects addressed
– it must at least try to create opportunities
for debate and to promote tolerance.
Relative knowledge
At the same time, the idea is that such objective, efficacious, progressive
knowledge is in no sense absolute and that it does not claim to be the complete or
final truth, but is rather relative to a particular historical and scientific context and
will be valid only in that context. In particular, secondary education can, up to a
point, accommodate a variety of forms of knowledge: it does not pretend to describe
something absolute, and likewise it accepts that not all awareness belongs to the
realm of knowledge, as some may, for instance, relate to religion or to experiences
which cannot be objectively analysed.
Such relativity in fact already applies to scientific knowledge in the strictest
sense and naturally applies still more to the learning of codes, whether behavioural,
linguistic or procedural: language teaching, for example, is typically the teaching of
a contingent matter, but awareness of the contingency of the code taught makes it
possible to overcome such contingency.
The infant cannot take an objective view when learning its mother tongue;
learning a language at secondary school brings with it awareness of the learning
process itself, which transforms the process and is thought to give it greater value.
This applies even more to forms of knowledge which belong to the culture of
a human group such as a nation or a religious community. Secondary schools are
expected to inculcate the values of the group in question; but it cannot take a selfcentred approach to those values.
Personal knowledge and critical knowledge
However, the relationship which secondary education seeks to build between
individual pupils and what they learn is more ambitious than so far acknowledged
in the present work: for these objective elements of knowledge do not remain merely
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“things known”, but combine to form the person’s knowledge or even personal
culture; in other words, thus becoming unique in character.
The content that is taught must be meaningful to that particular person; it
must be coherent, and it must be understood rather than learnt by rote. In nearly all
systems rote learning is unacceptable in secondary schools.
The personalization of knowledge within a culture is a powerful feature, and
the very construction of such a culture is personally meaningful: rather than going
immediately into the labour market, rather than succumbing to the easy beliefs
of prejudice or the law of the tribe, rather than giving in to every impulse, pupils
are expected to pause, take the time to learn, overcome their impatient desire to
dominate, and risk some freedom of thought in the face of group conformism. Such
respite before action, so essential for a proper understanding of secondary education,
is also a value in itself.
Forms of knowledge are moreover described as including a meta-cognitive
capability, an activity of self-observation, which consists not only of the power to
deal critically with prejudice and one’s own previous comparative ignorance, but also
a never-ending self-critical activity.
Knowledge-based values
This hypervaluation of human knowledge in secondary education in the
various ways described above raises a potential danger, if it is thought collectively
and individually advantageous that society’s members should be well-educated, since
it might result in teaching that is too abstract, too far from the realities of life, leaving
many pupils on the sidelines.
Although there might be a need to counterbalance some of these effects, there
still seems no need to abandon this “virtuous” model of knowledge in its present state.
The postulate that truth, beauty, justice and even virtue exist and can be brought
closer together through knowledge and study, bearing in mind that they can, no
doubt, never be fully defined nor be free of contradiction between their various
parts, seems preferable at this stage both to universal scepticism and to intolerant
absolutism.
Capabilities worthy of humans
Disagreements about “skills”?
The word “skill”, whose relationship with secondary education is by no
means self-evident, must now be introduced. As in other languages, it can refer to
professional or vocational know-how in relation to specialized practical matters: but
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
that is not what is meant here. It can also mean intellectual know-how: capability in
marshalling evidence, in argument, in map-reading, problem-solving, and so on. It
can also on occasion refer to a particular way of mastering some elementary buildingblocks of knowledge – as in the assessment, for instance, not pupils’ knowledge
of the rule for forming plurals in English, but their ability to put that rule into
practice properly, regularly and indeed automatically. It is also often connected with
the various items of knowledge of “how things are done” which can be applied to the
general business of living.
It is not surprising, then, that so multifaceted a word should often be at the
centre of misunderstandings: but it is equally unfortunate that these are thought to
involve “only” disagreements about wording, when in fact there are basic ideological
oppositions which deserve to be brought into the open.
• Some people object to the notion of “skill” because they think it must indicate
a disposition to diminish general culture and replace it by professional or
vocational training: such people do not appreciate that the word can be used
in many senses.
• Others protest when special attention is paid to the skills involved in
intellectual work, pointing out that such capabilities cannot be exercised
“for themselves”, independently of any application to a particular field of
knowledge: they are no doubt right – except that it is still necessary to make
sure that they are in fact properly identified, cultivated and appreciated in
these various particular fields, not left to the luck of individual pupils, who
often “learn how to work” only with help from their families or private
tutoring.
• There are also questions about the “micro-skills” which make up the bulk
of all complex learning: it is true that for reasons of convenience (often
financial) certain policy authorities use tests which appear to reduce curricula
to nothing more than such “micro-skills”; this often seems to be the case in
the United States of America, for instance. Attempts to reduce secondarylevel content to “skills” of that kind are indeed to be condemned, as the
discussion of assessment in Chapter 9 will show.
• The long-standing and fundamental opposition of some education systems
(not least those which come from the humanist and academic traditions) to
the acquisition of anything resembling “life skills” seems a bad idea likewise:
it represents an unjustifiable and universally harmful ranking of theoretical
and practical studies, it goes against the whole object of opening up secondary
schools, and it appears totally unsuited to the problems young people face in
most parts of the world today.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
Skills versus knowledge?
The question whether content ought to be extended to include “skills” is an old
one: much elitist education in the past was indeed oriented towards skills – thinking
skills – and great stress was laid on material that was meant to “exercise” the mind,
such as mathematics or ancient languages, as well as on capability in self-expression
and indeed life skills more generally.
At a certain time and for certain reasons (which would provide a worthwhile
subject for another study) the content of secondary education in many countries
became dangerously “intellectualized” and concentrated to an unbalanced extent
on factual knowledge rather than on capabilities, with obvious bad effects: loss of
meaning in such knowledge, which was no longer linked in any way to “utility”,
and loss of pupil motivation, greater difficulty for any “new clientele” in accessing
knowledge that is too divorced from real life.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, and paradoxically just
as republican government became at last securely established in France, the teaching
of practical rhetoric, the art of public speaking, was discontinued.
Another factor was involved: in many countries a poorly handled “democratic”
extension of secondary education has been the root cause of pupils’ failure and of
problems with falling levels of attainment: the feature common to the report “A
Nation At Risk” (1984) in the United States of America, the politicians’ challenge
to the English education system in the 1980s and the more recent challenge to
the German system from the PISA results is a preoccupation with “falling levels of
attainment” among pupils; indeed, education authorities in almost every country can
be seen agonizing over falling levels of attainment, at one time or another. This is not
the place to go into the matter thoroughly, and it is a complex one,26 as various studies
have shown, and no one can deny that this is a serious cause for concern; but the
agonizing itself has often had the consequence that education authorities, observing
or imagining that secondary content was “in trouble”, have reacted in different ways
(organizing standardized short-answer or multiple-choice tests; setting “base levels”,
etc.), all of which amount to a “flight to skills”, and often the most elementary ones,
as if the question of content as a whole was too complex and occasioned too much
controversy and tension to be handled in any other way.
It is understandable that those who were quite properly attached to the more
ambitious objectives of secondary education have not approved of these developments:
some scholars in the United States of America and the United Kingdom have railed,
for instance, against the reductionism of these moves, complaining that in many
cases education was being shrunk to nothing more than “teaching for tests” while
the cultural aspects of the curriculum, the essential training for tomorrow’s people,
were being obliterated.
26
On the contrary, the expansion of secondary education has generally led to a rise in average attainment
levels, though it is very hard to compare such levels objectively across generations.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
On a broader scale, European Union leaders, in their endeavour to steer the
various education systems of member countries towards the “information society” or
“knowledge society”, as decided in Lisbon in 2000, have generally (as Jean-Michel
Leclercq27 has pointed out) done nothing more than draw up the outlines of a “skill
society”, not a “knowledge society”. The European Commission claims that the key
to pupil success is to move from information-based curricula to skill-based curricula.
What is the right position in this debate?
First of all, it may be noted that the issue is not always clearly expressed: there
is in fact a range of positions among those who, between two extremes, advocate
greater emphasis on skills.
• Some teachers to whom repetition and rote learning are anathema think that
skills, because they bring out the interaction between knowing about reality
and changing it, are more fitting for that “education through understanding”
which improves pupil motivation and learning.
• Others are confident that there is no longer any need to memorize
information, since it can now be accessed through the Internet and with other
aids whenever and wherever needed. They think mainly of the economic
benefits of “skills” to society, as connected with expectations for employment
and production.
It might be useful here to stress that some likely consequences of overconcentration on skills are unacceptable and at the same time to propose an outline
solution that could restore calm to the debate.
• Ideologies which advocate a smaller role for memory seem particularly
dangerous: true, there is nothing to be said for rote learning as part of
an approach to teaching that is not concerned first and foremost with
understanding; nevertheless the lasting preparation of pupils, which is the
aim of secondary education, depends on cultivating a knowledge-oriented
mind, which cannot possibly be achieved without intelligent calls on the
faculty of memory.
• Likewise it would be as well to make sure that concentrating on skills does
not mean abandoning knowledge and the opportunity to build a culture
of the world in the pupil’s mind, nor elevating the status of low-level,
easily assessed but poorly developed skills: the notion of “key skills”, for
instance, as it appears in some documents, may be used in an ambitious
project that explicitly includes knowledge (see the definition of the eight
“key competencies” by the European Union’s Eurydice network), or it may
on the other hand be more concerned simply with skills (one being how
to “use” knowledge, as in the OECD’s definition of “key competencies”),
without strictly involving the “acquisition” of the knowledge in question.
27
84
J-M. Leclercq, in Le socle commun en Europe [A common basis in Europe], Conseil National des
Programmes, Paris, 2005, unpublished.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
• Most importantly of all, there has been some work involving very opportune
criticism that such a dichotomy between knowledge and skills is really
somewhat empty. As the philosopher Michel Fabre observes, can a skill really
be imagined which does not involve knowing anything? Can any knowledge
be imagined which could not claim at some point to embody a skill? As he
says, real knowledge is always “knowing about”, meaning that one has the
expertise to solve a problem. This is consistent with Perrenoud’s definition:
“competence: the ability to act in an efficacious manner in a defined type
of situation, a capacity supported by, but not exclusively dependent on,
knowledge.”
General intellectual capabilities
Various national and international bodies have prepared lists of skills or
“competencies”, and it is not always easy to find one’s way around them all. The
following can however be distinguished:
• basic literacy and numeracy skills: essentially regarded as not belonging to
the secondary level; if taught there, such instrumental capabilities must be
combined with cultural content;28
• “knowledge-using” skills; all acquisition of knowledge has to include the
question of its application and its usefulness – personal, social, professional,
etc.;
• generic skills relating to intellectual work as a whole;
• skills involved in the activities of people’s personal, professional or civic
lives.
In the case of generic skills relating to intellectual work, such as “knowing how
to marshal evidence”, “knowing how to learn”, “knowing how to use information
and communication technology”, as well as all the more specialized and subjectrelated skills (“knowing how to find one’s way around a timeline”, “knowing how to
read a map”, “knowing how to read texts composed for various cultural purposes”,
“knowing how to use a microscope”, etc.), there are many pitfalls.
• They may never be actually taught, but always assumed by secondary school
teachers to have been “acquired already”: that is how it can happen that
students come up to university not knowing how to take lecture notes or
make notes when reading a book. A practical look needs to be taken at the
28
“If a school teaches reading without (or quite separately from) any teaching about the content of
what the pupil reads, then it will continue to leave by the wayside all those pupils who are not already
familiar with that content from home: the problem of illiteracy may be a matter of reading technique
in some cases, but in many others it is one of having no notion of what the texts are referring to”: Jean
Hebrard, internal discussion paper for the “Primary Education” group, National Education General
Inspectorate, Paris, France, 2004.
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skills required for working in various fields, and a clear decision made about
where they are to be taught (possibly by other institutions, on occasion).
• Their teaching may be so cut off from that of other matters that they almost
become new disciplines, complete with new bodies of knowledge and new
abstractions: it does not seem a good idea, for instance, to set up separate
lessons specially for learning ICT skills, since these can be learnt while
learning other subjects.
• They may be taught in a way that is too closely connected with a particular
school subject, so that pupils never have an opportunity to realize that they
have a usefulness of their own, outside the school studies which were the
occasion for learning them.
The importance of generic skills is evident: it is a good thing that they should
be learnt, and it is salutary therefore to design an overall approach before the task of
teaching them is assigned to the various teaching units (levels, subjects, etc.) and to
monitor the approach carefully.
Life skills
The position of “life skills” – those required in the business of living itself – is
quite different. Secondary schools traditionally tend to do little about them, though
systems vary here too: some have firmly shut the door on almost everything to do
with practical living, such as “entrepreneurship”,29 the capacity to initiate, or the
ability to organize and take responsibility for action.
Three questions then arise:
• Ought secondary education to be extended to the acquisition of “life skills”,
where it is not at present?
• How should “life skills” be defined?
• How can pupils best develop such skills?
In answer to the first question it needs to be made quite clear that learning
for life is definitely the overall objective, and the very acquisition of knowledge and
related skills is only of value when applied.
On the second question, there are examples of short lists of “life skills” in
the stated education objectives of some countries (Denmark, for instance, and
Argentina), or in advice from international organizations such as UNESCO, the
OECD or the European Union. Overall, three kinds of concern are to be found,
their relative importance varying: personal life, requiring a set of skills amounting to
“cultural capital”, civic life (“social capital”) and productive life (“human capital”).
29
86
On the subject of entrepreneurship, see the joint UNESCO/ILO book Towards an Entrepreneurial
Culture for the Twenty-first Century, UNESCO, 2006.
EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
The skills required for acquiring and applying this threefold
“capital” are indeed multivalent: the
acquisition of skills for action, for
instance, is equally beneficial in personal life, civic life or working life.
The question therefore ought to be:
“Which skills would it be useful to
have and use in each of these three
kinds of situation?”.
It is trickier to know how to
introduce these skills successfully
into pupils’ actual school careers:
since it more often entails a real
revolution than merely adding new
elements to the existing curriculum,
there is no magic formula: ways must
be sought to ensure that education
as a whole can accommodate such
changes of viewpoint.
Which life skills?
The OECD’s approach is an interesting
one: it takes three main categories of
skills: acting autonomously, using tools
interactively (the “tools” include school
learning) and functioning in socially
heterogeneous groups (mutual discovery,
cooperation and conflict resolution). It
seems that a combination of the three
great life situations mentioned above with
these three general human competencies
yields coverage of the whole array of life
skills listed in the various systems:
•
•
•
•
•
managing one’s health;
teamwork;
organizing action;
empathy for others;
building adequate self-esteem, etc.
What knowledge for coaching which pupils?
Boredom and motivation
One question that is often asked about the content of education concerns its
inability to hold pupils’ attention and motivate them sufficiently. This question is in
fact a challenge to all education systems to show how they can justify public support
for education if it does not even succeed in interesting its pupils and instead only
spreads boredom.
This is a relatively new concern: boredom, it is well known, was by no means
uncommon in the secondary schools of the past, but it did not have the social
consequences that it does in today’s schools, where it often leads to dropping out
of school in one way or another, and such dropping out is more damaging to the
individual concerned than it used to be. For a long time, also, there were some great
collective myths, either national ones or ideological ones such as the myth of progress,
that often supported pupils’ learning and, somehow or other, their motivation.
Nowadays all that has changed: paradoxically, just as each society’s schools
are enrolling more and more pupils, they are finding it much harder to give them
sufficient motives to stay. High school certificates are increasingly devalued for
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purposes of access to employment, and often school no longer matches any grand
myth that might justify it in the pupils’ eyes. Society, for its part, has in many cases
developed various ways of accessing information outside school, as well as certain
forms of culture which set out to be particularly seductive: the world of the media is
forever promising instant, effortless satisfaction of the desire for information – and
forever artificially renewing that desire by means of various kinds of stimulus.
Since school can promise neither social success nor instant satisfaction, it really
needs to proclaim loud and clear that it is determined to convey its message to pupils
by other means.
• Its task is not to give short-term answers to isolated needs, but to equip its
pupils with lasting cultural, social and human capital.
• It constantly justifies its choice of what learning inputs offer by reference
to that aim and shows how such learning fully reflects the state of the real
world.
• It does not necessarily promote immediate motivation by using the culturally,
socially or locally familiar, but tackles the great questions faced by humans
everywhere.
• It does not promise its pupils that all will be easy, but invites them to pause
for a while even in the satisfaction of their needs, which calls for self-control
in the discipline of studying.
As a result, the issue of pupil motivation (which is of course an issue of content,
though not of content alone) seems to demand the following three contributions,
which need to be considered.
• It is essential for educational content to be connected at all times with those
parts of the real world which they illuminate: it is not good enough only to
reject the unreal content that, in some of the formerly colonized countries for
instance, seems to belong to another world; education must systematically
involve the social customs that exist around the knowledge that is being
taught.
• Content must also be constantly presented to the pupils as part of the story
of human elaboration of knowledge: what were the needs or curiosities that
this piece of knowledge was built up to satisfy? what is the history behind
its development? The cultivation among the pupils of an epistemological
view of what they know is a powerful but all-too-often neglected part
of motivation, but it has been given pride of place by the Geneva-based
international baccalauréat for many years.
• Content should also avoid only giving pupils a passport to things that
are already too close to them and to the limited geographical or social
environment of their immediate surroundings: the motivation that secondary
school needs to inspire should feed more and more on the pupils’ realization
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
that they need to manage a complex dialectic between knowledge which
roots them in a micro-society and knowledge which tears them away from
that micro-society. Likewise the idea should never be accepted that content
should, for motivation’s sake, be based only on what the pupils ask about
or ask for: pupils cannot ask for knowledge of which they know nothing;
furthermore, such approaches have been shown to be highly inegalitarian,
since socially and culturally underprivileged pupils are naturally liable to be
poor at suggesting content.
A question of diet
Diet provides an analogy that can provoke worthwhile questions here. Firstly,
education systems offer pupils many kinds of menu.
• Some, such as the A-level system in England, require pupils to follow a small
number of disciplines chosen from a wide range: the idea here is not that
these disciplines are fundamental ones (or pupils would not be given a choice
whether to continue or drop them), but that it matters little in the end what
knowledge they convey, the essential thing being that each should “train” the
mind in the methods and habits of academic work – or alternatively quite
the reverse, that they are an initial specialization with a view to later choices
for higher education.
• Other models prefer to offer pupils a little of everything, with a menu that
is almost the same for all. Clearly there is a potential advantage in terms
of general culture; but equally, the more disciplines offered, the greater the
danger that pupils may be forced to learn subjects that they do not like: this
may perhaps be necessary, but the risk is that it could lessen motivation.
• Another possibility is to offer pupils a choice of menus, each of which has
been prepared beforehand to contain a little of everything but with its
own particular mix of subjects in terms of timetable allocation and level
of difficulty, so that pupils once again have a real opportunity to choose in
accordance with their tastes and talents: this is often the pattern in countries
with the baccalauréat type of final examination.
None of these three formulas is best in principle, but each has drawbacks which
can be minimized if they are recognized. In particular, the ready-made “options”
formula often leads to a social ranking among options, with pernicious consequences:
a vicious circle is set up, in which one option will develop a social cachet while
another is held in little regard, so that the former is more sought after amid fierce
competition and attracts better pupils than the latter, which sinks further down the
social scale.
As these “options” generally tend to shape the choice of pupils’ further
studies, one can appreciate the imbalances such a situation will produce in terms of
professional training.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
Dietetics also deprecates the accumulation of desserts – in this case, optional
subjects that contribute nothing important to the pupils’ overall education, but only
exist (depending on the system) to help “consumerist” accumulation strategies designed
to win some marginal advantage, for instance in school certificate examinations. The
teacher’s responsibility in such cases is to counsel against bulimia, and to show pupils
just how far from perfect it is as a way of approaching knowledge.
Quite apart from this question of the way teaching is arranged, there is another
“diet” issue that constantly arises in secondary education: a tendency for the quantity
of material taught or the standard required to drift unhealthily high or low. It is an
important point, since it underlies many failure-prone situations in which pupils
can find themselves. Often the education authorities appear to have no grip on the
phenomenon: if the quantity of content to be learned becomes inflated, this produces
a situation where pupils either fail or are “force-fed”. This is harmful in either case;
if, on the other hand, educational content becomes poorer and the authorities fail
to notice, then of course the education of all pupils will suffer as a result, quite apart
from the lower motivational stimulus.
These are things that sometimes result from official instructions about content,
but perhaps more often from textbooks or teachers themselves. They can be avoided
by attending to three points already mentioned.
• By really giving the issue of content its proper strategic importance and
seeking to deal with it accordingly, education authorities will be obliged to
be selective, instead of piling on unreasonable quantities of content as the
years go by merely because it is easier to avoid choices than to make them.
• If it is established that content should always be linked to the mastery
of identifiable skills, then, educational content can be streamlined by
eliminating matter that relates to nothing at all and contributes neither
factual information nor progress in skills; if what pupils are expected to have
learnt by the end of each stage is identified clearly and the required standard
is indicated, with details of its status in each case (whether attainment of
the standard is mandatory or only optional), this should provide sufficient
rigour to avoid deviation from the standard.
• It should be possible, by insisting on a proper overview of curriculum
content, to ensure that content is repeated at another stage (a frequent
source of pupil overload and loss of motivation) with care and only when it is
indeed necessary for the pupil concerned, in view of the level of achievement
required. It is well known that in order for pupils to learn continuously some
things are taught in a “helix” pattern, each area being revisited at progressively
higher levels of understanding and expertise; but care must be taken that the
helix does not turn interminably round and round.
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EDUCATION POLICY: QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CONTENT
When the implementation of content is assessed there must be constant checks
for this kind of drift (by looking carefully at pupils’ work and results, and by means
of questionnaires for them and their teachers, etc.).
It is not enough to make sure that the menu offers well-designed choices and
avoids overload: the actual dishes on offer must be mutually compatible, and suitable
for digestion together. Here again there is a great deal to be done to ensure that
teaching is properly consistent overall, both “horizontally” (as between the various
things taught at a given stage) and “vertically” (as between different stages of the
school career). “Consistent” does not, of course, mean “uniform”; but it does mean
that whenever differences of approach in different subjects or at different stages
are needed these must, since they are liable to cause difficulties for the pupils, be
deliberate, explicit, and explained in recognizably similar terms on either side of the
divide.
• There may, for instance, be breaks in consistency due to different terminology
or tools: if a word is used in a different sense, or an intellectual or pedagogic
practice has a different function in two or more teaching situations, then
there must be teaching to explain the difference itself; it is not the pupil’s
task to discover it unaided, or to hunt for consistency where in reality there
is none.
• Pupils can also face inconsistency in overlapping or repetitious teaching; this
must be driven out or, if it cannot, made explicit so that pupils are not given
the impression that they are being served the same thing again and again.
• There are also differences among the various disciplines in the pace of learning,
yet each knows little of the others and acts as if it was free to determine its
pace unilaterally. For some disciplines it is better to teach methods before
much content has been learnt, while others are quite the reverse; again, some
disciplines find great value, and others none, in a rapid overview of a whole
area before going into it thoroughly; some disciplines feel a need to start by
justifying themselves in pupils’ eyes as proper subjects for study, while others
do not. Such discrepancies are liable to have a disastrous effect on learning,
whatever the choices made.
• If the standard viewpoint within a particular discipline changes during a
pupil’s school career (in many countries the teaching of History evinces such
a discontinuity between primary and secondary school, at which point tales
of the nation’s origin and achievements give way to a wider, more critical
perspective), then once again it is not the pupil’s responsibility to make sense
of the confusion; it is the school’s job to indicate and explain the change in
the subject’s frame of reference.
• When one discipline is instrumental to another, as mathematics is to physics
for example, that status ought also to be explained to the pupils, and handled
with care. Have the particular mathematical tools needed for learning this
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aspect of physics been properly taught beforehand? Have the pupils really
assimilated them? Can they be applied directly in physics, or do they need
revising/adapting? These are just some of the questions that need to be
asked.
• Consistency is just as necessary between sister disciplines, such as the
teaching of two languages: if the way one foreign or local language is taught
emphasizes particular aspects of content (primarily written or primarily
oral communication, much visiting of the language’s cultural monuments,
or ways of learning a language that mainly involve mastering it as a tool
for more restricted communication purposes, etc.), then the pupils must be
offered the necessary justifications for this.
The best way by far of ensuring that these inconsistencies no longer have a
foothold is to establish and cultivate a general attitude of system-wide openness to
epistemology at every stage in the design and implementation of content.
Constructing secondary education
Recasting disciplines
It has been argued above that secondary education is probably better
constructed around a framework of “disciplines”, for all that framework’s faults. That
said, though, there is a considerable difference between “around a framework of
disciplines” and “within the framework of the disciplines as they exist at present”. In
particular, though this very chapter proposes that content should be developed on
the basis of objectives and with a view to producing a well-equipped competence in
coping with knowledge of all sorts, that is not by any means a recommendation that
these disciplines should after all be reinstated without reform. The very reason for
rejecting “disciplines” in the first place was that the individual disciplines are often
too self-assured on their home ground to be willing to consider questions about
purpose and competence.
In any case it is as well to bear in mind that at secondary-school level a discipline
is no more than an introduction to method: the whole set of objectives and skill/
knowledge combinations aimed at is quite clearly not a discipline; nor, later on,
are personal lives, careers or even scientific research “disciplines”! Mathematics is
a tool, to be configured and made serviceable according to its applications. It is
useful to demonstrate from the outset how the various secondary-school disciplines,
at the start of the twenty-first century, are not and should not be merely simplified
versions of academic knowledge: for that, guided by the requirements of research, is
not (or is no longer) a body of knowledge designed for education and the training
of educators; and consequently the transposition of knowledge from academia to
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school involves, now more than ever, both selecting from the huge mass of knowledge
and a real work of putting together, so as to move from the extreme specialization of
academic research to schoolteaching that is consistent and inspiring and combines
skills with factual knowledge in the service of general objectives. The task is in itself
both an exercise in the particular body of knowledge concerned and at the same time
one of educational philosophy.
There is however a preliminary task that often needs to be done to get those
involved in each discipline (who have sometimes been shut away behind its borders
for a long time) to realize to what extent it is a historical construct, produced within
a particular context of knowledge, society and schooling which exists no longer,
and to see how the content conceived in other circumstances is now perverted by
its very practitioners. For each discipline’s combination of skills and knowledge to
play its full part in an overall education project and for its educational mandate to
be quite clear, it must be literally reformed: that is, must find new boundaries and
new justifications.
This necessary recasting of disciplines must accordingly take account of the
following questions (and probably others as well).
• What academic knowledge are they supposed to refer to? What university
courses and publications contain this content? Is it material that the teacher
needs to know, or material that actually needs to be taught to the pupils?
(If a decision is not made on this, there is a danger of sliding towards overtechnical content which could be damaging to pupil outcomes.)
• What kind of relationship to its body of knowledge is the discipline to
have, and why? How can the relationships between skills and their related
knowledge be mapped?
• What life skills tend to be supported by teaching this discipline, and what
multivalent mental capabilities likewise? What kind of educational mandate
could be drawn up for the discipline on that basis?
• What kinds of link will the reformed discipline have with other disciplines?
Will these links be explicit? What influence will they have on the discipline
itself?
• How will issues concerning pupil motivation arise within the framework
of the reformed discipline? What will the main questions put to education
advisers be? How will the teaching of the reformed discipline differ from
what it used to be?
All in all, it is possible to see how, by a back-and-forth process that leads from
the discipline’s initial expectations to its final integration as part of an overall project
defined in terms of objectives and designed to achieve a real solidarity between
knowledge and skills (including life skills), disciplines will eventually be redefined:
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not by imposition, not “for all time”, but in the service of general education curricula
informed by their real surroundings as a whole.
Between and beyond disciplines
In addition to recasting the disciplines, it is necessary to take precautions
concerning the borders between one discipline and another, and their common
boundary.
• Interdisciplinary approaches must not be regarded as optional extras, but
as indispensable if each discipline’s educational mandate is to be properly
discharged on the one hand, and, on the other, if the pupils are to be
properly informed about what scientific knowledge is, since such knowledge
is increasingly to be found across the dividing lines between disciplines.
• These approaches could, wherever possible, extend as far as the “integration”
of more or less neighbouring pairs of disciplines; pupils benefit when
disciplines that seem very far apart – such as the natural and social sciences, or
even science in general and the humanities – can be brought closer together,
or at least have the differences in their terminologies, methods and objects
made explicit.
• These approaches will often be more readily adopted if instead of theoretical
explanations the pupils are faced with a need to do some particular work,
create something, or carry out a technical project that lies at the intersection
of two or more disciplines and consequently leads them to make the
connections for themselves.
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7
ENCOUNTERS
WITH SOME
REMARKABLE
FIELDS OF
KNOWLEDGE
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Since this book is intended to equip education authorities for work on
educational content generally, it would have been improper to devote it to any
particular field of knowledge. The time has come, though, to look at the main fields
individually and see how the questions those authorities are going to encounter tend
to arise there.
First, some remarks that apply to all the observations which have been possible
in many countries, though they do not, of course, necessarily give a full account of
all today’s and tomorrow’s issues in these fields. First to be considered is the area of
languages, then knowledge of public and civic affairs, then knowledge of technology,
the arts and finally science.
These observations all have the same aim, and are designed to help education
authorities in the same way: to bring together, within each of the broad fields of
knowledge and between them, those “opposites” which have been arbitrarily and
wrongly separated by many factors in the history of educational content: theory and
practice, knowing and doing, expertise and general knowledge, and so forth.
Languages and human cultures
These are precisely the kinds of difficulty that surround language teaching.
Secondary schools may at any one time, depending on their local situation, be
teaching the so-called “mother tongue”, foreign languages, ancient languages, official
languages, or local, national or regional languages – and possibly even others.
This diversity shows the human importance of what is at stake in language
learning in every country, but unless thought is given to the objectives of such
learning as a whole there are liable to be difficulties.
What exactly may be expected from
Learning a language –
the learning of a language? Both in the
looking
beyond oneself
case of one’s own mother tongue, if that
mother tongue is taught in secondary
Learning a language almost inevitably
school, which is generally not the case
entails looking beyond oneself – one’s
in many regions of the world, and in
own culture – and opening up to other
that of languages learned after infancy,
people and their authentic cultures.
learning a language means learning to
communicate (listen, speak, read and write) by means of specific linguistic tools;
it also means experiencing at quite an early stage the fact that such learning always
requires conscious attention to the way the tool – language – works (a French speaker
learning English realizes, for instance, that the system of tenses cannot be translated
directly between the two languages); one soon understands also that languages are
used by people, and that learning a language inseparably entails discovering these
people’s cultural value system. It almost looks like common sense: yet it must be
admitted that the idea is far from being enshrined in all language teaching, and that
it is often applied to varying degrees even within the same education system: is it,
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for instance, always regarded as proper for secondary schools to teach oral expression
in the pupils’ mother tongue, as well as in the official language of teaching? Is equal
cultural value assigned to the various languages that pupils use, in and outside school?
Where there is no agreement on what it is to learn a language, no agreement that
opens the way to the next stage (which is setting out reasonable learning objectives
language by language), pupils are made to fail at school because they have not
mastered the language even when it is their own; and they can be utterly at a loss
when faced in secondary school with different languages taught in a manner that
reveals a lack of coherent thought.
It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of encouraging education authorities
to think of all language teaching as belonging to the same family and aiming at the
same objectives, though of course with differences of degree. This would enable them
to avoid the damage done by allowing the teaching of this or that particular language
to become isolated with all its own specific difficulties.
• For example, all languages are subjected to greater scientific scrutiny by the
relevant science, that is, general linguistics: there is an urgent need for shared
reflection among all those involved in teaching the various languages in a
given system, to see which of the tools of linguistics need to be chosen for
secondary education. Where this matter is not clarified, pupils are left in
unnecessary disarray because individual language departments make their
own choices as to whether or not to teach grammar formally, with greater
or smaller contributions from linguistics; some drift towards an excessively
scientific approach, as if the point of secondary school language teaching was
to learn linguistics.
• All languages have to deal with the existence of a body of literature: it is by no
means always clear whether or not literature is supposed to be part of what
is taught. Worst of all, it sometimes happens that, under the influence of
doubts instilled by various currents of thought, the meaning of such works is
no longer “taken seriously” but provides an excuse for studying the language
no more than “formally”. It should be made clear that, on the contrary, the
purpose of teaching a language is always the discovery of meaning; and that
the teaching of the literature is part of the teaching of the language.
Whatever the language – mother tongue, foreign, national language, and so on
– this point merits constant and careful attention: a language is taught in secondary
school to enable one to speak and understand the language. Furthermore, it is
very important to make the most of language teaching as an opportunity for selfexpression by communities that have not always had such an opportunity before.
Minority languages and immigrants’ languages must be given special attention and
must not only be included in the education provision but be offered to pupils who
do not belong to the groups in question as well. Here again, thinking globally about
the teaching of languages can make it easier to deal with the issue properly.
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Public knowledge and private beliefs
The spectrum of available knowledge is increasingly complex for everyone: at
one end there is of course the scientific knowledge acquired in school, and at the
other the practical and personal knowledge learnt at the mother’s knee, but there is
no clear delimitation of those forms of knowledge which it is the school’s duty to
transmit. Scientific knowledge is naturally included, as applicable to all and by all,
but so too, in many instances, is religious knowledge. Education is not in principle
concerned with private knowledge, but owing to the importance of pupil motivation
and pupil autonomy, education must now take into consideration the very personal
relationships between individual pupils and what they know; there are admittedly
things that “everyone knows” and with which a group identifies (such as national
myths), but schools can no longer merely transmit them as if they were scientific
facts. The status of various forms of knowledge is all the more vital since the school,
far from being confined to scientific knowledge that has absorbed the value of all
other, non-scientific knowledge, opinion and belief, must always act on many aspects
at once and perform two roles:
• it is the central site where scientific knowledge is taught (both “hard” science
and human sciences);
• it is the site for displaying and debating a whole range of “knowledge” whose
status in terms of truth may vary widely (social codes, matters of public
opinion, etc.), whether or not it actually has the duty of teaching such things
itself.
The question of whether schools should be open to certain types of “knowledge”
such as religious, political or other personal convictions is a difficult one. Countries
with official policies to promote secularism, such as the longstanding policy of
religion-free public education, have decided that education should be neutral and
not concerned with such matters, while faith-based schools or schools in countries
with no such official policy of secularism have not such a strict distinction. Today,
however, religion is on the rise again in many parts of the world, and officials in
many education systems are becoming aware that the schools’ disregard of religious
relationships to the world does not encourage tolerance and dialogue. These two
developments together reveal the limitations of excessively rigid conceptions of the
school’s role: schools must now be capable of acknowledging the status even of forms
of knowledge which they do not themselves teach.
Indeed they have long been required to provide such different kinds of
knowledge in various fields such as history or geography. Here are some examples.
• Some knowledge allows individuals to feel rooted in a particular group or
society: familiarity with a community’s heritage or a national culture, for
instance. Such “knowledge” often actually forms part of a myth or legend,
being an account of a collective project, rather than of historical fact. There
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are many examples of this, in Lebanon, Burundi, Chad or even Morocco,
where the education system some unifying myths rather than the country’s
more segmented, plural and, sometimes, conflict-torn reality.
• Other forms of knowledge enable pupils to stand back and critically appraise
collective knowledge and beliefs: such critical distance must be maintained
with regard to the group’s understanding of history, of course, and also in
regard to all the ideologies societies attempt to uphold as absolute truths,
such as socialism, liberalism, technocracy or scientism.
The difficulty is obvious: if schools include such subjects in their curriculum
they give the group cohesion during the day and fragment it at night, running
the risk of reviving communal problems. The choices made in that regard are thus
thoroughly political and such decisions must not be taken within the school alone, as
the next chapter will argue. In countries that are emerging from internal or external
conflict, in particular, these objectives are both particularly desirable and particularly
difficult to attain.
This is the crux of great tension in the political function of schools.
• When societies are racked by intolerance, racism and cultural, religious, ethnic
or social divides often worsened by contemporary economic factors, schools
are required to foster unity in order to make societies liveable: indeed, almost
everywhere there is an emergent or growing attention to “civics education”
designed to foster grassroots social dynamics.
• Yet where else, if not in secondary schools, is that very tolerance to be found
that looks outwards to embrace all humanity and strives to overcome narrow
group values?
Are these two approaches really incompatible? Might it not rather be the
school’s task to try to make them compatible – to present both the law of the group
(as part of civics education) and also the values which are not those of the national or
communal group? In both cases the aim is to enable pupils to learn and understand
the values of the group itself and also those outside the group – and to examine both
for conceptions of human life that give these values meaning. In the end, therefore,
it has to be appreciated that some form of philosophy must inevitably be taught, by
whatever means.
It is no longer a matter, then, as certain secularists would argue, of refusing to
consider any values other than those of the dominant group: what is needed is the
ability to “understand” different values when they are connected with different views
of the world; that includes, for instance, the need for both unbeliever and believer to
understand the very notion of belief.
Now the school’s task is to enable its pupils to go as far as possible – that is, as far
as socially acceptable – along the road of critical knowledge and the understanding of
others: it is the school’s function to create the conditions for debate among people.
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Teaching in the practice of debate, familiarity with the diversity of possible
debating situations, the handling of real debates, the critical assessment of the conduct
of debate in the media, for instance, are all vital. Debate, the “conduct of arguments” is
the means by which school can build up in pupils’ minds the idea that the world is not
made up of unchallengeable scientific certainties on the one hand and, on the other,
loose tolerance such as that inherent in “there is no point arguing about matters of
taste!”30 In truth, people must be able to talk, even about the kinds of “taste” for which
they are prepared to kill. That is a value which schools must ceaselessly promote.
Knowledge in action
Human beings have acted,
ever since the species emerged,
individually and in groups, and
they follow in their predecessors’ footsteps to transform the
world.
Human action is increasingly efficient because of the
rapid development of science
and technology, and this equally fascinating and terrifying efficient gain also extends to the
effect of people’s action on others, through persuasive advertising for instance, and on their
surroundings and – even beyond those surroundings – on
the whole of nature.
Secondary education often
fails to teach about action
The paradox is that despite the eminently
human character of “action”, secondary school
pays it little attention and barely prepares pupils
for it: schools were sometimes religious in
origin and aimed at contemplation rather than
transformation of the world; or were originally
aristocratic, aiming at a leisurely speculation.
Educational discourse has long since eschewed
action: science often stops short on the
fringes of applied science and go no further;
industrial technology, crafts, agricultural and
commercial technique are scorned by all pupils
or they play an underrated role; language and
civics education are hardly concerned with
pragmatics, while the arts, another means of
transforming the world, are also sidelined, as
will be seen below.
The sorcerer’s apprentice
is more and more in evidence,
and many ethical issues are
problematic today precisely in those areas where science meets technology.
If schools are to prepare pupils for the real world and to pay attention to human
action as much as to the meaning of human discourse, then a proper amount of
space must be allowed for learning about such lessons, very probably as a discipline
in its own right, addressing the following areas:
• knowledge of technology in history and human culture;
• knowledge of the technical world, acquired by exploring elementary
economics, the world of work and major ethical issues concerning the
modern world and the concept of sustainable development;
30
100
On this subject, see works on argument by Alain Bossinot and others.
ENCOUNTERS WITH SOME REMARKABLE FIELDS OF KNOWLEDGE
• knowledge of technical procedures, by identifying and solving problems,
sourcing and putting together the factors of production, matters concerning the
organization of production, marketing and the impact of production on people
and planet (problems of waste and its environmental effect, market changes and
the emergence of new needs that have an impact on demand for skills);
• capacity-building for action in various economic settings, in particular
capacities to find work, acquire new skills, recognize labour market
benchmarks, establish companies and be self-sufficient.
It will be necessary to ensure that education systems do not avoid opening up
to such content in anything more than appearance: if, for instance, only the poorest
and most vulnerable pupils are taught about the labour market or self-sufficiency,
then these skills will be stigmatized as second rate and will be kept on the sidelines of
secondary education content instead of being incorporated into its conceptual core.
Action is no longer only for slaves!
More is at stake than ever before, perhaps, in the teaching of knowledgein-action at present: in economically developed and other societies, individuals
increasingly often find themselves forced into a situation where there is no preexisting employment position on offer; they have to take the initiative themselves
and think up new forms of work, as freelancers, as entrepreneurs inside an existing
business (“intrapreneurship”), or by setting up a social enterprise for the service of
the community, and so on. The acquisition of basic skills for such forms of enterprise
can, as the joint UNESCO/ILO book mentioned above shows, have an impact on
youth unemployment, the risk of social exclusion, and poverty.
Barely explored potential of artistic knowledge
Since the beginning of time, humans have sought to master the means of expression
and emotion using a particular way of understanding the world: artistic knowledge. It is
astonishing how often such knowledge is still regarded as a “minor” element in secondary
education content, its very presence in the timetable minimal and uncertain, its weighting
in examinations low, its academic prestige poor, and its content held in low esteem. This
is all the more regrettable and paradoxical because young people themselves – for whom
secondary education is designed – are often very interested in artistic activity, especially
music. Unlike many school subjects, art seeks to reconcile matter and spirit through
artistic creation – a vital activity that features insufficiently in today’s schools.
In doing so, art education presents a diversity of experience which in itself and
through its variety defies hierarchies of knowledge and the ranking of pupils which certain
classical disciplines encourage. The point is a supremely important one: the experience
of music or the plastic arts often reveals qualities in pupils cast aside by conventional
intellectual subjects as worthless. This means that through art education such pupils
re-engage with learning. Artistic creativity entails less discrimination, and therefore less
stigmatization, than most academic subjects.
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In allowing pupils to express the inexpressible and to communicate by means
other than the pre-existing codes, art is an irreplaceable education in the mastery of
desire and emotion, and thus amounts to schooling in civilization, an aspect that
could be strongly developed from the moment young people enter secondary school;
moreover, art teaches people how to act in situations where not all the questions
are posed from the outset but arise subsequently and consequently require an acute
capacity for nimble adaptation. On this point the work “Education through Art:
Building Partnerships for Secondary Education” (UNESCO and Newark Museum)
cannot be too highly recommended.
Art is perhaps more readily and effectively open to the diversity of cultures than
any other kind of education: as there are foreign or distant cultures, “youth” cultures,
modern media cultures, minority
cultures and the cultures of
Art at the centre of
the poor or disinherited, art is
secondary education
a special melting pot in which
Some say art can be taught, others that it
other ventures in multicultural
can only be done. Some favour the “fine art”
openness can begin.
approach, while others prefer to start with
The problem is that it is
design and art embedded in social usefulness
hard to define scholastic artistic
… and so on. It can only be hoped that this
activities in relation to the nonextraordinary medium of creativity, self-control
formal artistic activities in which
and discovery of other minds will be placed at
pupils may participate: the arts
the very heart of secondary education.
are not academic disciplines
and have never been designed as such; there is no unanimously agreed standard of
knowledge, but there are competing “standards” that are not or are no longer school
subjects, such as drawing and the understanding of perspective in the visual arts.
Therefore, there are choices to be made, which will of course vary from system to
system, between philosophies of art and conceptions of its place in society.
Scientific knowledge
It is as necessary to take action on science education as on artistic knowledge and
knowledge for action, but for different reasons: it cannot be said that scientific knowledge is under-valued in school curricula, but in many countries fewer and fewer students
are studying science, which raises the spectre of a shortage of doctors, science teachers,
researchers and engineers in the short term, gives cause for concern. Various reasons can
be offered for this (the attractions of the service sector, the improvement in the school
performance of girls – who tend to be drawn more towards social studies and humanities,
the inadequate scientific training of primary school teachers, and so on), but one thing is
certain: action to make scientific content more inspiring is badly needed.
These subjects are beset by rather classic difficulties. One arises because of the
place given to mathematics as a tool, mainly in physics: physical laws may need to be
expressed through mathematics, but it is still vital to make sure that pupils are not cut
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off from access to science by not having a sufficient mastery of mathematics itself; for
mathematics has too often been given an elitist role, and it is important for science
teachers to reinstate the instrumental function of mathematics.
There are three approaches to science teaching used by the various education
systems; they are in fact complementary and all three should always be present.
• Science education is of course concerned with the learning of scientific content
itself; pupils need to assimilate in a few years the synthesis of centuries of
scientific research. This will necessarily be a summary, for the pupil must be
informed of the main aspects of the scientific vision of the world even though
there is not enough time to prove every point by experiment or observation.
The difficulty with presenting the results of scientific endeavour is that they
are in danger of being misunderstood as just another story or myth for lack
of association with the stringent demands of that endeavour; this aspect of
science teaching, necessary though it is, must therefore be kept within bounds,
for it is not, in itself, at all scientific.
• Real science education does not so much involve the teaching of results as the
teaching of a particular approach to reality, and part of that approach consists
in conducting experiments and establishing truths. Accordingly, Condorcet
said that science education provided a means that placed the exercise of reason
well within the reach of most human beings. The use of inventive experiment
to overcome obstacles, the avoidance of all dogmatism as to fact or method
through constant comparisons with reality and the renewal of scientific
knowledge – all afford indispensable educational opportunities. All the same,
as the costs of conducting experiments are high (in classroom time, materials
and labour), it may be sensible to limit pupils’ experimentation to a few key
experiments.
• All too often schools do not present science to pupils as a worldwide social
enterprise or introduce them properly to those features of the contemporary
world that are strongly marked by its interactions with science. Some aspects
should be mentioned in particular. For example, in regard to scientific validation
mechanisms, the question arises as to why, at a particular moment, a proposition
is considered to be scientific rather than questionable. Similarly, in regard to
the history of science, which is indissociably linked to the history of humanity,
secondary education must include information and prompt reflection on what
has driven scientific development at various stages, so as to demythologize
science and the scientific process and steer clear of the idea that science is
a succession of self-evident, uncontroversial discoveries that were perforce
beneficial to humanity. Science education must likewise introduce pupils to
issues of ethics and risk-taking which are now of great importance everywhere.
It must also, in the same vein, include the question of the application of science,
which must no longer be treated as a separate area: several countries, such as
Japan and Israel, have recently tested some particularly interesting integrated
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approaches to science, technology and society. In the Netherlands there has
even been an attempt to include the teaching of composite scientific and social
“themes” in the common core for all pupils while allowing pupils to choose the
usual “disciplines” as options.
The question of information and communication technology (ICT)
This book does not deal with ICT which is concerned more with teaching
methods, and with various individual or collective teaching aids, and does not strictly
count as “content” in secondary education. Nevertheless, secondary education would
be seriously at fault if pupils were not taught to use this technology. It is therefore
obvious that ICT practices must be a part of all that is learned in secondary school.
The issue that must be addressed here, on the other hand, is the extent to which
these tools, not least the Internet, have changed the pupils’ learning environment in a
manner that content must reflect.
• The availability of original documentary resources through digital networks
has quite obviously revolutionized pupils’ conditions of work: the resources of
school documentation centres and libraries cannot be compared with online
access to research laboratory websites, for instance, or to the resources which
the world’s great libraries have placed online. Furthermore, poor institutions
can have access to immense resources, often free of charge, if they have PCs
and proper connections. At the same time it has become even more vital
to teach pupils the main skills involved in documentary research, as well as
curiosity, a critical faculty, and the ability to stand back and rank the vast
volume of resources by reliability. This kind of learning is not in itself radically
new in that pupils must also learn how to use all resources properly, including
libraries, newspapers and magazines, radio, television and others; but these
skills which have long been desirable have been brought to the fore by the new
scale and ready accessibility of digital resources.
• Both the software tools available today and use of the Internet afford pupils
entirely new opportunities to create and communicate. The consequence is
not any specific new teaching objective but, once again, a readily accessed
world which can help to encourage content development by making it easier
to move from learning to the investment of such learning into the creation of
a product, which would then be compared with works produced by others, by
the world outside the school in professional, cultural and other circles.
Care must be taken, though, to ensure that use of the new information and
communication technology does lead to enriched teaching that is conducive to mastering
educational content, as it very often is, without yielding, as may also happen, to mere
fashion which allows the most irrelevant content taught by the most outdated methods
to be disguised in digital clothing. ICT is relatively neutral in itself: it is for the school to
ensure that it only transmits the messages that the school really wants to disseminate.
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8
DECISION-MAKING
ON CONTENT
AND BUILDING
A POLITICAL
DIALOGUE
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DECISION-MAKING ON CONTENT AND BUILDING A POLITICAL DIALOGUE
Who should have the last word?
A special domain of political decision
There is so much to decide! In today’s varied education systems there is
naturally a great variety of bodies responsible for these decisions: bodies may be
central, where the system has centralized content, local, where content is decided by
individual institutions, political, when content is chosen by some appointed political
authority such as a ministry or a parliament, or technocratic when it is left to experts.
However things are organized, decisions about content always contain, explicitly
or not, notions of a common possession and “the common good” – whatever the
“community” involved; they are therefore involved in politics one way or another,
for even a decision not to put the issue of content to the political authorities is itself
a political one.
One point needs to be stressed: questions of content are complex questions, in
regard to both its design and its implementation, and affect the working and living
experience of thousands of pupils, their families, serving secondary school teachers,
and others. It is very hard for any decision-making authority whatever to impose its
decisions in this area: the participation of those involved, though perhaps difficult
to secure, is indispensable; and the decision-making authority must do its utmost to
ensure that they participate.
Decisions on content must be taken for the long or medium term: content is
not to be revised daily and its effects will be felt far into the future. The decisionmaking authority would ideally be established for the long term and would not be a
minister, for instance, or even a government, for their lifetimes are shorter than that
of educational content.
These considerations tend to support the assignment of such decisions to a
long-lived body, whatever its level. This might well be the body which legislates for a
given organization, thus mapping out its future, and indeed, under the constitution
of Japan and some other countries, the Parliament approves the content of education.
There are advantages to this formula, but its drawbacks include the difficulty of
changing content that is determined by a procedure that is perforce slow.
Decision-making on content must:
• have a clear political direction, even if decisions are not taken by the political
authorities in the strict sense: the discussions leading up to the decisions
must address the issues of aims and purposes;
• be protected against certain hazards inherent in political decision-making,
such as partisan attitudes, for instance of how to protect content from
excessively nationalist or communitarian trends that the political decisionmakers may wish to follow.
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Of course, there is no “correct” organizational response to these questions, but
there is much to be gained by establishing an independent body to prepare policy
decisions, to ensure proper and thorough debate beforehand and to summarize that
debate for the public: such a body, composed of impeachable public figures, would
have no decision-making responsibility, but would gain from having independent
members who might include experts from outside the community. UNESCO, for
example, has on occasion provided such experts and some countries have extended
public invitations to tender for such consultancies.
The need for uncontested procedures
Just as the quality of a decision can be protected by setting up a properly
specified institution, so it may prove worthwhile to establish some procedures. Here
it would perhaps be salutary to establish two kinds of standards for use as references
throughout the preparation of educational content.
• First, a methodical charter31 that very generally sets out expected outputs
with respect to content (raising questions about skills programmes, content
programmes, standards, the degree of detail for curricula and a description
of pupils’ indispensable and desirable attainments at the end of secondary
education) and describes the chosen procedures for achieving this.
• Second, a definition of the objectives of secondary education, in reasonable
detail for each kind of subject, to serve as a specification for writing the
educational mandate for each discipline.
These two documents should be guaranteed by the body that has responsibility
for the matter.
Towards the general renewal of content
Beyond these basic instruments, it must be realized that the task of designing
content will not be achieved in a single attempt, but will involve the gradual
establishment of conditions for its renewal on a regular and easier, if not continuous,
basis. The question of who has the last word will become less pressing, since there
will never be a genuinely “last” word, and political choices about content will
increasingly be informed by retrospective assessments of the impact and limitations
of earlier decisions.
31
One example, though a decidedly imperfect one, is the Charte des programmes published in France in
1995.
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DECISION-MAKING ON CONTENT AND BUILDING A POLITICAL DIALOGUE
The quest for expert responses
The question of evaluating the content taught
First, the question arises as follows: content is actually being taught in a system
and the education authorities would like to know whether it is appropriate or not.
They usually have no instruments or expertise at hand to determine this matter, and
so the content remains unchanged and is allowed, remissly, to become outdated or a
decision may be taken to alter it, but without any specifications being drawn up on
the requirements.
Assessing currently taught content must be a discipline to which everyone
submits and which gradually becomes a regular institutional practice. Institutions
will therefore have to decide who is to conduct these assessments, by what methods,
and what is to be done with the results. An international view, if available through
UNESCO or the IBE, for instance, and ideally from a community of curriculum
experts, could be extremely useful for assessing content, as demonstrated at an IBE
seminar held in Geneva in July 2005.32
Questions that an assessment might seek to answer include the following.
• Is the official content actually taught? In its entirety? If not, what parts are not
being taught? Do the teachers have sufficient knowledge and understanding
of the content? Is the content taught in all schools and in all classes, or are
there differences in the way it is implemented? How are such differences
to be interpreted? (variations in teacher training, adaptations to different
sectors of the public, content too vague, differing interpretations by those
involved, different teaching materials, media and textbooks, etc.).
• Is the content being assimilated? By a small elite, or by the majority? What
difficulties are encountered? How motivated are pupils to learn the content
taught? What are their views on the content that is being taught?
• Does the content taught require any prior learning? If so, are these in place
for all pupils, or do some pupils have an unfair head start in learning this
content?
• Does the teaching of this content rely on many subject-based components?
Does each of the disciplines concerned play its part in teaching its content?
• Is the content assessed, whenever the pupils are assessed, in terms of meaning
and according to each discipline’s educational mandate? What are the results
of these assessments (distribution of results, correlation with earlier results
and with results obtained in other fields)? Are these results due to the school’s
“added value” or are they primarily a reflection of the social composition of
its intake?
32
108
See bibliography, op. cit.
DECISION-MAKING ON CONTENT AND BUILDING A POLITICAL DIALOGUE
A variety of investigatory methods will be used: interviews, pupil and teacher
questionnaires, analysis of documents such as textbooks, exercise books and pupils’
performance, and teaching observation in class. The aim is not to dwell on individual
situations, but to determine consistent general characteristics.
Some countries – Malaysia is one – have introduced “curriculum development
cycles” which, among many other interesting features, include an explicit assessment
phase following all new content implementation; that assessment in turn leads to
a survey of further requirements, which can be taken into account either by the
planning department (if, for instance, the implementation of the new content
requires new or re-allocated resources) or by undertaking a further round of content
modification.
Research and experiment
While such exercises of course require the availability of properly qualified staff
(as detailed below), it is also essential that the education authorities find ways of
making their path easier by regular recourse to education research, which can provide
some answers to the questions at issue here: it would be possible, for instance, to
commission research to assess, in terms of what pupils actually achieve compared with
the official curriculum (simple and complex skills, knowledge, behaviour, sustainable
culture), the effectiveness and fairness of the systems in which they are taught.
Other research might be commissioned on content along experimental lines, if
the decision-making authority hesitates between two or more directions, for example,
or wants to convince a particular group that a certain development is desirable
and sound. Experiments can be carried out, provided two well-known restrictions
applying to education are borne in mind:
• decisions on educational content will shape people’s minds for life and will
even affect future generations by making a difference to what is transmitted
to posterity: so one hardly has the right to expose people to the risk of
educational experimentation any more than to medical experimentation.
There must be protocols in both cases but they are not easy to draw up;
• in education it is hard to conduct truly experimental exercises in circumstances
in which definitive conclusions can be drawn as to the feasibility of
universally applying the experiment’s results: often what takes place is a fake
“experiment” which merely gives a fig leaf of science to the implementation
of a decision that has already been taken. This jeopardizes the credibility of
the entire undertaking.
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What kind of debate? Who should do what?
The historic problem of secondary education content and the reason why so
many problems crystallize around it is that in many cases communities have not so
far instituted procedures or allocated roles for dealing with the matter.
• They sometimes think that they can dispense with experts in this area, as if
these difficult questions could be handled without any professional advice.
• They also often think that they can dispense with open debate involving all
stakeholders, as if they could decide such important and complex matters on
their own.
A debate that needs to be encouraged, but kept orderly
Education authorities should not regard this debate (or rather, this political
dialogue) about content as a necessary evil, but as an extraordinary opportunity to
gain or regain real legitimacy in the eyes of the national and even the international
community – the funding agencies and domestic financial authorities. The education
authorities need to create the conditions in which a number of partners can become
productively involved in defining content and specifying what kind of person the
system aims to produce. Some countries, such as Armenia, have recently made
remarkable efforts to create such transparent conditions for discussion and have even
published an appeal for volunteers to take part in the necessary working groups, as
opposed to filling them by co-option which is all too usual in this field.
On the question of who should take part in the debate (which should be organized
by an independent body of experts, as suggested earlier), participants will naturally
include the administrative authorities and representatives of the main currents of
political and intellectual opinion, parents (their sociological representativeness should
be borne in mind), advocacy groups for the disadvantaged, minorities and migrants,
teachers at the various levels of education, representatives of the media and leading
cultural organizations, representatives of funding agencies, heads of teacher training
establishments, representatives of learned societies, the world of art and culture and,
of course, representatives of the formal, and if possible the informal, economy.
Special arrangements must be made in the case of universities: while their
participation is uncontroversial when it is a matter of consulting their experts in the
sociology or history of education, or the science of teaching, or philosophy, to ensure
that their particular expertise will benefit to the whole of secondary education, it is
often more perilous to turn to university specialists from the various subjects taught,
for universities, preoccupied with their own concerns and with advanced research, are
often unwilling to put real effort into the question of secondary education content;
or sometimes, even worse, the only ones to speak in the name of the university are
researchers who represent no one but themselves and their own narrow specialist field,
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DECISION-MAKING ON CONTENT AND BUILDING A POLITICAL DIALOGUE
and whose lack of familiarity with secondary education and poor understanding of
the issues at stake can on occasion lead to some very poor decisions.
Nevertheless it is essential for universities to be involved in the issue of the
knowledge and skills that secondary pupils are to be taught, both for the sake of
encouraging questions about the development of the academic knowledge that lies
behind secondary education content and in order to keep content designers informed
about the expectations of those in higher education concerning the methodological
and conceptual capabilities of their future intake.
The great number and wide range of individuals and bodies to be invited to
the discussion obviously means that the expert group must play a central role: it
should be clear that no particular contributor is supposed to impose any point of
view and that, if progress is to be made, the requisite time must be taken to learn
how to conduct democratic discussion. To avoid deadlock among participants, the
body of experts will find it very useful to be able to produce the results of objective
assessments and to use examples from other countries to cast new light judiciously
on domestic situations.
If agreement cannot be reached on some point, then the body of experts will
have to report this to the decision-making authority, which will settle the matter
– but without recourse to a “compromise at all costs”, which often produces content
with no real meaning at all. In any case, since the arrangements are intended to
provide for constant reconsideration based on assessment, further meetings with
those who hold the minority point of view may be held as required.
Content to be openly and democratically discussed
The need for democracy in connection with educational content does not
extend only to a single phase of debate or political dialogue. It is important that
there be full transparency in other areas as well.
• Content should be made readily available to the public: to secondary school
teachers, of course, but also to politicians, parents and pupils in the form
of inexpensive manuals, online publishing, and so on. If possible, various
versions of these documents should be produced, one for use by nonspecialist secondary teachers, one for the general public (parents) and one
for pupils.
• In addition to educational content itself, there should be a historical account
of the decisions taken and an outline of the discussion held before they were
taken and the reasons for those choices: educational content cannot be as
meaningful as pupils are entitled to demand if it is disseminated as if they
were self-evident and had never been the subject of hard and ambitious
choices.
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Looking in from, and out to, the outside world
As these issues are complex and relatively demanding on poor or emerging
communities, it is highly desirable that political dialogue on the one hand and
expertise in and documentation on content on the other should be more open to
contributions from outside the country.
• Such contributions may consist of methodological expertise, especially
through UNESCO or the IBE: in this regard, these organizations could even
propose to validate the quality of the procedures introduced by communities
and countries in order to discuss, prepare, establish and assess educational
content.
• The advantages of extending international comparisons in the field of
education to include comparisons of educational content should not be
neglected, for content is all too often disregarded, with preference being
given to structural or performance comparison. International bodies
should provide “content banks” so that users may have ready access to such
information.
112
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CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE SUCCESS OF CONTENT POLICIES
Content and assessment
Everyone agrees in principle that education systems exist to teach rather than
to assess; if the two are to compete with each other, then teaching must prevail over
assessment. Yet in fact there is often a drift in the opposite direction (due to many
factors) which in some cases gives grounds for complaint that assessment is conducted
in a manner that counteracts or even nullifies the efforts put into teaching, and has
an unwarranted, unacknowledged and often adverse effect on content.
Freeing education from preconceptions about assessment
First of all, the real content of education is in some cases not clearly determined in
the curricula themselves but in the design of the exercises and tests used to determine
attainment, which follow patterns of thought that are quite different from those
behind the official content: these traditional forms of assessment have sometimes
left their mark so firmly on people’s minds that teachers and even parents consider
them to be more important than the content itself, though they still have little
idea of what abilities the assessments measure. As a result, some exercises measure
capabilities which may be legitimate ones but do not form part of the content actually
prescribed, and so the question as to what an exercise really measures can produce
some very surprising answers: such cases can pervert learning in ways that often harm
the weakest pupils who no longer know what is important.
In other situations, the education authorities may decide to change content but
do not take care to change the exercises or examinations used to test the content so
that they continue to assess the same capabilities as before.
It is also a constant finding that whenever (for any of a number of reasons,
including cost) an assessment or examination process systematically leaves out certain
parts of the prescribed content or certain skills which are supposed to be taught,
teaching of that content or those skills should be discontinued.
It is therefore essential to keep a careful eye on the match between assessment
(testing) and content, and to make sure the two are changed in step.
Performance evaluation and its limitations
These are some of the ways systems can drift off course, so far as individual
assessment of pupils is concerned; but there are others which become evident when
a community undertakes to measure the performance of an entire education system.
This is not the place to deal with all the issues raised by the assessment of education
systems, but the attention of education authorities should be drawn to the ways
in which ill-designed or poorly implemented assessment can endanger pupils’
education.
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CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE SUCCESS OF CONTENT POLICIES
• The assessment of systems entails some quantified assessment of pupils’
performance; that performance is generally measured by tests administered
either to all the pupils at the relevant stage of their school career or to a
representative sample. The danger is that these measurements are so expensive
that a decision is taken to limit them to the least costly form (multiple choice
questions, for instance) and reject more creative exercises or ones that call for
more elaborate capabilities. This is liable, especially if the results of these tests
affect schools’ resource allocations or teachers’ contract renewals, to make
schools replace the richness of the official content with a drearily simple
objective: “do well in the tests!” – thus losing sight of many of the aims and
objectives of education.
• Another danger (to which international assessments are particularly prone)
is that assessments designed, for instance, within the OECD framework are
properly targeted to the right skills and even manage to evaluate some of the
more complex competencies, but do so as if there were no differences among
countries in terms of the content prescribed: this approach may be very
useful in providing a picture of a particular competency at a particular time
in a particular country by comparison with another, but it leaves out the fact
that the country in question may have decided to give greater priority to
other capabilities at that level of education.
An indicator is seldom good or bad in itself: it must be considered critically
and be credited with indicating what is actually indicated and not anything else.
Care must always be taken that one particular indicator is not insidiously gaining the
ascendancy over others or over the very objectives of education.
Down with the tyranny of averages!
There are other ways in which, in some systems, the importance of content
can be downplayed on the occasion of assessments, ways which at the same time
dampen pupils’ and teachers’ enthusiasm for content: it can happen in schools which
account to families for what their pupils have or have not learned, or which make
decisions about the pupils’ academic careers (promotion, repetition, streaming, etc.),
or decide whether or not to enter them for an examination by looking at calculated
“averages”. Recourse to averages may seem uncontroversial enough, but by their
capacity to neutralize any deficiencies by pointing to the presence of some knowledge
or capability in a field which has nothing to do with the one in question, it replaces
proper schoolteaching with a sophisticated gamesmanship in which the point is no
longer to learn particular content but to achieve some abstract “score”, which means
nothing in terms of real education.
If a school, or a system, really aims at effective secondary education, which
means real teaching and real learning to the benefit of both the individual and the
community, then it must avoid giving the impression that all things are equivalent
and that anything can “balance out” anything else. It is obviously necessary to reflect
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carefully, as appropriate to each system, on what constitutes a “good” examination
– one which does not disregard the objectives of the teaching that precedes it.
If content is to be defined in terms of target capabilities in association with
knowledge, then the certification of education will necessarily be more precise:
averages and the “average achievement” will no longer have great significance and it is
very probable that, although the idea of tests will not disappear entirely, attention will
be paid increasingly to “skill portfolios”, which will be regarded as more important
than the traditional calculation of “averages”.
The circumstances in which content is implemented
Educational content is no abstraction, but embodied in real teaching in real
schools, and is meaningful to real pupils. How content is taught is too broad an issue
to tackle here; but education authorities should be reminded of three delicate aspects
of content implementation: teaching materials and media, awareness of competing
cultures, and the degree to which the school itself practises what it preaches.
Textbooks and educational materials
There is a danger that the question of educational media, materials and textbooks
might seem superfluous or secondary when dealing with content policy; yet many
aspects of pupils’ learning depend on the quality of materials available to them. There
have been situations where education authorities have sought to change content
without also taking action to change the textbooks; elsewhere, new textbooks have
brought in innovations at variance with some aspects of the curriculum.
It is very important that content dictates textbooks rather than the other
way round; it is important, therefore, that in making decisions about content the
authorities, from the outset, consider the issues of duration, skills and the costs
entailed in introducing good textbooks.
There are many different economic, political and educational arrangements
for the provision of school textbooks: school institutions may develop textbooks
themselves or they may commission them from private-sector publishers, in which
case they may or may not monitor their production beforehand and they may or may
not allow teachers a real choice from a range of textbooks with different educational
approaches. No one solution is good or bad in itself; what matters is that those who
take the decisions on content have drawn up an adequately detailed specification, so
that textbook editors are not required to make choices which ought not to be theirs
to make. Assessments of content will also include examination of textbooks with a
view to checking whether their editors have respected the programme’s intentions.
In particular, it is essential that major innovations in content (anything, for instance,
that concerns a drive for a new kind of skill or a move to combine disciplines) should
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be specially covered by the textbooks, so that they may contribute to the in-service
retraining of teachers. The authority that draws up the specification could initiate a
call for tenders to see which editor or publishing house meets its expectations best.
It is, moreover, important that textbooks:
•
explicitly refer to the texts that prescribe the content that they are designed
to implement;
•
explicitly set out the educational choices made by the textbook’s authors
in order to implement the content;
•
are issued together with instructions, whenever necessary, for use by the
teacher; and provision should also be made – including funding – for
disseminating the instructions.
Since textbook publishing costs are high, the preparation of textbooks that
could be used in more than one country is obviously a relevant suggestion, provided
that the content to be taught is homogeneous.
Non-formal content
Proper implementation of content presupposes, as argued above, that officials
are constantly reminded of its real function. Pupils are not “empty vessels” waiting to
be filled with content: far from
it! If the implementation of
Is content transparent?
content is to be effective, it must
Are school career paths clear to everyone?
constantly relate to all aspects
of pupils’ culture, so that school
Is there really no “insider dealing” by pupils
learning really engages with
from the better-informed backgrounds?
their own mental situation.
Is information about school itself part of what
Even though the objective of
school teaches, with the same critical eye as it
school is indeed to free its pupils
attempts to turn on the rest of the world?
from the “obviousness” of their
If there is a “hidden curriculum”, a set of
immediate surroundings and
rules of behaviour, attitudes in class, minor
the constrictions of “youth”
information or important skills which never
culture tyrannized, more often
appear in any official programme but in fact
than not, by the market for
often underlie the determinants of most
popular music, video, and so
people’s educational success or failure, is
on, it nevertheless always needs
everything possible being done to unveil this
to start with what really makes
hidden curriculum and either abolish it or
up its pupils’ lives, culture and
build it into the acknowledged one?
language(s). The task is to show
them how to make sense of
what life has to offer them (on television for example, or in the form of information
disseminated through digital networks) and thus teach them how to stand back from
it all, so that they can be won over by intellectual curiosity.
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There have always been some approaches to education, in some countries, to
the effect that school does not need to be concerned with “children” or “adolescents”
because the effect of its action is to mould “pupils”: such an attitude would seem,
today at least, to be particularly fraught. The danger is that “adolescents” today might
behave as pupils only when they are forced to, without feeling in any way affected
by the knowledge taught at school. If society wants to educate pupils, it has to talk
to adolescents.
Schools really should practise what they preach!
Another condition that is just as vital for proper implementation of content
is that those involved in running schools constantly bear in mind that the school
spreads two kinds of lesson among pupils: the lessons it teaches overtly, lessons with
a certain content of knowledge, values, etc., and those it teaches by demonstration in
everyday practice, through everything that happens in school. It is essential that the
two types of lesson do not transmit contradictory messages.
First of all, there are some systems which put “civics” at the heart of their
educational objectives and require pupils to learn what democracy is in theory, without
practising democracy in school itself. True, school is not a gathering of “equals”,
for the teacher has in general the right to tell the pupil what to do – frequently in
educational theory, even more so in unspoken assumption; but that is all the more
reason why school should be, in everything that is not strictly a matter of teaching
and being taught, a practical example of equality among individuals.
Learning itself, far from being outside the rules, ought to set out just how and
why it involves the application of special rules. No school, then, can claim to be
teaching community values of tolerance and respect for rights and yet allow its pupils
to be treated or assessed unfairly, inflict punishment without reference to absolute
rules that respect the general principles of justice, or ignore or despise the voice of its
weaker members or its minorities.
It is still more important that, even within the teaching situation itself, what the
school does should not contradict what it says. “Education” should be part of what
pupils are taught at school, and what is taught at school must always be there for all
to see in the practices of the school itself.
The training and position of teachers
Even the best teaching content will be no more than a dream if the teachers lack
the ability, the will or the means to teach it. There are real opportunities for change,
but only if there is a real appreciation of the changes expected of schoolteachers
– and of how long it takes for a profession to evolve.
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Cutting the umbilical cord of university teaching
It is essential, of course, for secondary school teachers to have a proper training
in fact and theory; what is advocated below is not intended as a replacement for that,
nor indeed as a solution to the problem of its cost. Academic training in fact and
theory, however, is not enough, even when accompanied by real teaching know-how,
if teachers have not consciously grasped the relationship needed between what they
know and what they are required to convey to their pupils.
There is a transformation here which is often not managed as well as it should
be: it is that by which teacher training enables a prospective secondary school teacher
to move out of the world of academic knowledge, the world of his or her own higher
education, and into the world of school-teaching: for unless this break is consciously
recognized the teacher will never be in phase with secondary school content as it
is officially specified, and will greatly endanger the pupils’ general education by
becoming isolated in a set of academic concerns and methods which have no place
in the school.
Young secondary school teachers must, on the contrary, be encouraged to take
a critical view of the discipline that they teach, based on its epistemology, its history
and its social customs, so as to be familiar with its strong points and its limitations
and to think about how it intersects the other disciplines and its contribution to the
objective of enhancing every pupil’s culture. Each teacher should refer constantly
to his or her discipline specification within education. That specification is not a
substitute for knowledge of fact and theory: it gives meaning to what is being taught
to the pupils.
Preparing teachers for change
Equally important, the model should no longer be (as too often it still is) that
of a professional whose university degree is a certificate of training for all time:
the content of education, in particular, must change profoundly and to evolve
during a teaching career without causing unbearable disruption for teachers, who
should, from initial training onwards, be encouraged to think of inevitable changes
throughout their forthcoming careers – in education policy, in the pupil intake and
in the standard material to be taught – as normal occurrences: their initial training,
by giving them this professional ability to stand back from and reflect on their own
university learning as described above, will prepare them for these changes.
In particular, it will make it clear to teachers that as they face the professional
problems that emerge in future some of them will be able to find answers in terms
of continuous retraining, but others will find other ways of responding by equipping
themselves with new documentary resources, by working together with their fellow
teachers, or by engaging in action research.
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Teachers’ responsibilities for content
These are not the only changes in the position of secondary school teachers with
regard to teaching content: they must also be encouraged, from the initial training
stage, to think about the effect their teaching actually has on their pupils. “What am
I doing in teaching this to these pupils?”, “What am I doing in assessing my pupils
this way?” “What consequences will learning this thing now have on their education
as a whole?”. These must be questions they consider again and again.
Aiming at the objectives of learning, not merely at an obligation to teach
specified content, secondary school teachers must be aware that the effects of their
work will in its turn be subject to individual assessment. They must likewise consider
themselves responsible to the entire education community for the content they
teach, starting with the parents and the pupils themselves: their knowledge is no
dead letter, but is active within the community to which it is offered, and therefore to
be offered responsibly. The kind of schoolteacher required is neither a spokesperson
for a particular discipline nor a performer of rituals, but a professional thoroughly
aware of the choices made in determining the content taught and capable in turn
of constantly making choices of teaching strategy, as well as providing a wealth of
feedback to designers of content about how it is implemented and how it could be
developed in future.
School systems and establishments
The indispensable function of the individual school concerning content
Even though there are considerable differences around the world in what can
be called a “school”, and even though such institutions vary greatly in their degree
of independence, it would be wrong not to respect the level of the individual school,
to believe that content design ought to be decided only by an outside body or that
it should be a matter for the individual teacher: those regions which have acted on
those beliefs have been met with massive academic failure.
For teaching is not a free-floating disembodied activity: it is in the actual
institution with its particular collection of individuals, differing more or less widely
in culture and social position, that the content of education has to be given effect, and
it would be absurd if all the precautions taken at earlier stages to ensure that content
is not pre-empted by the demands of self-proclaimed “disciplines” were nullified at
the level of the individual institution. All the issues involved in determining content
must, accordingly, be reviewed at this level.
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This involves the following elements.
• The work done within the school to prepare courses and lessons.
• The school’s knowledge about
Implementation issues
how well its pupils are learning
the content in question.
Does the school know what the content
The same questions arise
of teaching is supposed to be? Do the
as those above concerning
teachers? The parents? Teachers of
the assessment of content,
other subjects? Is it clearly explained to
not with a view to changing
pupils?
the content itself, but to
understanding how the pupils
Is there provision for teaching the
are performing. Everything
content in its entirety?
that systems can provide to
Do the teachers anticipate difficulties in
help schools compare their
teaching the set content?
performance with that of
others is welcome, of course:
Are some teachers at the school more
the examination pass rate
familiar with particular aspects of the
does not matter as much as
content? Could they act as peer resources
detailed knowledge about
for their colleagues? Will connections
how capable the pupils are in
and combinations between the various
dealing with the various parts
subject areas be taken into account? If
of educational content, which
so, how?
raises the school’s awareness of
its strengths and weaknesses
and so that it may adopt a suitable teaching approach in consequence. In
view of the cost of obtaining such information, it is suggested that it be
gleaned from actual testing of pupils in existing examinations, so that the
imposition of putting a double burden on the examination system by means
of another set of tests can be avoided.
Educational leadership in how to teach
These elements raise the importance of the individual school considerably.
Certainly a conception of learning and educational content which improves secondary
education all round cannot be implemented by schools which are supposed merely
to “execute” an education policy without themselves being major sites where such
matters are negotiated. Local implementation of content by means of the teachers’
collective efforts, the involvement of the whole community in facilitating pupils’
studies, the regular and transparent assessment (in terms of effectiveness and fairness)
of what pupils have learnt in a particular school, the transformation of the school
into a “learning community” – all this requires the school to be a place of initiative
which takes responsibility for content as well as teaching.
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CONDITIONS ASSOCIATED WITH THE SUCCESS OF CONTENT POLICIES
Though the road to a balanced situation is long, the need to develop leadership
in education cannot be over-emphasized. Leadership (not the authority of a boss
who decides on others’ behalf, but a shared desire for “responsibility and initiative”)
conduces to that “learning organization which every school must become if it is to
provide the kind of education required for democratic societies and the knowledge
society.”33
33
122
Jean-Michel Leclercq, op. cit.
10
SUMMARY
FOR ACTION:
POLITICAL
CHOICES
AND TECHNICAL
PRECAUTIONS
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SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
What happens when decisions are taken in this particular field of education? What
is really at stake? How can these decisions best be made? How can they be properly
implemented in practice? These are the questions that have to be asked, on the clear
understanding that the choices are primarily political – some of the highest political
choices of all, indeed – but to carry them out properly and with a good prospect of real
success, it is essential to make a number of technical decisions as well.
Making the content of education the strategic
core of quality: what are the policy implications of such
a resolution?
The first question is whether education authorities are aware of the need for,
and can take, action on secondary school content.
An education policy with content at its centre undoubtedly requires more
courage from its stakeholders than a purely quantitative policy; the questions under
the latter policy may elicit uncomfortable answers, but at least such questions are not
hard to frame: where are the resources for education to be found? Who should pay
for what, and at what level? Questions of content, though, are not quite the same;
indeed they belong to the considerably more complex issue of quality.
Now the financial and human efforts allocated to a “quantitative” policy on
education (more open access from primary to secondary school, for instance, or
raising the school-leaving age, or encouraging pupils to stay on beyond compulsory
schooling, or working to reduce truancy or drop-out rates, etc.) are in danger of not
having any real effect on a community in terms of personal or social development
if the content offered is out of date, irrelevant, inconsistent, unfair, uninspiring or
depressing – and if pupils give up or drop out of school in the end without real
qualifications, having acquired neither knowledge nor skills that are likely to be
useful for their development or that of their social and political community.
Putting content near the top of the education policy agenda
If the education authorities wish to take action in this field, however, there are
decisions to be made, many of them difficult, which ultimately must:
• be acceptable to a majority within the community under the rules of
democratic political dialogue;
• make it possible to build a secondary school system that effectively achieves the
objectives assigned to it and obtains results that justify the funding efforts made.
It is useless to pretend that there is not an ever-present danger of tension between
these two aims: the search for effective secondary education which motivates all its
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SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
pupils and equips them for life in a way that suits their present and future personal
and social needs, often throws up proposals contrary to the traditions, routines,
short-term ideological preferences or predilections of one group or another.
This means that the necessary conditions for the success of such a policy on content
will be concerned as much with the right choice of objectives as with the quality and noncontroversiality of the procedures set up to define and attain those objectives.
The tension inherent in the problem must be made to work towards a solution:
education authorities, at whatever level they operate (local community, district or
region, country, etc.), need to make all stakeholders see that the point of having a
policy on content is precisely to raise the effectiveness of education to benefit the
entire community, and that it is for the sake of such a prize that they are being asked,
not to give the education authorities carte blanche, but to engage in a demanding
collective exercise.
Everyone must understand that the authorities are not launching a policy for
educational content in order to seize power over a much-coveted area, but simply to
ensure that every stakeholder – not least the citizens themselves take up their new
educational responsibilities.
Since content is a sensitive issue in which some of the preferences expressed are
ideological, stakeholders must also understand that if the policy is to succeed, the
various procedures must also in effect protect them from themselves as well as from
the political authorities.
Dealing with content as a political obligation to give a local definition to
humanity
Just as they need to arrange for democratic political dialogue, the authorities
should address in detail the political significance of the issues raised, so that stakeholders
can have the courage to tackle subjects which always seem ripe for postponement.
What the authorities must ensure is that stakeholders gradually come to
understand that, quite apart from the economic differences among the world’s
regions and the dissimilarities of its education systems and national traditions, the
issue of what should be taught in secondary schools to which societies now send evergreater numbers of children is now focusing increasingly on the very significance of
human action on this planet.
The question of content is no longer merely an invitation to repeat clichés or
simply to provide children and young people with the minimum intellectual baggage
on which everyone can agree; on the contrary, it is an invitation to choose between
two opposing visions of humanity’s future.
• In the one, humanity allows individualism to develop with no safeguards in
place and each person will try to find the information needed from within
the store of “knowledge” available, using the most sophisticated techniques
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SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
without necessarily understanding anything about them. People will be freed
from knowledge, free from the demanding laws of learning, from school and
from having to spend time at school and money on education.
• In the other, humanity will consider, on the contrary, that it has a duty to
require institutions worthy of so great a trust that they institute meaning
and direction wherever such is most urgently needed: schools, in particular
secondary schools, may thus be given the complex task of providing people
with reasons to speak to each other and languages in which to do so, showing
them what it means to share knowledge that is common to some degree, widely
different cultures and responsibilities that increasingly involve solidarity.
The decisions that each community takes on secondary education content are
not only strategic as shown in the first two chapters, but also political in the noblest
sense of the word since they amount to a local definition of humanity tomorrow. The
noblest sense of the word indeed, for this implies that each community effectively
and explicitly answers a small number of questions namely: what lessons can be learnt
from the history of humanity and from its present condition to inform training
designed for humanity tomorrow or in local decisions on educational content? What
proportion should consist of the concerns and values of the particular community in
relation to concerns and values that go beyond that community?
The authorities’ chances of success in conducting real political dialogue on
these subjects will also depend on their ability to convince people that the issues at
stake are so momentous.
Creating favourable conditions for decision-making on
educational content
The quality of decisions made in a democratic context often depends on a
number of procedures which provide for the construction of the collective will and
the gradual transcending of particular interests by concern for the general interest.
Organizing the gathering of information
126
Before taking action, one must
first know the facts! This seemingly
ludicrous point must nonetheless be
made.
Is it really known what is being taught,
before work even starts?
In particular regard to educational content, the very least that can
be said is that often not very much is
known about it and, for that reason,
Are the real situation and diversity in the
classroom known factors? What benefits
are being sought? What constraints must
be taken into account?
Implementation questions
SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
policy-makers have rarely taken it into account, the general impression being that
it has been taken for granted. Yet clearly nothing worthwhile can ever be achieved
without first taking stock of the existing situation. Taking stock is costly, of course.
It might perhaps be wise in that regard not to be ultra-perfectionist, but to start by
studying the material to hand: the most interesting information apparently emerge
when small samples of secondary school teachers are asked the appropriate questions
or when the distribution of pupils’ results is studied and correlated with various
factors. In gathering such information, communities should not overlook the advantages of involving universities, not only the faculties teaching the various disciplines
taught in secondary schools, but also the sociology and education departments, and
of seeking contributions from researchers and expert advice from other countries or
from multilateral bodies, but should keep control over the use made of the research
findings.
Drawing up specifications and a working procedure
The decisions to be made will, at the relevant time, be policy decisions in the
sense that they concern general policy: for example, the decision to act through
content is itself a general policy decision. Final decisions about content will involve
political and financial choices that cannot be made by experts. The policy-making
body will be forced at that point to exercise political power, but the goal is that the
ultimate decision should be so well informed by prior debate that it is obvious to
everyone that it is the right one either because of its inherent wisdom or because it is
the indisputable outcome of democratic consultation.
The experience of a number of countries shows that policy dialogue on these
matters should be constructed at three levels:
• a general policy level, namely the level at which the decision was taken earlier
to place the matter on the agenda, at which all procedures are adopted and
monitored to ensure observance and at which the results of debates are
ultimately approved or final decisions taken on any unresolved matters;
• an expert level, consisting of a permanent, independent body of uncontested
expertise: this body will not be expert in the details of content nor will it
supplant the social forum, but it will have expertise in education policy
and the skills needed to arrange and lead the democratic debate; it will be
composed of eminent persons who are “above the fray”, not necessarily from
the community itself and open-minded on the various epistemological,
philosophical and social issues raised in this book. They may require training
which could be provided in an international setting;
• a level open to expressions of opinion from the full range of interests to be
consulted. That range could extend to the whole public, but it is important
not to ritualize the debate and to ensure by the best possible means that all
partners, as suggested in Chapter 8, for instance, agree to play the game,
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SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
building a complete and complex structure together and allowing their views
on the objectives of education to be combined with those of others.
Building a debate on actual learning outcomes
The questions that are to form the subject matter of the consultation that will
be held by this body of experts, with a view to the submission of policy decisions to
the political authority, will vary from one situation to another, but they fall into two
main categories:
• questions relating to the general structure of education, generally discussed
separately and before turning to content, even though they are in fact
inseparable, may be raised, such as: “Should there be national curricula?
Should vocational and general education be provided separately or is
convergence preferable? Should common core be defined? At what age
should school careers diverge?” There are also questions about free choice,
imposed decisions and other matters;
• purely content-related questions, which, as suggested above, should be
ranked in descending order, starting with those concerning general outcomes
and ending with those concerned with the detailed specification of expected
pupils’ attainment at the end of secondary education, regardless of what predetermined “disciplines” are involved. Chapters 6 and 7 give an overview of
the main precautions needed to avoid neglecting the major problems.
It would clearly be very beneficial to reverse the order in which the two categories
are usually considered and to derive as many elements as possible from expected
outcomes and attainments: what arrangement of disciplines will best meet such
expectations? Which curricula do they warrant most fully? The objective doggedly
aimed at throughout this exercise will be to turn education on its head by organizing
it with reference to expected outputs in terms of school-leavers’ knowledge and skills
rather than taking the course often followed of first seeing to the entire organizational
structure of education, thus devoting the entire policy agenda to management and
resource issues, and then, at the end of the process, raising the question of what can
be taught given those constraints.
Publishing clear accounts of decisions on content, with reasons;
making sure they are suitably communicated to all stakeholders
Communication is of course vital to political activity: in this area it is especially
valuable, since it involves informing people about decisions taken on educational
content and the more difficult task of disseminating the message inherent in the
content and a state of mind.
Four aspects of such communication must be guaranteed.
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SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
• An “official” aspect of the communication: however the particular education
system is organized, stakeholders must first of all be quite clear about what is
to be taught, in terms of knowledge and skills expected of pupils at various
landmark stages. They must be clear about what is mandatory and what is
discretionary in each case. Nothing is worse than a situation where teachers
themselves are unsure of what the rules or laws on education actually
provide: there must be a system of universally available and authoritative
official publications to which anyone can refer at any time.
• The public communication envisaged here offers detail: the decisions
published are certainly useful in themselves, but most of the time they will
fail to have the desired impact unless the account of why and how they have
been adopted is also made public, as frankly and fully as possible. This is a
field in which those involved, professionally or otherwise, will only grasp a
rule if its underlying political meaning is constantly visible to them. (Why
has this content been chosen to be taught? Why not another? What major
changes can be expected in future?) There are few areas in which the provision
to stakeholders of full information setting out the thrust of decisions and
putting those decisions into perspective is as essential as here.
• Special professional communication materials should be designed on all
available media for informing those who will be required to teach particular
parts of content: in addition to the rules themselves, there should be
comprehensive advice on implementation, with illustrations and examples
of best practices, especially in the case of content that can be adapted to
different sections of the public served. This should be done whenever new
content is introduced, affording teachers an opportunity to exchange views
with content designers and implementers, and with their own colleagues:
one constant objective will be to avoid the isolation of teachers, whether in
their school, their classroom or their subject.
• It is not at all adequate to provide information only to professionals who are
directly involved: obviously, if educational content is to reach its target – the
pupils – then the pupils must be informed as well, as must their families,
school heads, and teachers of other subjects, so that everybody knows
what the goal is. A variety of channels and media will be required for such
communication to take place: oral explanations to pupils by their teachers
at the start of the school year (or of a particular course) about learning
objectives and content choices, discussion with them about these objectives
and choices, regular interaction and detailed work with them about progress,
public statements – included in the school textbooks themselves – of what is
expected of them; explanations of content for the parents’ benefit, phrased in
language that does not exclude those parents who have never been to school
themselves; explanations for schoolteachers in other disciplines, seeking to
involve them in their colleagues’ work. In many cases (subject to resource
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SUMMARY FOR ACTION: POLITICAL CHOICES AND TECHNICAL PRECAUTIONS
constraints), it would be useful to issue special publications to make sure
that all of these messages are effectively understood by the various players.
Implementing new patterns for handling content: how to
increase their impact
Adapting examinations, teacher training and support, production and
distribution
of teaching materials consistent with the new patterns for content
Decisions in many areas are needed in support of content reform if
counterproductive effects are to be avoided.
• The examination and testing system urgently needs to be revised to ensure that
its routines and assumptions do not set all scheduled content developments at
naught, and that there are not two or more contradictory standards in place. It
should also be pointed out that the more clearly content is specified in terms of
expected pupil outcomes, the less scope there will be for examinations or tests
to impose their own competing rules: in particular, all matters concerning the
giving of marks, balancing-out of scores achieved in different disciplines, and
the identification of unacceptable gaps in pupils’ and candidates’ knowledge
will need to be handled within the system’s chosen approach to educational
objectives and content; for if such precautions are not taken, the rationale
behind examinations and tests will triumph in the end.
• Initial and continuing teacher training must be geared to similar ends, for
new content will have no effect if the teachers are not trained in such diverse
areas as:
– command of the major issues involved in content development, and
motivation for teachers to play their part in it;
– epistemology in general and in their own discipline;
– capacity to master changes in content throughout their careers;
– command of general education objectives set for their pupils;
– perception of the hierarchy between general objectives and more specialized
training goals;
– capacity to convey educational content to the general public;
– curiosity about the real culture of their pupils, in all their diversity;
– capacity to master textbooks and all documentary materials relating to
educational content;
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– sensitivity in measuring and monitoring pupils’ real learning attainments.
• The questions of knowledge media should not be left to improvisation, either,
and the authorities should make sure that clear specifications are issued to
producers of media such as school textbooks, Internet sites and dedicated
radio and television programmes and to the designers of documentation
services, in particular online services. All these materials must be rigorously
assessed to determine whether they are consistent with goals set for educational
content and for which pupils they may be used. Another delicate issue is the
physical availability of such media for use by pupils, the aim being to prevent
too much unfairness in the availability of books or other media depending
on their social background.
Specifying the school’s function in relation to content
Many questions need to be dealt with at the level of the individual school,
and even the most centralized systems, which have long believed that they could
economize on content development at this level, have realized that content is
implemented in schools and the school is thus the great revealer.
As noted in Chapter 9 above, it is important that the school authorities do
what they can, using measures properly tailored to the local situations, to ensure that
the school is the natural place for curriculum development within groups, within
disciplines and across disciplines, subject, of course, to the limits of what the external
regulations allow. Curricula constitute one of the flagship components of the school’s
planning and of the leadership exercised within it, not least with a view to:
• detailed awareness of curricula taught in practice; research into the
relationships among content prescribed, content actually taught and content
in fact assimilated; detailed study of pupil attainment in both the short and
long terms, the impact of pupils’ studies on their socialization, their further
education, their lives and their economic fortunes;
• explaining content to the various stakeholders, from the teachers most
directly concerned to everyone else including, as noted above, pupils and
parents;
• a collective search for solutions to pupils’ learning difficulties, not only in
terms of teaching methods but also through specially developed content.
Whatever the system of education, individual schools must no longer be marked,
as is all too often the case in regard to educational content, by non-accountability,
passivity, blind application of rules imposed from outside, piecemeal implementation
by teachers who never meet each other and disciplines jealous of their own domain.
They must acquire full and accountable control over the activity of all of its content
stakeholders.
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Assessments, and conclusions on living content
The final operation is the one that gives purpose to the whole enterprise. This
work has sought to develop a certain conception of the issues involved in specifying
educational content; it would be utterly at variance with that conception if it were
to end by suggesting that the task could be done once and for all. On the contrary, if
content is to be in step with changes in society and science, then it must naturally be
constantly updated, or at least at regular periods announced in advance.
It is accordingly essential that the assessment of educational content as
recommended here should, from the outset, create a general attitude of humility that
makes the revision of content not an exception, but the most normal of professional
tasks. Observance of regular procedures for content revision is hardly necessary
if a community has only an enrolment policy and considers its duty to be done
once children and adolescents are in school. If, on the other hand, a community is
concerned with the quality of education, and the potential benefits of education to
individuals and society, then there obviously has to be well-established procedures
for updating, adaptation, responding to problems raised by assessments.
The point, indeed, is to establish permanent relations through education
between, on the one hand, a democratic society in which questions about collective
aims and purposes can and must be asked, and, on the other, a knowledge society with
a human face. Is it a better response to complain about the lack of benchmarks in the
modern world, or, on the contrary, to see that the extended schooling now available
to the majority of young people – for the very first time in human history – confers
on education a high degree of responsibility for proposing such benchmarks?
132
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Under the auspices of UNESCO’s Section for General Secondary Education, RogerFrançois Gauthier analyses the content of secondary education around the world,
illustrating how issues of content, long neglected or taken for granted, are in fact of
strategic importance for the success of educational policies.
This work draws the attention of decision-makers and teachers to the vast scope
and importance of a subject which must be dealt with clearly, methodically and by
consensus if the young are to be provided with the best possible combination of
knowledge, skills and values.
The content of secondary education around the world: present position and strategic choices
“P
rimary education for young children concentrates on literacy and the
acquisition of skills defined without giving rise to any controversy; higher
education aims at specialized knowledge. What kind of education should be
provided between these two stages? The predominant feeling at present is that this
stage is of capital importance, since it is the stage at which the future worker, citizen
and adult must be trained. Who, then, can deny that it would be a grave mistake to
overlook the issue.”
The content of secondary
education around the world:
present position
and strategic choices
by
Roger-François Gauthier
Secondary education in the twenty-first century