No, We Can’t Just Keep Adding Stuff To What’s Taught In Schools
And even if we could, most of it wouldn't sink in.
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Kaleb Cooper, off Clarkson’s Farm, has had an idea. “I am going to try to get farming taught in schools,” he recently told the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where he was promoting his inevitable children’s book. “I was never very good at school, but farming can teach us a lot of things about maths, English or science.” Whether never having been very good in school makes you more or less qualified to aid in curriculum reforms is left to the reader to decide. I’m genuinely not sure.
Cooper wasn’t the first to propose this particular idea. Last July, Maya Ellis – the first ever Labour MP for Lancashire’s largely rural Ribble Valley – told Farmers Guardian that she would “absolutely love it if our curriculum review ended up with some form of compulsory teaching in schools about where our food comes from or giving children the opportunity to visit a farm”. Which is, to be fair, exactly the sort of thing you should probably say to Farmers Guardian if you’re the first Labour MP for a traditionally Tory rural seat.
The problem is – that isn’t the only thing people have demanded be added to the national curriculum. This happens all the time. What follows is the result of the most cursory Google News search.
Self-defence for girls. At the request of some teenagers in Hull.
Gaza, and the early warnings of genocide. Whatever else you may think of Greta Thunberg, you can’t fault her ability to generate headlines.
Yorkshire dialect. Colin Speakman – author of several books on Yorkshire, volunteer at the Yorkshire Society, founder of the Yorkshire dialect festival ThriddingsFest – told the Yorkshire Post that it’s basically the same principle as teaching Welsh. Sure, why not.
Pensions. A bullshit survey commissioned by an online investment platform I’m not going to promote by naming found that over (and not, as the story in Pensions Age says, “almost”) three-quarters (76%) of UK adults believe pensions aren’t discussed enough in schools. As someone who has not thought enough about long-range financial planning, I sympathise – but really if people can make it past 40 without the need to get ahead of this getting through to them, I’m not sure how you’re gonna get the kids on board.
AI. Another bullshit survey, this one commissioned by, and to win coverage for, a platform for finding tutors. It found that 74% of European tutors believe the technology’s impact on learning means it should be taught in schools. “Students are crying out for guidance and education on AI technology,” FindTutors CEO Albert Clemente says, apparently. Well I never.
AI, again. And another bullshit survey, this one of [checks notes] LinkedIn users. (Less keen than the tutors: only 66%!) There will come a point at which, if this is the world-shaking technology we keep being told, this might make sense, I’m sure – but given that the main questions about AI right now are “what can it actually do” and “to what extent is it bullshit”, and since the answers to both those questions are currently “we don’t know”, then how are you meant to pull a curriculum together from that exactly?
Coding. Another bullshit survey, this one finding that 60% of parents think it an important skill for kids and reported by ComputerWeekly. It was commissioned by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which obviously has an interest in lots of kids getting into coding. Whether the “teach coding” and “teach AI, a technology whose more convincing use cases include coding” people are aware of any possible contradiction in their positions or, indeed, each other’s existence is not, at this juncture, clear.
Personal finance. Thus argues former soldier Peter Corr, who says his lack of knowledge of such things resulted in him ending up homeless, in North East Bylines.
Black British Music. So demands a petition posted by the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster.
Brexit. I have a lot of time for Professor Anand Menon who proposed this in 2019, at the height of the madness, but nonetheless: oh, dear god, no.
Entrepreneurship. Been proposed twice recently, by both Sunny Varkey, founder of the giant private schools chain GEMS Education, and Virgin’s Richard Branson. Whether it is possible to teach entrepreneurship I’m not sure – it feels more like teaching, say, morality than it does like teaching maths (or, come to that, business studies) – and being pushed by some of the world’s most successful self-made men does feel a lot like a statement of belief that “the world would better if more of it looked like me”.
Suicide prevention. Three men who lost daughters to suicide have been channeling their pain into a campaign for schools to teach “grit and resilience”, to help kids “feel able to take on the challenges and risks of life”. These guys have actually persuaded the government to release new guidance on relationships, sex and health education (RHSE). Fair enough.
CPR. This story about a teenager who lost both parents to sudden heart attacks is gutwrenching, and this too feels a lot like someone who has suffered an inconceivable level of tragedy trying to find something meaningful to pull from it – but I fear that neither CPR, nor the school system’s ability to impart knowledge, are as effective as one might wish them to be
Last and also, thankfully least, there’s:
Kate Middleton’s 13-Second Bun Hack. To be fair, we can probably assume Glamour magazine didn’t mean this headline entirely seriously.
Oh actually, there was also this piece from BoxingScene (“The Beltline: Do you think boxing should be taught in schools?”) but I don’t think it counts because BoxingScene seems to be American and also they’re not sure.
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So yes, it happens a lot. It happens so often, in fact, that I’m not even the first to have had the brainwave that there might be a mileage in just listing all the things people have wanted to stuff into the school day, which is annoying. In 2018 former Department for Education official Gabriel Milland wrote a column for the Times in which he “constructed a list of all the subjects that someone had claimed should be included in the national curriculum”. They included financial literacy, first aid, mental health education, eating disorders, mindfulness, jazz appreciation, animal welfare, fertility, cycling, breastfeeding, organ donation, death and grief, how to gamble, how to skin and poach fish, how to watch pornography, how to use a knife and fork, and the Hillsborough disaster. You can read the full list here.
Not all of the ideas on either my list or Gabriel’s are in the same category. Some of them are just plain madness, obviously. But others are decent enough ideas for things young people should learn, it’s just that they’re more obviously the preserve of families than teaching staff. (Cutlery use? Really?)
Others are such good ideas that kids actually, er, learn them already. Financial literacy is in whatever they’re calling PHSE these days, and if kids aren’t all magically popping out at the end of the process as thousands of mini Steven Bartletts, then that perhaps might be a clue that “just sticking something in the curriculum” may not be the instant fix those headlines implies. In the same way, it’s been a long time since I was at school but I’m fairly sure there was a session with St John’s Ambulance at which my class was taught CPR. That neither of these skills are among my strengths now may say something about me, or might say something about how well they were taught. Just as likely, though, the explanation is the same for the fact I managed to take French for seven years and yet barely speak French – that there is a limit to the knowledge you’re going to retain without regular reinforcement.
There is also a hard limit on the time schools have to teach. For a campaigner, whether worthy or unhinged, “we should teach this in schools” is an easy win: it’s a cost-free headline, and they’re not the ones who’ll ever have to deal with the limits or trade offs inherent in running an actual school. The people who are in charge of such things, though, do have to think about what they can realistically impart in a 32-hour school week, not to mention which bits of knowledge will be most useful. Yes, farming, entrepreneurship and mental health are all things that young people would ideally have some instinct for. But are they things that can be taught? Are schools the best places to teach them? Should they definitely be taking time away from history or physics?
I don’t know the answers – but I would pose a challenge for anyone writing up these stories in future. The next time someone says they’d like to see animal husbandry or knitting taught in schools, ask them what subject they think we should sacrifice in exchange. Ask them what trade offs they’d make.
I don’t expect anyone to do this. But I live in hope.
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