Jess Edwards
The terms “knowledge rich”, “powerful knowledge” or a “knowledge based pedagogy” are fast becoming a fashionable way of describing the values at the centre of a great education
AT ITS HEART, those pushing this “knowledge agenda” draw on the ideas of E D Hirsch1 who expounds passionately on how a return to a more traditional curriculum built around ideas of shared knowledge can help children to become more powerful. Children, they argue, need access to “powerful knowledge” and this will help achieve a more socially just education system.
So Rachel De Souza, founder of Parents and Teachers for Excellence, says in her forward to A Question of Knowledge:
“Knowing those things – and not just recalling the bald facts but deeply understanding them – gives you an upper hand. It gives you the confidence to discuss a wide range of live topics with those around you and it gives you social status. It makes you part of the club that runs the world, and the inside track to change it.”2
If, like me, you follow the endless Twitter “debates” between the “traditionalists” and the “progressives”, you will no doubt have seen that the idea that a core body of knowledge exists that children need to know in order to be educated. This comes alongside an associated pedagogy – namely that of direct instruction or the transition model of education akin to what Freire termed the “banking model”3.
The teacher acts as the holder of knowledge, imparting that knowledge to pupils in the form of facts to memorise. There are some really deep problems with this model of pedagogy. The first for me is the very question of “knowledge”. Presented to us as value free, knowledge is anything but. In the writings of Hirsch, we will find all sorts of important things for children to learn about American history. None of them will be about Geronimo or Crazy Horse though. None of them will be about Malcolm X or the Black Panthers either – why not?
It’s not so much what is deemed as important to the knowledge brigade, but what is omitted that is worrying. Also missing from this model of curriculum is the question of immediate relevance to the subjects of education – children.
It’s worth just noting a central tenet of Hirsch’s work – something that he called “intellectual capital”. This is the idea that middle class and ruling class children come to school already with a bank of vocabulary and experience and knowledge that gives them what Hirsh says is the “Velcro to gain still more knowledge”4
I can see why this might sound appealing and correct to so many teachers. On the surface, it is true of course, that middle class children come to school with many advantages. But scratch below that surface for a moment and what are we saying? That working class children are culturally impoverished? That they come to school with a cultural deficit that we must overcome?
This is something that Dianne Reay gives some time to exploring in her book Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Class. She writes of the Head Teacher of a big academy in North London where the parents started to complain about what they called the draconian rules within the school. In her defence, the Head Teacher said:
“What underpins this philosophy is that if they come from unstructured backgrounds where anything goes and rules and boundaries are not clear in the home, we need to ensure that they’re clear here. So we run very tight systems here, you could call it a traditional approach or a formal approach”5.
I give that quote because I think it encapsulates the contempt with which the current architects of the education system really hold working class children and their families in. To Nick Gibb, government minister of state at the Department for Education, and his friends, they’re all from chaotic, unstructured, “anything goes” homes and at school they need to learn to do what they’re told and learn what’s good for them. What is dressed up as social justice is what I would call old fashioned social control.
I believe that children learn best when they feel there is a relevance and purpose to the things that go on in class. Where they have some say and ownership over the process of learning and where they are helped to un-cover and explore the curriculum. The associated pedagogies of a curriculum that treats children as the subjects, rather than the objects of the education process is at direct odds with the current trend of so called “powerful knowledge” and direct instruction.
I am lucky enough to have been working alongside Luke Abbot and Tim Taylor on the National Education Union funded, Mantle of the Expert (MOE) course over the last year. MOE is a truly transformative pedagogy that places children at the very centre of the learning process. This year, my Year 4 class have worked in role within story worlds of their own creation. We have learnt about world travel, about a range of cultures and beliefs, about Vikings and Anglo-Saxons and about migration and our local area. I have worked hard to avoid turning these subjects into a list of learning objectives to be ticked off one by one. Through using the MoE approach, the children have been part of co-constructing the stories and we have planned the next steps in our inquiries together.
Some might ask if the children have learnt anything. The answer can be seen in pages upon pages of the best writing I have ever achieved from children in my fifteen years of teaching practice. The children’s writing has benefitted from the sense of purpose they feel. I am not asking them to write for me or for a set of assessment criteria (although of course, I am assessing their writing all of the time). Instead, they are writing because they feel there is an immediate need for them to do so. For example, we read Kensuke’s Kingdom by Michael Morpurgo and worked as a make believe mystery solving team for an entire term. They needed to write reports to file on missing people; they have needed to write scripts for TV advertisements for the mystery solving team. They have felt compelled to write letters, newspaper reports and heartfelt diary entries. Of course, spelling, grammar and punctuation have all been included in a way that is meaningful. This is crucial because without the writing feeling purposeful to the children, the teaching of SPaG will largely fall on deaf ears.
Centrally important to this creative approach to pedagogy is dialogue. Dialogue between children and between adults and children. Talking, thinking and talking again. Imagining solutions to problems, testing those solutions out and in the process, learning essential skills and knowledge. There is now a group of Twitteratti teachers who spend lots of their time attacking dialogue. They rail against group work. They say that discussion is a waste of time.
But dialogue is crucial. Dialogue is how we construct meaning in education. It’s how we make sense of the world. It must be placed centre stage in any pedagogy that seeks to be truly liberating.
I believe deeply that it is simply not true that those in government are honest about wanting education to provide social justice. Many of the teachers currently arguing in favour of the knowledge agenda are passionate teachers, wanting to empower the students in their classes.
They are being misled. The language of social justice is being co-opted by those with no interest in achieving it. Arguing that the banking model is the way that children learn best has failed the test of history. Even the CBI president, Paul Drechsler, has criticised heavily the current emphasis on test results and rote learning, and called for them to prioritise teaching that encourages thoughts, questions, creativity and teamworking6. Even for the needs of British industry, the current system is not delivering.
Creativity, now painted as something only an oldfashioned, woolly, liberal kind of teacher believes in, must be fought for in our schools. Without a creative approach to the teaching of all subjects, children will never gain the deep understanding and love of learning that they deserve to feel. The creative process, from thought, through discussion, rethinking and making, lies at the very centre of what it is to be human. To turn a human being’s learning into an exercise in fact based test passing, is to embed the deepest alienation in our school system. Teachers everywhere must begin to fight for a vision of education where children can truly develop their personalities, where they are encouraged to think and question and most importantly, to challenge and make the world a better place.
- Hirsch, E. D. (2016) Why Knowledge Matters (Harvard).
- http://parentsandteachers.org.uk/application/files/3415/0816/0485/The_Question_of_Knowledge_FINAL.pdf
- Freire, P. (1996) Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Penguin).
- Quoted in Policy exchange, Knowledge and the Curriculum https://policyexchange.org.uk/wpcontent/
uploads/2016/09/knowledge-and-the-curriculum.pdf. - Reay, D. (2017) Miseducation, Inequality and the Working Class (Polity).
- http://www.cbi.org.uk/news/education-is-more-than-knowledgealone/