What Knowledge is of Most Worth? An Old Question Revisited in England

Abstract

One assumption of this chapter is that education, and especially curriculum, should be examined within a specifi c location before even modest attempts at generalisation are made. In this paper the focus will be mainly upon England: the recent histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland differ considerably from that of England. For example, since education policy in Wales was devolved from the UK Parliament to the Welsh National Assembly in the 1990s, much greater priority has been given to ‘Welshness’ in their national curriculum than Englishness in the English national curriculum. The question ‘what knowledge is of most worth?’ has more usually been taken for granted in England than given specifi c attention. In England, politicians and other decision-makers, including educationists, have tended to look backwards to justify the curriculum in terms of tradition rather than more fundamental epistemological enquiry. When the question has been specifi cally addressed it has almost always been due to social pressure of a political or economic kind. These kinds of social change have tended to be of more signifi cance than changes in ideas or educational theory and practice. One of the best-known publications addressing the question of the worth of knowledge in the school curriculum was made by Herbert Spencer (1820‐1903). In his essay ‘Education’ (1861) Spencer made it clear that his reason for questioning the content of the school curriculum was that tremendous social and economic changes had taken place in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but these changes had not been refl ected suffi ciently, if at all, in school curricula. England had pioneered the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century which had then produced all kinds of social and economic pressures in the nineteenth century but schools largely ignored those changes. The curriculum of public or independent schools still concentrated very largely on Latin and Greek, perhaps with a little mathematics, when the dominant forms of knowledge were now science and technology. In the twentieth century the education system, including the curriculum, was reexamined on a number of occasions: the 1902 Education Act and the Secondary Regulations of 1904; the 1944 Education Act; the 1988 National Curriculum, with subsequent additions and modifi cations up to the end of the century. A major concern of this chapter is to look at those occasions of curriculum change and to attempt to analyse what social pressure or combination of pressures (economic, political and ideological) have been responsible for the re-examination of the education