How does curriculum respond to the current collapse of Humanist government
...as though Labour were remotely interested
[Notes from a seminar in the Creative Conversations series led by Prof Penny Hay, Bath Spa University, 4th June, 2025]
We are in a period of rapid fluctuation in social and political change that is slowing the relentless march of Humanism. History suggests we will regress to a norm of moral advancement. How do educators respond, and keep the flame alive? First, some notes on a curriculum alternative; then on educator roles.
Dimensions for curriculum:
Classrooms as places for the generation, not just the transfer, of knowledge
Knowledge for young people is being generated in diverse settings which both spark and suppress the imagination. At worst, we might say that classrooms are too often places in which imagination is suspended in favour of knowledge that is stipulated. We need to see classrooms as places where knowledge-generation finds a home, and where the quality of that knowledge can be mediated and adjudged. Classrooms – even in the AI society – will not go away. In the most fluid and virtual realities, classrooms are places where students and teachers join to observe the world, gain insights about it, develop tools to analyse it, and make judgements about it. Until now, technological advances have mostly been absorbed into our social world - yes, changing it, but staying broadly within our expectations, values and tolerances. The fundamental threat of AI is that, rather than force it to submit to our social norms, it will force us to live in a world of alien social norms. Classrooms should be one of the few spaces available to us to ensure that awareness and argument prevent that flip.
Curriculum should be conversational and issues-based
Curriculum as presently conceived is essentially transactional. Knowledge is offered to students as a reward for submitting to classroom conscription. It has little intrinsic value, all but for a small number of subject enthusiasts. The new wave of student disengagement reflects the reality that the reward has diminished significantly in value. It carries less currency in young lives than it once, perhaps, did. The solution is not to think of different content – packages of disciplinary knowledge presented in the same pedagogical way. We need to replace transaction with exchange, with true participation in conceiving and constructing knowledge. I proposed to the Francis Review that a new subject be added to the ‘syllabus’ – taught on a Friday and titled, ‘How do I make sense of all this?’. Imagine how to facilitate such a class. There lies the roots of a conversational curriculum. But conversation about what? If we are to accomplish the admittedly Herculean task of bring classrooms into the modern world - including what AI will do the nature and legitimacy of knowledge itself - then curriculum needs to focus, not on university-conceived subjects and disciplines, but on the immediate, meaningful challenge of constructing a life by making choices. Choices among alternatives. This points to a curriculum focused on issues of the day.
Recognition that knowledge enters an already ‘excited’ cognitive system
The new science of consciousness (Daniel Dennett, Anil Seth) teaches us what cognitive psychologists have known for 80 years: that the young person’s mind is essentially a judgement machine, constantly in motion, constantly processing data against personal theories and values. Both Dennett and Seth argue that we do not receive information (visuals, words, senses) and interpret them, but that we emit predictions about the world we are perceiving – which is being projected to us – measure that prediction against data and internal values, and then settle for a version of reality. The idea that what is taught is what is learned is a hopeless fiction. What is taught is part of that projection and is subject to the cognitive scrutiny of the young person. However we conceive of curriculum, it will be subjected to the judgement of each individual student. Teaching is but an elusive approximation at communication. Without conversation this reality lies outside the scope of the teacher. The teacher needs to develop skills of negotiation, cognitive insight, managing difference, facilitating argument, tolerance of difference, guidance to evidence. They are currently denied these skills by a tunnel-visioned and mechanistic teacher-education system inflicted by government on university departments of education.
The role of the educator
We live, increasingly, in a world in which authorities (no less governments) insist on single narratives, restricted explanations of events. The best example of this is the forced narrative of austerity. Overwhelming debt, fiscal retrenchment and our dependency on the concentration of wealth to the already wealthy is but one way of analysing and managing our economy. There are alternatives – numerous and diverse alternatives. These are suppressed. This situation reflects a contemporary impatience of many forms of authority with argument. ‘We know what the policy is – leave us to get on with it’. This is the ideological basis of Ofsted, which looks only down the system for compliance, rather than up the system for policy flaws.
Educators should be committed to the multiplication of narratives
Young people in classrooms are citizens – in the Dewey-an sense. They are being inducted into a culture in which one gives shape to their lives through making choices. Those choices reflect personal preference, but hopefully within a frame of moral obligation to others. This is the shift from informed subjectivity to intersubjectivity – framing the personal in the collective. This requires alternatives. Choices are made among options. The role of the educator - and the educational researcher - is to ensure that both young people and their educators are aware of options and where to find them, how to make judgements across them. Without multiple explanations reflecting diverse values and preferences we live under authoritarianism.
Educators are convenors of public debate
Young people aspiring to be active citizens need the skills and the experience of argument. Argument is the substance of any democracy. This involves the tolerance of difference, the taste for exploring difference, the capacity to articulate one’s view and the capacity to defend that view against others. If classrooms offer nothing of value beyond this, they should be places where young people are developing the skills of debate and reasoned argument. Otherwise, argument and tolerance of difference exist in the citizenry only by chance. The same goes for educational researchers. Too many of our reports are both compliant with narrow contract stipulations and reported to an administrative system which guards their secrecy. Our reports should reflect diversity and complexity and should be directly available to citizen and elected representatives.
Educators are curators of justifications
A basic tenet of Humanism, common to its many forms, is that authority has to be justified – it has to claim and show its legitimacy. From church cleric to politician and professional this has become a foundational understanding of a democratic society. But it also means that justification has to be framed in terms that relate to the lives and values of the citizenry. Educators are best placed as, in Dewey’s terms, ‘society’s intellectuals’, to explore the legitimacy of authority. Not in an adversarial way, but as a key element of constitutional study, of civic education. Authority – and the hierarchies that inevitably attend them – are essential to social structure, and their proper study and critical understanding is a key element of a democracy. How authority in today's world and politics is justified, ho
w2 it appeals for its legitimacy, stands as a major issue of the day. Its proper place for deliberation is the classroom.
Education and social change
A proper curriculum debate should be centred on a defining question: do classrooms follow social change, are they abreast of it, or do they serve to promote social change? Contemporary curriculum (for sure, in the UK) is antediluvian and lags behind social change like a grumpy child trailing their parents on an unwelcome walk. On the other hand, young people bring to classrooms important agents of social change in terms of smartphones, new forms of sexuality and relationships, and changing forms of consciousness about today’s issues, from climate change to genocides and to assertive government. Classrooms are dominated by external controls, but they also have a life of their own, beyond the purview of the baggy-trousered Ofsted inspector. They both lag and lead social change. But how do we want them to be?
Here is the conflict between conservative and progressive ideals. Classrooms are places where we learn and admire the status quo; or else they are places where society equips its youth to move on. At present we have an obstinately immovable curriculum rooted in conservative (Conservative) values, enacted by one of the most right-wing governments of modern times (1988). The English National Curriculum favours the status quo and is based on overwhelming respect for established figures and ideas. Its foundations are subject disciplines, disciplines, that is, that have been recognised and insisted upon by universities. Even before we come to the question of how curriculum relates to social change, we should question whether theory-based subject disciplines are an appropriate way of representing the world to young people. Geography, History, Physics and so on – is this really the way we experience the world today? And even for those who can indeed, see the world this way, does it appear in such fragmented shards, each with its own boundary?
Thinking of a curriculum that grows out of and into conversation responds to these issues and questions. If Georgraphy and History are to be made meaningful to young people, it is through proposition, exchange, challenge that we discover contexts of meaning. And it is in those contexts that we understand the contemporary relevance of ideas and phenomena. Pre-eminent among curriculum designs that move significantly in this direction is the International Baccalaureate (Primary Years Program). Here, study is based on active (often fieldwork-based) inquiry with the teacher as facilitator. Subject disciplines still exist, but they have to find their way into the mainstream curriculum as knowledge resources. For the most part, the student finds herself in a small group discussing the method and the substance of inquiry, contemporary issues in life and community, policies and practices – daily experience. Social change becomes a subject of study.
There is much worthwhile discussion around the IB/PYP – its approach to diagnostic assessment, its encouragement of open classrooms, the essential element of deliberation and collective thinking among a teaching staff that are able to break out of the straitjacketed isolation of their disciplinary area to address educational ideas. But the key noteworthy point is that, unlike, say, Summerhill School which is almost entirely based on self-directed conversational learning outside of classrooms and books, or alternative approaches such as Montessori or Steiner or Cotswold Chine schools, the IB is a system that is manageable across a mass schooling network. It is as differentiated, student-experience-centred and individualistic as those alternatives, but it is designed as a whole-school approach with conventional staff/student ratios. It is feasible as a default approach to State schooling.
The point is not to promote IB schools, so much as to say that education systems based on alternative, more Humanistic and more progressive ideals are feasible – economically, educationally, even politically. But it requires the ban to be lifted on recognising that schooling is, as it always has been, ideological.