Letter from London Knowledge-skills debate Debates on education are many and varied as always. The final professed goal of everybody involved in education, is to equip children and young adults with the skills they need to make a living, preferably in an interesting, successful and rewarding manner when they go out into the big bad world. These days debates, proposals and arguments affect children from primary school to university levels. Right now one of the controversial subjects under discussion is a proposal to scrap the national curriculum — a system of study and assessment devised by the Conservative government in 1988 — which all schools are obliged to follow. A report prepared for the Association of Teachers and Lecturers’ conference, held in early April, calls for an overhaul of the system with the consequent abandonment of tests currently held for children aged seven, 11 and 14. “We can’t carry on with a national curriculum which has its roots in the 19th century, doesn’t fit the 20th century and doesn’t prepare children for the 21st century,” commented Mary Bousted general secretary of the association. According to Bousted, many children are so bored by constant testing that they leave school at age 16 disillusioned with further education. Instead a range of skills should be taught in schools, such as creativity, communications and citizenship, rather than subjects such as history, geography, science etc. However, Alan Smithers, professor of education at the University of Buckingham, describes this proposal as “disturbing nonsense”. “The point about testing is that we discovered quite shocking things about how few of our children can handle words and numbers properly at the age of 11. Without that testing we would have assumed everything was OK,” he says. Teachers’ leaders emphasise that pupils don’t need a knowledge-based curriculum, but learning skills for the future. Geography, to take one example might disappear completely. But the argument against abandonment of such a subject is that basic knowledge of the location, size and demographics of countries, not to mention cities of the world, seems even more necessary if the next generation is to make any headway in the emerging new globalised economy. The plain truth which teachers’ representatives seem to have overlooked is that the skill-sets projected as new ideas have always been embedded in traditional subjects, and at university level students’ lack of general knowledge makes a lecturer’s job considerably harder. Let us hope that these areas of study don’t disappear for a generation of students whose skills in creativity, communications and citizenship far outweigh their knowledge of the world around them and its history. We need to know how we ended up where we are. (Jacqueline Thomas is a London-based academic) United States of America Visa restrictions disrupt academic traffic Prominent Indian academics including Dr. Goverdhan Mehta, hitherto director of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore are not exceptions. The Bush administration is under fire for a marked increase in the number of academics who have been denied visas to travel to the US, purportedly on national…
