An Assortment of School Subjects by Any Other Name…

nick cowen, 16 December 2008

In his regular column on education in last week’s Sunday Times, Chris Woodhead laid into the recently published Rose report on primary schooling in whose defence I posted a blog last week.
If I return to its defence against Woodhead’s attack on it in this week’s posting, it is less in angry defiance of the opinion of such an august authority on education than in the spirit of continued puzzlement as to the basis for the invective that has been levelled at it by not only Woodhead but such other prominent writers about education as Michael Gove and Melanie Phillips with whose more traditionally oriented views I normally find myself in agreement — but not on this occasion.

In his newspaper column, Woodhead indicts Rose for having commended the greater use in primary schools of cross-curricular forms of study. Woodhead writes: ‘Surely Rose knows that “cross-curricularity” damages children’s learning.’ By calling for its greater use in primary schools in delivery of National Curriculum subjects, Woodhead claims ‘Rose… has lost professional credibility’.
In support of his assertion that Sir Jim Rose knows cross-curricularity is educationally counter-productive, Woodhead cites a 1992 report on primary school teaching methods that he and Rose co-authored together with Robin Alexander. Contained in that report were the following highly critical comments about this didactic method that Woodhead quotes to show that Rose is fully aware of the defects of that method. The report states:
‘The resistance to subjects at the primary stage is no longer credible.’
‘There is clear evidence that much topic work has led to fragmentation and superficial learning.’
Does the fact that Rose put his name to a document that contains such statements establish, as Woodhead claims it does, that the proposals which Rose is now making are in reality against his better judgement, and have merely been advanced to do the bidding of his political masters?
I am afraid I just cannot see that it does, and this for two principal reasons.
First, the 1992 report to which Woodhead also put his signature along with Rose actually supports the judicious use of project work in primary schools. It states:
‘When topic work focuses in a clearly defined and limited number of attainment targets, it, too, can make an important contribution to the development of pupil learning.’ (p.35, paragraph 123)
Second, nowhere in Rose’s just published report is it stated anywhere that cross-curricular topic work should altogether replace the teaching of separate subjects in primary school. All that does advocate is that judicious use be made of both didactic methods. Thus, the fourth recommendation made in that report runs:
‘Given the excellent examples of both witnessed by the Review, neither discrete subject teaching nor cross-curricular studies must disappear from primary schools. Schools should protect time when learning is best served by teaching subject content and give children ample opportunities to use and apply their developing subject knowledge, skills and understanding in cross-curricular studies.’ (para. 1.47)
Given this express statement on the part of Rose that separate subject teaching has its place in primary education and that primary schools should retain such a form of pedagogy, why does Woodhead claim that Rose is departing from his better judgment by also recommending in his recent report the use of projects where appropriate?
I can only surmise that this is because Woodhead has now become of the view that such topic work is incapable of ever being sufficiently focussed on a clearly defined and limited number of attainment targets to be capable in practice of making an important contribution to the development of pupil learning. Certainly the illustration that Woodhead gives of just such a possible topic suggests that he thinks that all use of the method is doomed to failure, especially given the present politically correct regimen in schools within which it would have to be employed. Thus, Woodhead writes:
‘A cross-curricular study is a “topic” for a “theme” – chocolate, for example. Lessons have these days to be “relevant” and “accessible”; chocolate is a popular topic because it is popular with children. So a primary school class might spend half a term studying chocolate: the geography of where it is grown, the history of its consumption, a little science, perhaps, on how it is made and warnings, of course, about how it make you fat.’
About such a possible cross-curricular topic, Woodhead writes: ‘It is hard for children to make links [between what they learn] if they do not have a real understanding of the facts that they are meant to be linking to begin with. And it is difficult to see how any teacher is going to ensure systematic progress across a range of subjects when encouraged to seize on topics, however imaginative or well planned their lessons are. Rose nonetheless wants schools to have “optimum flexibility for planning cross-curriculum studies”. Hence his six areas. This, if the government accepts his proposals, which it will, is the future of state primary education. ’
Woodhead here makes it sound as if in future teaching in primary schools will be entirely topic based. Were that to be what the Rose report is commending, Woodhead would be correct to indict it. But we have seen that the Rose report expressly calls for the very opposite. Since it does acknowledge the merits and need for separate subject teaching in primary schooling especially towards its end, it follows that the ‘optimum flexibility’ for which it is calling falls well short of an exclusively topic-based approach for which Woodhead claims the Rose report is paving the way.
Perhaps, the final word here on the subject of the merits of the topic-based cross curricular approach to primary school pedagogy should be left to what was said on the subject in the seemingly perfectly sane and hardly excessively progressive Hadow report on primary schooling of 1931. In its chapter on the primary school curriculum, it states:
‘Teaching by subjects is a mode of instruction which, though it may be appropriate for older boys and girls, who have themselves developed specialised interests, and who are ready to follow the major intellectual pursuits of mankind along the lines of their logical development, does not always correspond with the child’s unsystematised but eager interests in the people and things of a world still new to him… We think that what is needed, therefore, is a new orientation of school instruction which shall bring it into closer correlation with the natural movement of children’s minds…
‘Some centre of interest [should be] selected, and for a while the children’s studies along many lines converge upon it or radiate out from it. One may, for instance, take up the question of the various ways in which food and other goods find their way into a given city. The pursuit of such an inquiry may first direct attention of the young researchers to the different modes of transport, by rail, road and now by air, and bring up for solution problems concerning the draught of barges, the way in which railway engine and the petrol engine do their work, and how aeroplanes can remain in the air. It may follow the lines of traffic backward into the country and lead to some study of the district from which the corn or the fruit and vegetables come, or the industrial regions where the textiles are made. Historical questions are started by the presence of modern methods of transportation side by side with the old… The whole process of enquiry will constantly involve reference to books, and frequently give opportunity for arithmetical calculation and the graphic representation of numerical facts.’ (sections 83 and 84)
I just cannot see what reason there could possibly be for opposing the judicious employment of such a method as the Hadow report here describes in the education of seven and eight year olds.
Call me old-fashioned or what, therefore, but give me, or rather give my grandchildren should I be fortunate enough ever to have any, old-time cross-curricular project work, if not all day every day in primary schools, but at least on some days, for some for the time.
An assortment of school subjects by the name of ‘an area of experience’ can, therefore, still smell as sweet as history, geography, mathematics and science, when all taught separately.