Stuart Baird: Take dogma's chains off our children

Published on Wednesday 11 May 2011 21:22

WHILE the outcome to the Holyrood election was both historic and momentous, the education policy that accompanies the winning party is both illiberal and debased.

We must remember that the Curriculum for Excellence, at the heart of the SNP policy, has many strands. In the first instance there is the dubious desire to prescribe values to our children rather than have them experience the world and let them find their own. Our children are to be as we are.

A further strand subjugates the curriculum as a tool for social policy. It seems that on a weekly basis some current social issue is delegated to schools from the economy or health to the environment. Here politicians want our children to be the solution to the problems that we, as adults, face.

What these strands and others share is a desire to twist education and direct its energies to concerns that are not of its making nor within its power to change. What is worse, the ideal for our comprehensive system is diminished.

Education should ensure that all of our children are introduced to the best that is known and thought. At its heart are the subjects as the organising principle for the curriculum. The transmission of subject based knowledge allows each child to have a framework for understanding the world. There, the aspirations of all our children are raised.

It is an ideal as relevant for today as it ever was.

It is evident, however, that to populate the curriculum with policy programmes and social-engineering agendas leaves little space for that goal. It is a position that those who care about education and our children should be challenging.

In his victory speech, Alex Salmond talked about looking to the future and aiming high. With regards education, the bold move would be for all political parties to take a step back and give our children the space to be inspired through their subjects and the knowledge that they gain.

• Stuart Baird is education spokesman for the Generation Youth Issues charity and a classroom teacher