At this year’s Annual Conference, ASCL launched a year-long project on Ethical Leadership in Education - you can read more about the background to this in Carolyn Roberts' article Shared Values in issue 96 of Leader magazine.

This is the second in a series of eight blog posts, where Carolyn adds further context to the subject and poses questions relating to this proposed new commission.

What is the status or value of knowledge and learning in contemporary English society (or: why I‘ve just been a bit sharp with 20 Year 11s who didn’t take the mock seriously)?

Cicero said “What greater and better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and to instruct our young?”, but a couple of them looked at me as if they didn’t really rate it much as a gift.

It is in the teeth of curriculum turbulence that we have to remember our position as society’s educators in our role as guardians of the young. We are the people who offer powerful and shared knowledge to the nation’s children. That knowledge comes from centuries of learning and from the universities and subject associations.  It is powerful because it enables children to interpret and control the world; it is shared because all our children should be exposed to it. It is fair and just that this should be so. It is unfair and unjust when children are offered poor quality knowledge which fails to lift them out of their experience. 

That’s what Gove was feeling for when he made announcements about good graduates: the best and the brightest should be in charge of the minds of our young – and we should have a way of getting that to happen (although that’s for another day).

In this as, in all areas of our work, we should take ourselves seriously. A while ago, I did a lot of reading and thinking about knowledge and the curriculum but I could never separate it from the underlying or fundamental purpose of schooling. So, I put together ten principles and try to work towards them.

1. Knowledge is worthwhile in itself
   Tell children this unapologetically: it’s what childhood and adolescence is for
2. Schools teach shared and powerful knowledge on behalf of society
   We teach what they need to make sense of and improve the world
3. Shared and powerful knowledge is verified through learned communities
   We are model learners, in touch with research and subject associations
4. Children need powerful knowledge to understand and interpret the world
   Without it they remain dependent upon those who have it or misuse it
5. Powerful knowledge is cognitively superior to that needed for daily life
   It transcends and liberates children from their daily experience
6. Shared and powerful knowledge enables children to grow into useful citizens
   As adults they can understand, cooperate and shape the world together
7. Shared knowledge is a foundation for a just and sustainable democracy
   Citizens educated together share an understanding of the common good
8. It is fair and just that all children should have access to this knowledge
   Powerful knowledge opens doors: it must be available to all children
9. Accepted adult authority is required for shared knowledge transmission
   The teacher’s authority to transmit knowledge is given and valued by society
10. Pedagogy links adult authority, powerful knowledge and its transmission
    Quality professionals enable children to make a relationship with ideas to change the world.

Education is not about exams as just a proxy for learning. It is about and whether what we’ve learned helps us live happy and useful lives. It is about the way maths illuminates the world but science explains why the lights go on. It is about the consolation of literature and the fun of sport. It is about understanding the world and changing it for the better. At a time of renewed soul-searching in London, as the much-misunderstood E D Hirsch said of schools with teaching shared and powerful knowledge:

“Nothing could be more important to our national well-being ...The inter-ethnic hostilities … the astonishing indifference to the condition of our children all bespeak a decline in the communitarian spirit.  The common school’s most important contribution [could be] preserving the fragile fabric of our democracy.”
I may have condensed the message to Year 11. Now, go away and revise properly, will you?
 
Get involved
In 2018, ASCL would like to be able to propose a Code of Ethics for Education so that together, we’ll be able to talk to the public clearly about the ethics we want to pass on to our young people.

In order to achieve this, we need your help. If you would like to be involved in any way, or if you would like to share your views on this important issue, please email codeofethics@ascl.org.uk