I’ve blogged about the QCA ‘big picture’ before (Where do educational ideas originate? A digital paper trail…) but this morning, reading David Carr’s Making Sense of Education: an introduction to the philosophy and theory of education and teaching, I came across a couple of quotations which put everything into perspective and set up a nice dichotomy regarding putting theory into practice.

The first quotation comes from the angle of curriculum balance, with Carr illustrating rather well how this can mean something so superficial it’s hardly worth mentioning, or something so radical that it would mean a wholesale reorganization of schools:

…on the face of it, there cannot be much quarrel with any insistence that the content of the curriculum should be coherent: at all events, one could hardly wish it to be incoherent. The trouble here, however, seems to be that any call for curriculum coherence is either requiring something so general as to be trivial – in which case it may hardly seem worth emphasising – or it is claiming something very much more radical and controversial. First, indeed, it is necessary to determine precisely what any alleged relations of coherence are supposed to hold between – as well as, perhaps, exactly how such relations are supposed to hold. On the one hand, if coherence is required only between the parts of particular subjects or lessons, then – irrespective of any difficulties involved in achieving this – such coherence could hardly be other than an intrinsic goal of any and all good teaching… On the other hand, however, it could be that the demand for coherence is meant to apply rather more widely to the curriculum: to the programme in general, perhaps, rather than to this or that subject in particular… This more radical but controversial conception of curriculum coherence would maintain that if the general programme of study that children are required to undergo in schools is to be of any real educational worth, then it should be experienced more as a meaningfully interrelated whole than as a meaningless array of discrete or fragmented bodies of information or activity. In short, the more general demand for coherence may seem to be better met by a progressive or integrated than by a traditional or subject-centred curriculum. (p.141-142)

The second quotation puts this into a bit more perspective, intimating that full coherence and integration wouldn’t really work in practice:

..it is still crucially important to appreciate the proper limits of integration: that, in short, it would be folly to attempt any wholesale integration of the school curriculum, since any curriculum will contain much that is not readily integrable. Hence, while there may be quite plausible cases for combining aspects of history with drama, cookery with geography, or even moral education with cricket, it is easy to see how the search for integration could become strained and artificial, resulting in some very much less meaningful constellations of learning. (p.143)

What is needed, therefore, is a ‘middle way’ – a method of integrating those subjects, areas of human understanding, and knowledge that cohere whilst maintaining independence and rigour with those that do not.

Answers on a postcard please… :p