Listening to Laura McInerney’s recent interview with Nick Gibb for a Schools Week tenth-anniversary podcast, I was struck by the former schools minister’s certitude about the ‘knowledge-rich’ turn in educational policy. In his view, it has evidently been a triumph of Good over Evil.
Gibb expressed no doubt that the phonics check and ‘knowledge-rich’ curricula are Good Things; that higher PISA results represent absolute progress; and that, if some schools can get every child to pass their GCSEs, then every school ought to.
He wouldn’t even entertain the idea there might be opportunity costs to any of this. Each was just another example of children nourished by more ‘Goodness’.
The train of thought is plain: unless you are Adam or Eve, it’s better to know more. And doing better in a phonics check, GCSE, or PISA test is an indication you know more. Isn’t it?
Well, certainly not without important caveats.
First, there are obvious opportunity costs involved in, for example, sacrificing drama lessons for more maths, killing the joy of reading with limiting phonics programmes, or damaging wellbeing with too much exam-related stress (something Gibb dismissed out of hand, instead blaming social media and mobile phones).
It’s as if Gibb believes no price is too high for knowing more. But even if that were true, I’d argue he has pulled off a classic bait-and-switch.
He has sold us on the promise of more knowledge, but what children actually take home is often eviscerated of the very things that would have made it worthwhile.
During the interview, Gibb trotted out the view – popularised, he points out, by Daniel Willingham and E. D. Hirsch – that due to limitations of working memory, ‘if you want to do high-level thinking, critical thinking, problem solving, or to be creative, you have to have access to information, knowledge, content in your long-term memory’.
According to this speculative metaphysics, knowledge is reduced to data or schema stored in the memory. However, while I agree that remembering is a necessary part of learning, it’s not sufficient for possessing the virtue of knowledge.
This is a fag-packet sketch of a folly
A student may memorise the entirety of Wikipedia, be able to recite it on demand, get a briefcase full of 9s, but have knowledge only in a very narrow sense. To have the virtue of knowledge is to be able to respond to a context in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons and so on.
But these adverbial criteria for being knowledgeable are largely ignored by GCSEs and the other markers Gibb sanctifies. By their nature as standardised tests, exams invariably reward and thus encourage standardised responses — the opposite of the ability to respond and adapt to context entailed by knowledge-as-a-virtue.
Far from being the blueprint for a ‘knowledge-rich’ curriculum, this is a fag-packet sketch of a folly — the educational equivalent of a Potemkin village.
Furthermore, for knowledge to be powerful, it can’t just be had; it has to be possessed. While I have children, I do not possess them because they have their own agency. Knowledge, however, is different. To have it without controlling it (in different contexts, not just tests) is a hollowed-out version of knowledge – powerless and ultimately forgettable.
Similarly, we don’t always have possession over our memories or what we remember. We might have knowledge as a result of traumatic experiences, for example, but it’s far from clear whether we possess it. It is precisely our lack of power in the face of a traumatic memory that sustains the trauma.
My reference to Adam and Eve above wasn’t just glib. When they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, they weren’t rewarded with a ‘strong pass’ and better life prospects; they were banished from Eden. They didn’t possess knowledge of good and evil. They acquired it, but at what cost?
Now of course I’m not suggesting all knowledge of facts and phonemes is overpriced (or trauma-inducing) but such stories point to the opportunity cost of knowing things if not acquired properly.
Instead of the powerful knowledge they’ve been promised, I worry our students are being handed a fig leaf for an impoverished education.
Thank you for explaining so clearly why many of us despaired at the interviews with Nick Gibb. I, like many committed and long-serving teachers with a deep love of educating, have left the profession (after 27 years in my case) despite working in good schools with well-motivated students and supportive management. The reason: that we can no longer ‘deliver’ an almost scripted curriculum which is full of learn-by-rote knowledge and devoid of every other aspect of education.
Two facts omitted from Mr Gibb-the technical analysis by PISA states you can’t use the data to make comparisons because England didn’t enter enough children to be representative, in other words we didn’t enter enough children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The clever and wealthy children have actually widened the gap between themselves and the disadvantaged. So technically a small section of our society has improved, whilst the children that need social mobility the most have floundered…thankyou Mr Gibb but I will not be buying into “daydream”.