Richard's blog

Further to my recent post, a couple of points I have been thinking about stretching further back into the secondary & primary system:

• choice is killing the notion of a curriculum. Even primary schools now offer electives – I was told recently that in at least some states music is not compulsory – students just have to do a creative subject (so art or music). I can’t see any benefit in limiting scope so young. The result of this is students hit the next stage of their education with less breadth, less scope and, ironically, less choice.
• schools need to be better at teaching the social and economic worlds. Sciences are important but over-emphasised; over-emphasised because they can be readily defined and taught. My secondary education finished without significant mention of Islam, economics, politics or psychology. We did, however, make honeycomb confectionery in science.

Lifetime value needs to be the driving rationale here. Schools need to provide rigorous breadth to equip students for the future.

Ends of years are good times for taking stock. Since May I’ve been enrolled in the Marketing program at Melbourne Business School. It is the right time in my life, I think, to be back at school.

The key difference I notice between my undergraduate and graduate educations is that the latter is emphasising a body of knowledge and an intellectual toolkit in an explicit way. Let us call this “the goods.” I find this approach to learning beneficial. Despite the classic arguments against canons, certain ideas and principles must be better and more useful than others, or at least form a useful starting point to diverge. It makes sense therefore that we should cover off the goods in a non-random fashion.

There are a few plausible explanations why this does not, largely, occur in undergraduate education. I think the most salient explanation is the issue of taxonomy. This has two components.

The first, that in carving up knowledge, a sense of the whole is lost. Knowledge must firstly be carved into moderately coherent 15-week pieces. Then, these pieces are offered as a smorgasbord, with no hand overseeing whether the goods get covered off or not in the infinite permutations of student whim.

The second component is that some crucial things don’t fit into any taxonomy at all, or if they do, they’re in a part of the smorgasbord you may or may not pick. I’m thinking here about the kinds of things the UNESCO International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first Century calls its Four Pillars: learning to know, learning to be, learning to live with and learning to be. There’s a lot of meta-thought and context in the Four Pillars, more or less the antithesis of what a depth-oriented, subjectised, semesterised course can offer. Meta level learning, such as general problem solving, people skills, analysis, study skills, basic philosophy and socioeconomic context are understandably glossed over by lecturers whose main objective is to realise the objectives of the existing model.

The University of Melbourne makes much of its breadth program in the Melbourne Model – but to me this seems like more of the same: an unstructured smorgasbord, only this time across disciplines rather than within one. What is needed, at both secondary and undergraduate level, is a commitment to the definition, explicit teaching, and practice of the goods. This is too important to leave to chance. Whoever moves first will be rewarded with a massive brand advantage in an employment marketplace hungry for these skills.

On chapel street today.

Testing blogging from my iPhone.

So i haven’t blogged in 9 months. Part being busy, part Twitter, part ennui. But I feel it’s time to light the fire again.

And to start a renovation. This blog is now past its sixth birthday, so time to ditch the old design, (based on Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick,) and bring in the new.

I’ve used Srini’s beautifully-coded Plainscape as the basis of the new design with aesthetic modifications. The sidebar uses the excellent Delicious Plus, Wickett Twitter Widget, and Picasa Photos widgets. I am running Wordpress version 2.9.