a committee of the “greatest minds in Britain” would decide what children were taught. The Prince of Wales’ Teaching Institute would also be involved in drawing up a new curriculum.
“I’m an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to the curriculum,” Mr Gove said. “Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages. That’s the best training of the mind and that’s how children will be able to compete.”
“The invitation is there for all the great minds of our time to help reshape the national curriculum — both primary and secondary,” Mr Gove said. “We want to rewrite the whole thing and we are going to start as soon as we get in. We need the experts to tell us what is needed. The critical thing is to find people who want the intellectual life of the nation to be revived.”
He’s absolutely right in saying that what draws people into teaching is that they love history or physics, and they want to communicate that love. They don’t love abstract thinking skills; they love the thrill of discovery in their own special field.
“I was amazed to discover that science is not divided into physics, chemistry and biology. It has these hybrid headings about the chemical and material whatever and the Earth, the environment and this and that.”
Because, you know, hybridity is evil - EVIL! Interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven education is clearly a plot to weaken the moral fibre of the nation. Any increase in actual learning or interest on the part of students that it may produce must be an aberration.
Lessons should celebrate rather than denigrate Britain’s role through the ages, including the Empire. “Guilt about Britain’s past is misplaced.”
More state funding for Shakespeare in schools I could get behind
Modern languages will also be revived. “One of the biggest tragedies in state education over the last ten years has been this huge drop in French and German, Italian and Spanish,”