The question, What is school for? elicits a range of different answers, including (in no particular order):
- Personal development: developing character; attending to ‘the whole child’; helping children and young people to ‘fulfil their potential’
- Enculturation: Passing on the most important elements of the culture to children and young people – Matthew Arnold’s call to ensure young people be granted access to ‘the best that has been thought and said’
- Socialisation: helping us to live together well and be productive citizens, both through work and more generally in society
- Building knowledge: knowing more; developing skills; the ‘3 Rs’; passing exams and getting qualifications
Most people recognise that schools serve a number of purposes – not just one – but they can differ markedly in terms of the purposes of schooling that they choose to emphasise. In his 2016 speech at Durham University, Nick Gibb, the Schools Minister, described the Government’s ambition around ‘elevating knowledge to become a central component of a good school education’ and he went on to say, ‘a commitment to social justice requires us to place knowledge at the heart of our education system’. The speech clearly emphasises Point 4 above, and the many schools that have adopted a knowledge-based approach to the curriculum would sit broadly in the same ‘camp’.
Meanwhile, Google Steiner schools and Montessori schools and you will see approaches to schooling that emphasise particular approaches to curriculum and teaching.
Clearly, we want children and young people to develop as well-rounded, active citizens who experience ‘success’ both in their work and in their lives in general. We want to expose them to the cultural richness of their local, national and international context and heritage. We want them to be able to live well alongside others and contribute in a very positive way to society. We absolutely want them to learn well at school, achieving success both academically and in many other ways. Who can argue with these good things? The key question is: how best to go about getting them for children and young people?
I am convinced by this argument that David Didau makes in his book ‘Making Kids Cleverer’ (2019): however we choose to order the key purposes of schooling, we can achieve all of them by making kids smarter. And we make kids smarter by enabling them to know more. It’s a classic knowledge-is-power argument: we are what we know, and the more we know, the smarter we are. The smarter we are, the happier we will be, the healthier we will be (so we will live longer) and the more successful we will be. I think that’s spot on and I leave the last word to Didau:
‘The most important individual difference between children is the quality and quantity of what they know’.
