Trivium 21c ltd.

Grid of Posts 3×2

  • It’s OK to Teach Skills

    Pretty much every subject studied in school requires the teaching of knowledge and skills. It would be mad to set up the two areas in opposition. Yet it happens. Why? Because some people think that skills work in the following way (as the old story goes): rather than provide the starving villagers with some fish Read more

  • Knowledge Rich as Knowledge Limiting.

    In my book Athena vs the Machine, I explored how some schools fall into managerialist thinking and impose systems that are ‘knowledge limiting’ rather than knowledge rich. These schools might describe their curriculum as knowledge rich but in practice they mean, some or all of, – don’t teach skills, focus on the list written down Read more

  • Curriculum, Assessment and the Arts

    Substantive and disciplinary knowledge have become the words around which curriculum is being organised in some schools. Pro forma’s are filled in enthusiastically, or not so, to justify curriculum choices to line-managers. And whilst these terms seem to work well in some subjects I’m not so sure the distinction works so well in the arts. Read more

  • Teachers Should Not Teach Opinion as Fact

    “Nothing has changed,” Theresa May was fond of saying, just as it was clear that things, in fact, had changed. The Dept. For Education in England has felt the need to release new guidance on how to tackle politically sensitive topics in an ‘impartial’ way. Teachers’ Unions are uncomfortable, saying this guidance might impinge on Read more

  • Rousseau, Romanticism, Education and Play

    Toby Young: “The idea that somehow children want to be left to their own devices to run wild and play and discover the world for themselves, and any interference in that romantic process is cruel, is just rubbish…” Rousseau gets blamed for a lot of things in education being often cited as ‘where it all Read more

  • Schools Should Ditch Creativity

    The problem with the word ‘creativity’ is that it conjures up such a wide range of possible interpretations that it ends up serving no-one except those who wish to peddle it as a pedagogical aim and charge thousands of pounds for their talks in Dubai or Davos, or a school hall near you on an Read more