'If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.'
John Dewey
Do schools need a curriculum? This is a pertinent question that needs reevaluating as we head into a new digital age of AI and robotics, where students learn more outside school from YouTube and TikTok than they do in their outdated school textbooks. Knowledge and technology are advancing at such fast rates that it is hard for schools to keep up to date. Furthermore, the UK has been spreading its (still dominant) imperious model of education around the world for centuries. As we become a more globally inclusive community, is it time to move away from the colonial past that viewed the UK culture as the ‘correct’ way of thinking?
Many cultures throughout history have existed in positive and productive ways with no formal schooling, and perhaps have lived more harmoniously with their environment and local communities. One side of the argument could be to scrap the curriculum and let students follow their interests through the ever-growing plethora of online and in-person courses. And yet, as John Dewey states, 'As societies become more complex in structure and resources, the need of formal or intentional teaching and learning increases.' (Dewey, 1916)
A Dilemma
This dilemma is portrayed poignantly in the 1980 adventure-comedy, ‘The Gods Must Be Crazy’, which describes the Kalahari bushmen as 'the most contented people in the world. They have no crime, no punishment, no violence, no laws, no police, judges, rulers or bosses. They believe that the gods put only good and useful things on the earth for them to use.' They also have no schools or curriculum, their young people learn through trial and error by watching and copying their elders – all things that are possible in a small, isolated hunter-gatherer society. However:
'Only 600 miles to the south, there's a vast city and here you find ‘civilised’ man. ‘Civilised’ man refused to adapt himself to his environment; instead, he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery, and he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But somehow he didn't know where to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier, the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10-15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into.'
The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)
The majority of us live in this complex modern world where both parents leave the home to work and rely on a state or private ‘nannying’ system called school. We trust that schools will help us parents share the job of raising our young people with all the life-skills they need to become confident adults who know their strengths and are ready to step into a prosperous profession.
Unlike hunter-gatherer societies, it is no longer possible for most people to take their kids to work to watch them write articles or calculate account spreadsheets. It seems more likely that there is a better way to learn the basics of maths and English and the complex knowledge needed to be ready for today's jobs. Having a curriculum of knowledge and skills taught by professionals in each subject using specially developed teaching techniques sounds like a really good idea. But why, then, do 'school leaders and employers agree that young people do not have the essential skills needed for work by the time they leave the school gates' (House of Lords, 2021-22)?
Compulsory primary education began in England in 1880 as we moved from a largely agricultural society to an industrial one. Per Shaw: 'Compulsory schooling was introduced, partly to provide the labour force with the basic skills and routines necessary in an industrial society and also to attempt to prevent civil unrest, which people feared as a very real possibility.' (Shaw, 2011)
The state suggested a set of subjects that schools could teach, but the standard UK National Curriculum was only introduced to primary schools by the Education Reform Act of 1988 by Kenneth Baker to standardise what was being taught across all schools and to introduce GCSEs. For an industrial society, our curriculum has largely been successful, but as we move from the industrial to the digital age it does not appear to be sufficient.
Since the 1990s, England’s education has been through many reforms to raise standards. The curriculum focused more and more on academic retention of knowledge. The government introduced The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills (OFSTED) to root out failing schools and demand high standards. They produced a systematic publication of competitive ‘league tables’ for public examination results to help parents compare schools.
Exam grades have been steadily increasing, which suggests these reforms have been a great success – yet a Times survey found that 'A third of businesses say that their workforce is lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills' and that 'A poll of British businesses ... found that a majority felt the education system was not preparing young people for the world of work' (Yeomans, 2022). A UCL doctoral student survey stated that 'Evidence suggests that mental health problems are on the rise for young people in the UK with depression, anxiety and suicide rates all increasing' (Khawaja, 2020).
Further, increasing numbers of pupils are opting out of school. 'In 2021/22, 22.5% of pupils were recorded as “persistently absent” ... This equates to around 1.6 million pupils' (House of Commons, 2024); 'The number of children in home education has soared by 60% since before the Covid-19 pandemic' (Schools Week, 2023), and a Department of Education workforce survey 'found that 40,000 teachers resigned from state schools last year – almost 9% of the teaching workforce, and the highest number since it began publishing the data in 2011 – while a further 4,000 retired'. (Adams, 2023). So what has gone wrong?
Research suggests that a rigid and fully academic curriculum and high-stakes exams are at the heart of the problem. Gert Biesta, Professor of Education at Maynooth University, suggests that 'This has to do with the question of whether we are indeed measuring what we value, or whether we are just measuring what we can easily measure ... so that targets and indicators of quality become mistaken for quality itself.'
With the current ‘hothousing’ and ‘teaching to the test’ methods that are used to meet standards and raise league tables, 'it is no longer a question of what schools can do for their students, but what students can do for their school' (Biesta, 2016). The Times 2022 survey found that 50% of employers thought 'that their organisation would be more productive if the education system were better tailored to future employment. 89% said that it was important for young people to be assessed on more than academic skills' (Yeomans, 2022).
A wealth of evidence already shows us that high-stakes exams cause unnecessary stress and can have a directly negative impact on the mental health of young people, because 'Exams are a poor measure of students' ability' (Khawaja, 2020). Cramming information to pass a test is not quality education, because 'Children often forget something they have learned' (Mercer & Littleton, 2007).
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology & Cognitive Neuroscience at Cambridge, found in her research, ‘The teenage brain and exams misalignment’, that 'England’s obsession with high stakes exams goes against teenage brain science ... Young people cite exam stress and fear of academic failure as their most prominent worry (in multiple large surveys)' (Blakemore, 2021). She found that teenagers need to develop their social capacities, build relationships and explore their creativity through these important years of growth. Does this suggest that our curriculum is no longer sufficient, or needs redesigning, or could it be our delivery method and assessment model that needs updating?
While 'curriculum' can be understood as a helpful structure, we thought it would be interesting to consider both John Dewey’s and Bayo Akomolafe's strong arguments of how rigid curricula have been failing communities and state systems for over 100 years.
Dewey believed that a curriculum can be both a good thing and a bad thing depending on how it is structured and implemented. A well-designed curriculum provides a framework that guides learning experiences, encourages critical thinking and fosters meaningful connections between students and the content they are studying. It can also help educators create cohesive and integrated learning experiences that support students' growth and development. Curriculum comes from the Latin word meaning ‘the course of the race’, from currere (‘to run’). It is the track or path we follow on our learning journey, a planned sequence of instruction that can be a guide for both teachers and pupils.
Curricula communicate the intention of a course, laying out:
- The Learning Objectives – What is to be learned, and
- The Pedagogy – How it will be taught.
A good curriculum will work out what knowledge and skills are helpful to learn (and in what order) to enhance understanding. However, Dewey (1916) also recognised that a rigid, static and overly prescriptive curriculum focusing solely on content delivery and rote memorisation stifles creativity, critical thinking and genuine engagement with learning. A curriculum that is disconnected from students' interests, experiences and needs can limit their autonomy, motivation and ability to make meaningful connections between what they are learning and the real world.
Bayo Akomolafe (2018, 2019) rides the cutting edge of curriculum and the philosophy of education, because he not only challenges traditional notions of education that prioritise control and standardisation, but also looks at how curricula must be more inclusive and diverse through adaptation, creativity and identity.
Especially through his book, 'These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home', Akomolafe (2018) urges us to realise that in our dynamic world learners must be equipped to navigate complexity and change through adaptive learning; that education is not a fixed entity but a pulsating, living organism that emerges in the interactions between students, teachers and the world; and that creativity flourishes in environments that embrace uncertainty.
A Solution
Driven by the need for change and using all this research to guide us, we, the Biophilic Education Alliance (BE All), have built a new vision for the education of the future: a Biophilic Education system that focuses on the love of life and creating sustainable, inclusive and ethical environments where students can learn about what interests them, be valued for who they are, discover their talents and develop into confident adults. We embrace using AI and robotics as tools, but more importantly, we remember our connection to the natural environment, guided by the wisdom of our ancestors and indigenous local knowledge and culture.
We promote an equal blend of academic learning with critical thinking and reasoning; physical and practical learning with movement and technical skills; social-emotional learning with self-management and teamwork, and creative/intuitive learning with ideation and problem-solving. We aim to nurture the whole human being as an integral and interconnected part of the wider local and global ecosystems, to focus on collaboration over competition and to build thriving communities.
We have built a new Da Vinci Life-Skills Curriculum and Assessment Framework to help support schools and home ed hubs make this needed transition and a BE Mentor Development program to support teachers’ shift from a knowledge-rich curriculum to an experiential and project-based learning system. Instead of moving into adulthood with stress filling their minds, we help young people develop the capacity to engage wholeheartedly in the learning journey that is life. Our figurehead, Leonardo Da Vinci, did not see the world through siloed subjects; he explored the world with an insatiable childlike curiosity. Whether it was science, art, geography, maths or linguistics, he was a polymathic systems thinker.
We have created five transdisciplinary pathways that blend traditional school subjects and the learning objectives from the UK National Curriculum with students' interests and 21st-century life-skills. Each pathway contains a collection of engaging and challenging projects that relate learning to real-world contexts:
- The PERSONAL EXPLORATION pathway (PEP) involves individual passion projects and group projects designed by the students with support from their mentors. Learners are guided with the lead questions: What do you want to do, or make, or get better at? What problems do you want to solve?
- The PRODUCTION pathway creates content that is presented in the public sphere, such as a science museum, gallery exhibition, film or fashion show.
- The ENTERPRISE pathway models how to put something useful and sustainable into the community and encourages students to start an enterprise or design products by exploring industrial and civic design, engineering, robotics and coding.
- The FOOD pathway investigates the journey of food from the earth to our plates and the proper waste management to make the experience cyclical. We grow and cook food and explore nutrition, health and the local and global food trade. Where possible, we work with the community to form a farmers' market and a CSA (Community-Sustained Agriculture programme).
- The MULTIVERSE GAMES pathway explores game and character design, game mechanics, creative writing and team building using the robust world-building aspects of RPG (Role Playing Game) adventures in historical and fantasy contexts to develop social-emotional learning (SEL) experiences and to explore identity and communication skills.
Our founders are both teachers, so we know how little time is available to create new and exciting projects on the job. This is why we provide schools and hubs with comprehensive schemes of work and teaching materials to enable smooth delivery.
The projects can be delivered as a whole curriculum or each project can be delivered separately as a complement to the current system. All our projects are evidenced in digital portfolios which clearly show the students' vast range of different abilities as well as low-stakes knowledge tests. We have developed a non-competitive formative assessment framework called Da Vinci Qualifications (DVQs) that evaluates nine core life-skills and 27 sub-skills in line with the skills employers are looking for.
Like Dewey, we believe that a scaffolded curriculum can be a good thing, if delivered in a way that encourages student autonomy and choice – one that is fluid enough to embrace the fast-paced changes in society and technology and that is inclusive of different world beliefs and histories. It is time for change. The Biophilic Education Alliance is an open call to action to educators, schools, learning centres, independent schools and governments to join together under the values of inclusion, ethics and sustainability.
Rosina Dorelli and Zachary Reznichek are co-founders of The Biophilic Education Alliance (BE All).
Adams, R. (2023). 'Teacher shortages: Record numbers of teachers in England quitting profession, figures show'. The Guardian, 8 June 2023. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/education/2023/jun/08/teachers-england-schools-figures-department-education-survey
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