Reinstating knowledge: diagnoses and prescriptions for England’s curriculum ills.

This paper examines three recent accounts of what has allegedly gone wrong with the school curriculum in England in recent years and their prescriptions for remedying these ills – all three accounts sharing strong proposals to reinstate knowledge at the heart of the curriculum. These analyses, despite some significant similarities, come from very different political standpoints. They are: first, proposals by the current UK Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove to ‘shrink’ the National Curriculum whilst promoting a new English Baccalaureate; secondly Frank Furedi, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes’ critiques of ‘therapeutic education’ and thirdly Michael Young and Johan Muller’s proposals, grounded in a social realist epistemology, for a ‘Future 3’ curriculum which respects the objectivity of knowledge but also recognises its fallibility and openness to change. The paper concludes by suggesting that Michael Gove’s basic objective is to shape what Basil Bernstein called a neoconservative prospective educational identity; the paper offers a critical assessment of this project and briefly considers an alternative approach, focusing on some issues relating to citizenship education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]