On 9th February 1984, aged nine, I lay in bed in a room which I shared with my 11 year old brother in Nuneaton (a railway junction town outside of Coventry) and listened to the end of the world.
Moments later my mother calmly walked in and told us that it was all a practice and to go back to sleep. It has taken me until ‘now years’ to realise that, at the time, she didn’t know this to be true – as this newspaper article from the time explains.
For 30 seconds, she could have been justifiably mistaken for believing that her and her entire family was about to die.
In the year I was born, 1974, the government sent a booklet to every home in Britain called ‘Protect and Survive’ (which was still circulated until 1980) explaining how a household should prepare for a nuclear bomb being dropped on its head – by painting your windows white and propping the kitchen door against a wall in the lounge.
It was of course nonsense. Everyone would be dead within 30 seconds of impact.
But it made people feel better.
The ‘four horsemen’ curriculum
This blog is inspired by something an edutweeter shared a couple of weeks ago.
She recounted being provoked by a speaker who suggested that any good 21st century school curriculum should prepare children for a future of nuclear war, environmental collapse, famine and pandemic.
Whilst this might be an extreme view of how ‘children need to be prepared for the future’, it’s not the first time I’ve heard this sentiment. More commonly, I’ve seen well intentioned teachers teaching (quite young) children about a terrifying and unstable world which they have no control over – and which they will ultimately succumb to.
A lot of contemporary children’s literature is quite dark, telling tales of real-world misery and the very worst of humanity. My own son came home a bit rattled in Year 3 after his school showed a video in assembly depicting an imaginary large scale modern war in the UK (to help them empathise with wars across the globe).
Every school will have curriculum units on on the climate emergency and on any number of important societal ills. And I completely understand the sentiment behind including this very important material.
However, I also worry that if we venture into these areas without serious thought to our/ our schools/ our communities guiding philosophy – for what we hope to ultimately achieve for education – then we risk leaving only questions.
Questions and hopelessness.
Indeed, successive reports (even pre-pandemic) point to worrying levels of hopelessness in young people.
The ‘knowledge of good and evil’ curriculum
According to the Bible (I’m an atheist brought up in a strictly religious family), the ‘original sin’ – Adam and Eve’s big mistake – took place in the garden of Eden.
They were told they could eat any fruit they wanted within the garden and live happily for eternity. Anything apart from the fruit of the ‘Tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ that is.
I’m sure you know the story but, *Spoiler*, they take a bite. Immediately, they lose their innocence and see all the evil in the world. They get cast out of the garden of Eden and are condemned to die, along with every generation thereafter (nice one Adam?!).
As a child growing up in Nuneaton in the 1980’s, there was no internet. No social media. If I wanted to find out about the horrors which beset the world I had to read a newspaper. Maybe watch John Craven’s Newsround. Or hear the sirens wailing in the middle of the night – but because I had no internet, I didn’t know what these were.
Fast forward to 2022 and we give every child the ‘knowledge of good and evil’ beamed directly into their bedrooms. Onto shiny black tablets and phones. We make cursory efforts to block harmful content but, to be honest, that’s a bit of a faff, so more often than not we allow them access to every aspect of the world, unfiltered, and unsupervised.
I am convinced that 100 years from now, history students will view the 21st century’s woeful disinterest in what children can freely watch on the internet, much as your Year 5 class view Victorian children being sent to clean chimneys.
As a result, children arrive at school with a smorgasbord of knowledge about a chaotic world.
Whilst there is a great deal of education which we need to engage in – with both parents and pupils in the future – to blunt the tip of this modern curse, right now we must teach the children we have in front of us – which includes acknowledging and addressing the world of worries which has filled their heads.
The ‘World is not okay’ curriculum
One of my Heads of School and their DHT have a jokey refrain when the day’s going south: the shout goes up: ‘I’m fine, it’s fine – we’re all fine!’
A curriculum which ignores all the world’s worries is as dangerous as a curriculum which invites all of them in without due consideration.
The World faces huge challenges in terms of poverty, war, famine, disease etc etc etc.
The children of Coventry lying listening (largely ambivalent) to the three minute warning siren, grew up knowing that a nuclear war would be the end of us all.
Those children lying in bed in Coventry in 1984 grew up taught (by their teachers and parents) that racism (casually present in all parts of society at the time), along with homophobia, hate and injustice (also casually present), weren’t okay and couldn’t be part of our collective future.
And whilst we have a long way to go, I believe that our nation – and in general, our world – is far better than it was in 1984.
The history curriculum
To understand the world as it is, we must understand it as it was.
Here, the ‘knowledge curriculum’ mob and I are in complete agreement.
In our modern world, information and ‘news’ (real or made up) flashes across the internet faster than light. The amount of information which we need to process is dizzying. And those who seek to drag the world back to darker times use this to overwhelm our senses and sense of right and wrong.
And this is where knowledge of our world’s history becomes an essential skill for a student in the third decade of the 21st Century. For if we don’t know what happened as a result of our species’ past actions, how can we possibly make sense of the world as it is now.
Whilst we like to think that our generation is the first to imagine and do pretty much everything, to consider that thousands of generations of people, with instincts much like ours, have gone before us. is an enlightening and humbling prospect to consider.
So, for me, alongside basic skills in the 3 R’s, science etc, knowing our World’s history is an essential aspect of the curriculum and is as good an insurance against repeating the mistakes of the past as any other.
It also gives both children and adults perspective about the lives which they must live. For whilst there are a great many things wrong with society and the world at large, I would challenge you to pick a period in all of history where you think you’d have been happier, safer or healthier (in a rich Western nation at least).
The Hope Curriculum
According to Greek mythology, in Hesiod’s Theogony, Pandora was tricked into opening a box. In that box was all the evils of the world, which promptly escaped and spread across the globe.
When she looked into the box, only one sprite remained: hope.
And here is where I finally get to the point of this blog.
Children are growing up in a deeply imperfect world (although arguably no worse – and often much better – than for much of the last millennia) and we must prepare them for the challenges which we seek them to solve if our species is to survive.
They are currently exposed to a great deal more of the world, via online devices in their bedrooms, than we would want. But this is their reality and so we must create a curriculum which addresses the worries which these cyber phantoms instil.
So we must teach these things – but we must teach them with an overwhelming sense of hope.
We must teach our children that they have the strength, the knowledge, the skills, the commitment within themselves; that they are more than a match for these problems. We must teach them the human values to achieve these aims.
We must think carefully when and how we discuss these problems. We must resist the temptation to over-share the problems of the world to children who are developmentally unready to process these truths. We must avoid assuming adult understanding in immature minds.
So we must flood our curricula with an overwhelming sense of hope. A belief that we can move the arc of humanity ever upwards by instilling in our young people better values than the generations which preceded them, whilst acknowledging that human frailty will always lean towards poor short-term decisions.
We must teach our children of the history of the World and the generations of pioneers which have gone before them. How individuals and groups shifted societal understanding towards greater kindness and empathy.
As educators, this is our greatest gift: the chance to influence the next generation for the better.
A 3 minute warning
Ironically, hearing the world was about to end had literally no impact on my childhood. In an era before Social Media and the Internet, nobody (not my parents, not my teachers, nor my friends) mentioned it the following day. The Coventry local newspaper saw it as ‘old news’ by the time they came to print.
The result? I grew up in the same deeply flawed and violent and chaotic world as we live in now – as we have always lived in – but it never made be less hopeful about my future. I never once thought that my future would be anything other than happy.
Back then it was a result of a lack of a ‘knowledge of good and evil’.
Our challenge is to create this same sense of optimism with Pandora’s box wide open.
southgloshead 