It was the year of curriculum intent

2019 in England was the year when our schools re-set their curriculum statements. You see there are the three Is – Intent; Implementation; Impact.

These are the markers set down by Ofsted, the school’s inspection body in England.

Ofsted is the piper that calls the tune in England. [1]

Sean Harford HMI, National Director for Education at OFSTED clarifies what is to be understood by the three Is.

‘The curriculum is a framework for setting out the aims of a programme of education, including the knowledge and understanding to be gained at each stage (Intent); for translating that framework over time into a structure and narrative, within an institutional context (Implementation); and for evaluating what knowledge and understanding pupils have gained against expectations (Impact.achievement)’ [2]

Knowledge and understanding. No mention of skills. 

Just think about the wonder of what we understand as a musical skill. The crafting of a musical phrase, the placing of a sound within a sea of silence …

And what kind of knowledge will Ofsted have in mind?

And what of musical understanding? 

Musical understanding is defined by cognitive psychologist John Sloboda as akin to getting a joke – music understood without the mediation of language.

Perhaps behind the scenes is an ideological conflation of a narrow conception of culture with a narrow conception of knowledge.

Notes:

[1] Many of my world-wide readers may find it difficult to comprehend how it is that a school’s monitoring body can be such a powerful agent of change, acting as the chief re-contextualiser of the field. (See Basil Bernstein on the Official Re-contextualising Field ((ORF)))

Ofsted operate without fear or favour creating fear and trembling.

[2] Source not known but taken from a consultant’s powerpoint slide.

Powerful local knowledge [1]

Better try over number seventy-eight before we start I suppose?’ said William, pointing to a heap of old Christmas carol books on a side table. [2]

Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree, like much of his writing, contains references to music-making. Hardy’s interest in the social conditions of his characters is matched by interest in the social conditions of their music-making.

For Hardy music is social practice. Musical meanings and musical knowledge are made here and now together and bound to the meanings made through the relationships of those participating. And all this in relationship to their place in the social order.

In the case of Under the Greenwood Tree there is the story of the Melstock choir, a band of local musicians playing and singing in the west gallery of their village church. Their music is silenced by the installation of the organ and a well-tutored organist. The imagined mediocrity of the locals is replaced by the imagined more refined and civilising sounds of the organ and the organist’s playing.

The musically disenfranchised locals inhabiting Hardy’s rural Wessex had come to enjoy in Michael Gove’s words:

‘… a shared appreciation of cultural reference points, a common stock of knowledge on which all can draw, and trade, in a society in which we all understand each other better’. . . [3]

Well, of course, I am being a little facetious, for Michael Gove was not referring to local traditions, such as Hardy’s musicians and their customs held in common, but to the proposition that:

‘… there is such a thing as the best. Richard Wagner is an artist of sublime genius and his work is incomparably more rewarding – intellectually, sensually and emotionally – than, say, the Arctic Monkeys’. [4]

Or shall we say, not the Arctic Monkeys but the carollers on the western edge of Sheffield whose singing this Christmas-time makes connections with that nearly lost repertoire of Hardy’s childhood time and now lost to the Christmas canon. [5]

Ah! ‘the best of the musical canon’, where have I heard that?

Here are two utterly different conceptions of what music is, what it is for, how it is educative; what culture is and what it is for.

While there is the knowledge of the powerful [6] exemplified in the edicts of our cultural administrators, it may be the carollers at the Sportsman Inn who will be in touch with incomparably more knowledge of music as a human practice and perhaps, just perhaps, of humanity too.

‘Number seventy-eight was always a teaser – always. I can mind him ever since I was growing up a hard boy-chap. But he’s a good tune, and worth a mint o’ practice.’ [7]

Wishing you a very happy Christmas!

Notes:

[1] First published Christmas 2014.

Readers will find a number of previous blogs dealing with the idea of culture. This blog connects well with ‘How culture counts for music education’ https://wordpress.com/post/jfin107.wordpress.com/1038

[2] Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy, London, MacMillan, 1964 page 24.

[3] Gove, M. (2011) The need to reform the education system. Speech made at the University of Cambridge, November 24.

[4] Ibid. Has Mr. Gove made a categorical error?

[5] See http://www.localcarols.org.uk/sings.php for this year’s programme of singing.

[6] Michael Young contrasts ‘The knowledge of the powerful’ with ‘powerful knowledge’. See http://www.fpce.up.pt/ciie/revistaesc/ESC32/ESC32_Arquivo.pdf

[7] I do concede that I am in some part a romantic. Philosopher Michele Foucault notes that nostalgia can be a rich source of critique should readers think I am indulging.

Rocks

Emily was coming up five and excited about our annual holiday in St Ives, Cornwall. St Ives had long become a habit and already Emily knew about the little shop in St Andrews Street where there were gems for sale. And soon after arrival that’s where we were looking for another gem or two to add to Emily’s prized collection.

Gem stones, things of great beauty, and for Emily of great aesthetic significance at this moment in her life.

In another place 8X4 are concluding their science topic on human relationships. They ask their teacher, a favourite of theirs, what is the next topic?

‘Rocks’.

‘Rocks … what has that got to do with anything?’, they say.

Mr. X will be taking you and he can make anything interesting.

In another place I observe a beginning teacher teaching year 8 and the subject is ‘rocks’.

The point of the lesson is to categorise rocks into three kinds…you know…Igneous ……

The lesson is dry, factual, cold, business-like…well…just rocks in three columns really.

I am sitting at the back of the class next to a quiet, studious girl and I venture to ask her what she knows about rocks.

Well, since primary school days she has been reading the magazine Gems of the Earth and in her garden there are some interesting rocks which she tells me about.

Back to copying down the three columns and learning those categories.

I am left wondering about where the subjective life of the child fits into a formal education that is school and that is concerned to impress upon the child an objective world.

Is the subjective life to be silenced?

Must feelings, meanings, thoughts, insights, curiosities be privatised?