WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.960 Michael Young's term powerful knowledge is a great and valuable phrase and I'm glad that 00:00:12.960 --> 00:00:19.380 he's coined it because he comes from a sociological background which realizes that knowledge is often 00:00:19.380 --> 00:00:25.560 controlled by people. It doesn't exist in a pure form but what that means is that some knowledge 00:00:25.560 --> 00:00:27.600 has a real role to play. 00:00:27.600 --> 00:00:30.640 And in that way, knowledge can be emancipatory. 00:00:30.640 --> 00:00:34.020 It can literally enable people to do things 00:00:34.024 --> 00:00:38.744 that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do and the job of a good set of teachers in a school 00:00:39.304 --> 00:00:45.224 is to allow students to fly intellectually to do things that they wouldn't be able to do. 00:00:45.224 --> 00:00:49.464 There are other jobs that schools have to do as well but that is a principal one. 00:00:49.464 --> 00:00:54.424 Why it's important to talk about powerful knowledge is that we have lapsed into a very 00:00:54.424 --> 00:00:59.704 strange position in England. There's somehow an opposition between skills and knowledge, 00:00:59.704 --> 00:01:03.004 between the learning process and discipline knowledge 00:01:03.004 --> 00:01:04.304 and discipline understanding. 00:01:04.304 --> 00:01:06.244 It's seen as an opposition. 00:01:06.244 --> 00:01:08.044 It's actually very weird. 00:01:08.048 --> 00:01:11.248 in terms of the international debate on high quality curriculum? 00:01:11.808 --> 00:01:16.848 There are two mistakes made in the skills knowledge debate. One mistake is to think 00:01:16.848 --> 00:01:21.808 that skills somehow exist independently of knowledge. Now if I think of my own subject 00:01:21.808 --> 00:01:28.928 science that's rubbish because a skill like reading an ammeter using a microscope well 00:01:28.928 --> 00:01:34.288 is completely dependent on understanding of flow of charge or what one's looking at down a microscope. 00:01:34.288 --> 00:01:39.008 But the other mistake is to somehow think, oh, we can more or less forget about skills 00:01:39.008 --> 00:01:42.068 and just concentrate on knowledge because that's what's really important. 00:01:42.071 --> 00:01:47.071 And again, sticking with science, when you go to employers, when you go to higher education 00:01:47.071 --> 00:01:53.371 scientists, they want students, of course, who've got a solid knowledge grounding and 00:01:53.371 --> 00:01:55.831 are capable of exercising certain skills. 00:01:56.491 --> 00:02:01.171 And then in addition to those skills I've mentioned that are absolutely central to science, 00:02:01.791 --> 00:02:05.511 increasingly, of course, everybody wants the so-called softer skills. 00:02:05.671 --> 00:02:07.891 They want people who can work in groups. 00:02:08.211 --> 00:02:10.231 They want people who can communicate well. 00:02:10.231 --> 00:02:16.091 When subjects are well taught in schools, you of course enable children 00:02:16.095 --> 00:02:21.015 to develop those skills. Most of us can remember teachers, even if we didn't terribly enjoy 00:02:21.015 --> 00:02:27.175 a particular subject in terms of its content, good teachers got us to work with other people, 00:02:27.175 --> 00:02:32.615 they got us to make presentations, they got us to extend the skills that we had. That's 00:02:32.615 --> 00:02:36.095 what one wants a good curriculum to enable. 00:02:36.095 --> 00:02:43.935 In the early part of this century, IEcon 2000, it was felt that there was a need to insert 00:02:43.935 --> 00:02:50.115 elements of the curriculum associated with the development of skills, learning to learn, 00:02:50.119 --> 00:02:56.679 creativity, innovation and so on. The view of the people managing the national curriculum 00:02:56.679 --> 00:03:03.039 at that time was the only way of creating space was by producing more generic, otherwise 00:03:03.039 --> 00:03:08.119 really vague statements of discipline knowledge and key subjects. In other words, these people 00:03:08.119 --> 00:03:17.119 saw an opposition between those two things, which is peculiar. What we know from key studies, 00:03:17.119 --> 00:03:24.119 such as the big cohort studies looking at children born in 1958 and following right through to the present. 00:03:24.143 --> 00:03:31.143 time. We know that there are key aspects of science, of mathematics, humanities and arts, 00:03:31.143 --> 00:03:38.183 that if you don't possess understanding of those things and can't apply them, then you 00:03:38.183 --> 00:03:45.183 will have worse life chances. Discipline understanding, knowledge from specific disciplines, science 00:03:45.183 --> 00:03:48.903 and mathematics, is absolutely essential to good life chances. 00:03:54.143 --> 00:03:57.083 Thank you for bringing in a special episode.