A rigid curriculum will see the majority of children sink

Children learn directly from the expert, and so acquire the skills needed for adult life. In the UK, we delegate education to schools, with families retaining important roles both supporting school education, and helping children develop social skills. The support role of parents cannot be overstated, as the evidence is clear that children from less advantaged backgrounds do less well at school simply because of lack of parental support.

My parents were always reading, with a regular Saturday visit to the library, and that encouraged me to become an avid reader. The same was true for our children. My parents didn’t make us read classic texts – they were simply happy that we were reading. I developed my lifelong taste for science fiction from those early library visits – not because I was told what to read.

It’s in this light that I contemplated Education Secretary Michael Gove’s comments that children should read Middlemarch rather than the Twilight series. I have read neither, and probably never will, but I’d be happy if young people read either, or indeed just about anything else. That led me to think about what schools should teach. Discussing what must be in the curriculum is always tendentious because the volume of human knowledge is far more than any one person can assimilate.