5. On Subject Hierarchies
‘Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects – why maths and languages and not drama and dance?’
‘The academic curriculum is based on a series of assumptions that are irrelevant to our current circumstances’.
‘I believe the way we have to go is not to go back to a subject-based curriculum.’
‘I think we should question that there are subjects… It’s not like we don’t know; we know what works in schools; and we know that there is a better alternative to narrowly conceived subject-based curricula that enshrine a hierarchy.’
‘The reason I don’t like the idea of subjects is that it suggests you can differentiate the curriculum purely on the basis of information or propositional knowledge. History is not just a bag of content, it is a discipline, a process of reflection. I just think it’s based on a false premise that you can lift information out of the world and pin it to the wall like a butterfly, and that is what the old academic curriculum was too much about, what we’re trying to get away from.’