Last weekend, Britain's Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove made headlines following a rumour that he was "banning" American classics, including To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, from the English literature curriculum.
The move was condemned by the National Association for Teaching of English, by professor of American studies at the University of East Anglia Christopher Bigsby, and by English teacher Mary Stevens, who accused Gove of "taking choice away from teachers".
As it turns out, Gove had done no such thing. He has only changed the minimum standards, in an effort to broaden the scope of the classroom readings. But at the core of this controversy is a vital question: who should decide what kids are taught in class? Teachers, government, or parents?
Naturally, most teachers, academics, and virtually all teachers' organisations think that they should be in charge, hence the outrage over the rumoured changes.
In Australia, as in Britain, there is a culture of "trusting the experts". Many teachers' organisations and academic education-alists maintain that they are the only ones qualified to decide what kids should be taught, and many of us are inclined to believe them.
But Australia's National Curriculum shows exactly why we shouldn't let a small group of hand-picked experts decide what every student in every school is taught.
Just look at what happened here when we left our Foundation to Year 10 English curriculum to the experts. It currently includes a disproportionately large amount of content about languages other than English, different cultural perspectives, and ethical issues like climate change.
At the same time, its coverage of English grammar is sketchy, and it lacks any recommended reading list at all. In fact, the curriculum doesn't even indicate how many works of literature students should read, let alone what sort of literature it should be.
There are vague indications of the kind of readings the curriculum writers had in mind. A large chunk of the rationale is spent emphasising the contribution of indigenous peoples to Australia's literary heritage and our links with Asia. Elsewhere, the curriculum alludes to things like Dreamtime literature, the Ramayana, and other "texts" from or about other cultures.
Any of this in measure is fine. But where are the works foundational to the Western literary canon? Where are Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens?
Nowhere. Aside from some vague references to Keats, Tennyson, Burns and Blake in example sentences, the only European stories that the F-10 curriculum refers to explicitly are Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella.
Even Shakespeare is missed. In fact, he is mentioned only in the glossary, where he features in an example sentence — namely: "because I am reading Shakespeare, my time is limited".
You certainly don't need to be a qualified expert to see that there are a few big problems with the so-called "English" curriculum.
This is a reason successive conservative governments in Britain and Australia alike — Thatcher, Howard, and now Cameron and Abbott — have supported a national curriculum: because they have hoped that, if they step in, they might be able to prevent schools from teaching sloppy curriculums like this.
This sounds good in theory, but there are some unpleasant consequences that arise from having a single, government-mandated curriculum.
First, it gives the government the means to decide what is taught in schools, and this kind of power is dangerous.
Second, it is a simple fact that left and right-leaning governments are highly unlikely to agree on a single set of standards. Even if Christopher Pyne were to strip down the national curriculum to the basics — the three Rs — we could expect an uproar over his failing to give sufficient attention to ethics, social justice, and multiculturalism.
No national curriculum can be "locked in", nor should it be. After all, if a good curriculum can be locked in, so can a bad one. But this means that every time a new government gets into power, they are likely to demand another sweeping review of the previous government's national curriculum. This is already happening in Australia, and has happened every time there has been a change of government in Britain since the national curriculum was introduced in 1988.
Neither teachers nor the government should have full control over school curriculums. Parents should have the most say in what students are taught. As it stands, they perhaps have the least say.
To give parents more say in what kids were taught and to make the national curriculum debate irrelevant, one thing that governments could do would be to abolish the national curriculum altogether and dramatically increase the variety of recognised curriculums. That way, schools would be able to tailor their courses based on demand, while parents would be able to "vote with their feet" and select the school that most reflects the education they want their children to receive.
It is beyond doubt that something needs to be done to increase accountability for teachers, but both the Australian and British governments should explore other options. Clearly, in a liberal democracy like ours, a national curriculum is not the answer.
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