Major changes are afoot in Britain’s schools. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) promises greater autonomy for teachers and more space for creativity. Ed Balls explains: ‘By cutting waste and duplication in the curriculum, I am giving teachers the time to concentrate on what is really vital.’ But what is really vital? Geography lessons on cities, rivers and continental drift will make way for ‘themed’ teaching on issues such as the effects on poorer nations of our choices as consumers, or the lessons of the South-East Asian tsunami. Announcing the changes, QCA chief Ken Boston explained they would allow a more practical approach to the curriculum. ‘Instead of teaching them the battle of Malplaquet, you teach them how to cook food. Are we going to teach the battle of the Nile, or are we going to teach about how to take out a mortgage?”

Thus the curriculum seems to be a becoming a battleground between those who view it as a vehicle for socialising children and critics who argue for the importance of academic knowledge. In her seminal essay ‘The Crisis in Education’, Hannah Arendt argued that ‘the function of the school is to teach children what the world is like and not to instruct them in the art of living’. The government appears to have drawn very different conclusions. Reformers seem keen to turn every contemporary preoccupation – from healthy eating to citizenship - into a school subject. Boston argues that schools have a responsibility to deal with ‘issues like obesity, issues like teenage pregnancy, which are running at extraordinary high rates’. When then education secretary Alan Johnson argued climate change should be an integral part of the geography curriculum, he was clear this was less about understanding science than altering behaviour, aiming to ‘lock in a culture change that could, quite literally, save the world’. But might this morally charged version of education distract children from deeper learning? Children may learn that the slave trade was bad, for example, but will they appreciate why it was deemed acceptable at that period of history, and the economic as well as moral imperatives that led to its abolition?

Is the curriculum being politically manipulated at the expense of ‘real’ subjects, which represent a genuine body of knowledge? Or are critics of the QCA dooming children to irrelevant facts by clinging to a set of subjects that were designed for the 19th century? What should schools teach children?