The language used in education shapes policy, practice, and perceptions. Edge’s series asks, What's in a Word? and scrutinises the impact of the terminology we commonly employ.
This is great branding. To say something is ‘rich’ feels classy, and if it’s rich in knowledge, the vibe is all opulent, gold-encrusted grimoires in a wood-panelled library, perhaps with a meerschaum pipe and some Morocco leather slippers. I’m being flippant. But I’m also not. ‘Knowledge-rich’ is a phrase with proper meaning behind it – with a rigorous backstory of research and, as far as we can get it in the slippery world of social sciences, empirical truth. But around that core meaning, a lot of other more vague and unsubstantiated ideas have accrued.
Let’s start with the proper meaning. E.D. Hirsch is often taken as the prime exponent and originator of the approach, and his thesis is straightforward and persuasive. You can’t divorce knowledge from skills, because every skill is based on units of knowledge. So, for example, if you want to teach the ‘skill’ of reading in the abstract, you’ll struggle without the ‘knowledge’ of the words, context and content you are reading about.
My own first teaching experience illustrated this perfectly. It was in a tiny village three days walk from the road in the high Himalayas of landlocked Nepal. And yet, in a quirk of post-colonial schooling, the set text was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, a rollicking tale of ships and shipwrecks set in the aftermath of a Jacobite rebellion in eighteenth century Scotland. For kids who had never seen a lake or a boat, let alone the sea, it was baffling beyond belief. They lacked the knowledge essential to even begin developing their skill. This also illustrates the second key fallacy Hirsch takes aim at: the assumption that the cultural world of every student is the same outside school. In his view, it’s not just that knowledge is foundational for learning – it’s that communal knowledge is essential. We have to know the same stuff as each other, both ‘for the sake of the community and the individual child’. He tells us that everyone is entitled to be taught ‘the enabling knowledge that is possessed by the most successful adults in the wider society.’
‘Enabling’ becomes a bit more complicated, though. To take an example closer to home, is knowing Latin ‘enabling’ because it helps us with particular tasks? Or is it ‘enabling’ because it allows us to share an obscure social code with elite public schoolboys? And actually, ‘community’ is hard too. Which community? Should communal knowledge be located in the traditional canon or in a diversified canon? Should we all be learning about Mozart, or should we all be learning about Marvin Gaye? That isn’t just a value judgement, either. Even if one could definitively say who is ‘better’, the choice is actually about the story we tell.
To choose Marvin Gaye is to tell one story about the role and importance of music – to choose Mozart tells a very different one. But the branding can cause difficulty. We hear about ‘rich’ knowledge, ‘powerful’ knowledge, all wrapped up in ‘traditional’ teaching. It can become seductive to either castigate the whole approach as reactionary – or to use it as an excuse to push a reactionary curriculum. That library, that pipe, and those slippers, feel old-fashioned, when the core of a ‘knowledge-rich’ approach should be a simple matter of evidence-based pedagogy. It isn’t, though. Even the way we talk about knowledge ignores the breadth of the definition used in the theory and research on the topic.
Knowledge isn’t the same as facts. It can encompass the precise weight with which to press down on the clutch when changing gear, the grip on a pencil, the understanding of the complexity of another person’s motivations, the choice of words and rhythm of speech that makes people warm to you.
And yet, that’s not what ‘knowledge’ seems to mean in the general educational discourse. Our current moment is shaped above all by two figures – Michael Gove and Nick Gibb. It was their reforms a decade and a half ago that shifted the dial, and to many, including Gibb himself in the lucid and fascinating account of it he published this year, those reforms are an unequivocal success story, told in black and white in the recent climbing of the international league tables. But the way the reforms were rolled out, and the nature of the assessment system they created, have left us with a persistent sense that ‘knowledge’ is something only found on the page and only demonstrated via written exam.
To some extent the great tragedy of the introduction of the concept of ‘knowledge-rich’ education into the mainstream in England is that it came freighted with too much political baggage, delivered at a time when culture wars were beginning to rumble, and presented in a combative way that reduced debate to a binary choice. It was co-opted into a highly competitive exam-based system, where knowledge-rich sometimes became a synonym for knowledge-heavy. It became elided with a view of education as solely the preserve of the academically successful, and culture as something defined by the past. And while on the one hand the explicit teaching of core knowledge liberated many, including the most disadvantaged, at the same time the increasingly narrow definition of what counted as core knowledge could be profoundly alienating.
Think again about those kids in Nepal. As teachers, we might have two very different responses to the dilemma they found themselves in. Either one could rigorously break down the knowledge they needed to understand all the concepts in Kidnapped. Or one could just, you know, teach them a different book. Maybe one about mountains. No matter what your view of the current curriculum in England, this debate is still a live one. Not whether we need to teach knowledge, or whether we need it to be part of a communal equitable cultural inheritance. That should be a given. The core question we should be asking instead – and it is a nightmarishly difficult one – is which knowledge.
Written by
Sammy Wright.
Sammy is Head of School at a large secondary in Sunderland. He sat on the government's Social Mobility Commission from 2018 to 2021, becoming a key voice in the debates over exam grades during the pandemic. He has taught for twenty years at schools in Oxfordshire, London and the North East. His debut novel Fit won the Northern Book Prize, and in 2024 Penguin/Bodley Head published his non-fiction debut Exam Nation, a critically acclaimed survey of the state of education in England today.
Next time: Doug Cole considers the meaning of a highly contested term: ‘employability’.