Gove's education reform

From the Guardian

Michael Gove might never achieve his wish for a nation where all children acquire the "fundamental building blocks" of knowledge to equip them through life. But if his draft national curriculum is any guide we might as a nation get much, much, better at University Challenge.

Announced alongside the decision to keep GCSEs after all and to broaden the way secondary schools are judged, comes a 173-page document, plus appendixes on grammar and punctuation, which lays down the Gove-ian vision of what children in England should be taught.

While this is a deliberately slimmed down document – Gove argues it should form "only part of the whole curriculum, not its entirety", allowing teachers to go off piste occasionally – what it lack in pages it makes up for in suggested facts. Lots of them.
As well as a thorough grounding in the essentials of maths, spelling, grammar and punctuation, from 2014 children will be expected to pinpoint cities and rivers on a globe in geography classes, while history will present, in Gove's words to parliament, "a clear narrative of British progress with a proper emphasis on heroes and heroines from our past". English will involve "the great works of the literary canon".

Maybe he should go back to basics and start on a few Morals and Ethics. A curriculum that involves the teaching of Integrity needs to be introduced. The current system seems to have produced a Nation of liars and thieves. That's even before the Americans got a look in.