How many times have I heard someone on the radio say, “they should really be teaching this in schools,” when referring to their own pet project, whether that’s cooking, meditation, tackling obesity, knitting, or whatever?
The trouble is since the “new” curriculum was published in 1999, lots of different initiatives and schemes have sneaked into our daily lives and we have to try and squeeze it into an already overloaded curriculum.
Even though we really need to remove some initiatives before we even get started, we need to have a rule, that if we add something to the school week, something of equal time has to be taken out and provided by someone else.
So, for example, if we have to teach another hour of PE every week to counter obesity, we have to remove an hour of something else from the school curriculum.
In the meantime, we need to look at reducing what we already have. Emotive subjects like Religion and Irish are obvious targets but no one is likely to touch them. Drama is the clear favourite for the cull but, again, I can imagine it will be like extracting a well-rooted tooth.
As an aside, my favourite initiative that was tried to be introduced was during the Celtic Tiger when it was argued school should teach students to drive. Far from where we were reared.
