I think Matt’s post and this one have quite a bit of common ground. As Matt points out, realising the connection between skills/competences and subject content is a way of ensuring young people have good guides for action, decision making and thinking critically.

I am (much less clearly!) suggesting that the skills of history allied to historical content could support young people to resist the kind of damaging collective story that got told about the housing market.

Ian

I’d wholeheartedly agree that one of the roles of education is to help people to be critical about the dominant stories around them. This would help prevent the bubble of the financial crisis, as well as open up the debate about whether greater material wealth is a good thing or not.

On a more positive note, I think it might also encourage ingenuity and innovation, as young people would emerge from education more able to ‘think the unthunk’ and come up with inventive ideas to make the most of entrepreneurial opportunities.

I think the methods you suggest could encourage this, although I think Matt Grist has identified an even more effective way over on his social brain blog (http://socialbrain.rsablogs.org.uk/2009/05/08/learning-to-think-is-not-all-about-thinking/#comments)

He suggests that. to help kids to make sense of the world and ‘think for themselves’ teachers should subtly emphasise the skills associated with disciplines, as well as the knowledge they are teaching. By doing this across disciplines, he suggests it will help kids to grasp a set of principles about how the world works and understand how and when those principles should be applied. This will help them to think for themselves or, in your words, deal critically with the stories around them. (He explains it better than I can!)

This definitely sounds like something the RSA should pursue, and I’d love to help out when I come to join you.

Max