John McTernan: For reformation, read deformation

AS WE celebrate the 450th anniversary of the Reformation, one of its lasting legacies is being destroyed. Scottish education, once the envy of the world, is being wrecked by an outdated and discredited educational theory.

Pupils just starting back at school are guinea pigs in this back-to-the-future experiment branded "Curriculum for Excellence". Now, just as you should never play cards for cash against a man called Doc, you should never trust a politician who comes selling "excellence". What they offer is invariably the very opposite.

What is being done in our schools is a massive act of vandalism, and those first to suffer will be the least academically able. For, in the guise of modernisation, public exams at 16 are being abolished. In place of Standard Grades will be teacher assessments.

So, pupils who leave school at 16 will have nothing that independently validates what they have learned. This is already one of the costliest decisions that a young person can make, but at least they might have some paper qualifications to take to an employer - or to use when they return to learning. Now they'll just get a note from the dominie. What an appalling prospect.

For those who stay on it's little better, for they are going to be taught through topics. Yes, those staples of primary school education - the Romans, the Stewarts, the Egyptians - are not going to be left behind with childish things, they will dog pupils till they get to university. Academic subjects for teaching are being abolished. Of course, Learning and Teaching Scotland (LTS) call it "inter-disciplinary" education, but it will be topics for sure.

Here's their helpful example: "In modern studies a group might be exploring issues about a disaster that's in the news such as an earthquake. If it's in another country, there is potential for links to geography to study the area. Physics could look at natural forces that caused the disaster. The relevant language class might explore expanding vocabulary and reading foreign language newspapers covering the news. ICT could look at communication systems used."

No, no, no. Why not have pupils learning something, a subject, gaining knowledge that they can apply? The sad thing is that you will search a long time for a reference to knowledge in all the writing about Curriculum for Excellence, and when you do you read that "the emphasis is on providing young people with the skills that will help them reflect on the knowledge they are developing".

At the risk of sounding like Rhodes Boyson, I don't want my nieces and nephews to develop knowledge - I want them to be taught things and to know things as a result. The trouble is that learning (or being "an effective learner") is only one of the four "capacities" that the new system is meant to develop in young people. The others are to be - a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor (whatever that means).

I know that schools are in loco parentis at times, but this is ridiculous. The nationalisation of what should be parental responsibilities is wrong on so many counts. Kids only spend 15,000 hours in compulsory education; the core role of schools must be educational, not social. The most chilling thing I've read recently has been the script LTS has produced for teachers to spin to anxious parents. Why do we need these changes? "(T]o give our children the competitive edge in the job market of the future."

So this is what we have come to, a nakedly monetised, economistic view of the purpose and content of education. For the current Scottish Government who have sought to define themselves against New Labour's public service reforms (attacked as marketisation and privatisation) this is breathtaking. It is nothing less than putting the market at the heart of education.

Now I know and like education secretary Mike Russell, he is a literate and cultured man. But he too says: "Our young people will need to be creative, resourceful, flexible, confident and responsible to succeed in the new global economy." It's not exactly John Ruskin, is it?

To be fair, there is also an educational philosophy, albeit one that dare not speak it's name. It is child-centred learning - that misfit offspring of the 60s which was allowed to wreak havoc in primary schools in England in the 70s and early 80s. It was to Scotland's undoubted benefit (and some pride) that our education system remained broadly uncontaminated by this trendy rubbish. But coming late to the party, we are going one better - we're going to wreck secondary schools too.

For the moment, exams remain in S5. Quite how the abolition of teaching subjects is squared with subject-based public examinations is unclear, though there are references to best practice. However, the direction of travel (to use the awful jargon with which the Curriculum for Excellence is littered) is clear. Highers will be next to go.

This is the most shocking betrayal of all that is best in Scotland. An educational system of real excellence that demonstrably underpinned democratic values is being put to the sword. It will fail. Not only in the terms the public understand - literacy and numeracy - but also in its own terms. For all the references to the false idols of the market and the global economy, this is not a reform that business either wants or will welcome. The extraordinary thing is that such a destructive and misconstrued change has gone so far with so little critical scrutiny. Where is our Parliament and where are our MSPs? The only complaints have been about too hasty an implementation, not about the substance.

Of course there are real challenges to Scottish education. Not least of which is the rapid decline in standards compared to England. But a retreat from public examinations and a wholesale embrace of the worst of 60s educational theories combined with a blind obeisance to the demands of the economy worthy of Ronald Reagan cannot - and must not - be the answer.

Where is John Knox when we need him to help us challenge the monstrous regiment of educationalists?