Background

The Thomas More Foundation is a developing collaboration of educators and academics. We have a particular interest in the formation of teachers as this is decisive for the quality of education that students receive. We are, therefore, investigating the possibility of producing a postgraduate certificate for the intellectual enrichment of teachers, provisionally on the theme of the history of ideas. 

The dominant curricula available to UK schools are generally based on the acquisition of knowledge and skills and treat knowledge as belonging to discrete subject areas. For students to receive the best of what education has to offer them, it will be necessary to deepen teachers’ depth of understanding of their subject.  

Yet this is not enough. One researcher has called for ‘educated educators’ that go beyond the traditional vocation of the ‘qualified teacher’. He was referring to the tendency to fragment knowledge into distinct subjects, contrary to the complex integration of knowledge which is genuinely descriptive of the world. Teachers have much to benefit from engagement with subjects outside of their own, as they will discover the reciprocal impact of ideas across disciplines; students in turn benefit from recognising, through their teachers, a unity intrinsic to the knowledge they are given across their subjects.  

The study of the history of ideas is instructive in this regard: it demonstrates the recurrence of certain metaphysical and theological problems throughout history; it specifies the historical impact of various solutions to these problems on art, science, culture, and politics; it presents the lives of great thinkers who wrestled with these problems, and whose work was necessary for future problems be formulated and it shows how any event or idea may be interrogated from a variety of disciplines. 

We aim to encourage teachers to present their subject to students as a history of ideas, that is, as a history of problems encountered and overcome, which the students themselves can attempt to reason through as part of their intellectual formation, all the while discovering for themselves the complex unity of knowledge which resists reduction to any single discipline. In this way genuine understanding is achieved, understanding which goes beyond the memorisation of facts; though not without educational value, memorisation is by no means the summit of education. 

For these reasons, a postgraduate certificate in the history of ideas could effectively aid  the enrichment of teachers across the UK. We have therefore called this consultation to determine the practicalities of such a project. 

The Consultation: A Summary

We began by rehearsing the original vision for the certificate — an online, asynchronous, interdisciplinary, and multi-modal survey of the history of ideas aimed to offer teachers in particular (though not exclusively these) a deeper source of enrichment and formation than they are able to access. We considered the reasons why there is presently a lack of quality formation amongst teachers across both state and private schools alike:

• First, there is no agreement about what a curriculum, and thus an education, is for. In England, there is an emphasis on knowledge, whereas in Scotland there has been a emphasis on skills for the last 15 years; and in Australia there is a similar mixture of views. Furthermore, what students are expected to know is typically government-mandated and so it is not always possible to implement alternative approaches to education or to challenge certain aspects of content. For instance, it is common for curriculums to deny human nature and transcendental values. There is a need for a richer anthropology to undergird education;

• Second, the dominant culture surrounding education today fails to appreciate the need for insight into the complex whole of knowledge, It often explicitly enforces a one-dimensional view of education that is in turn rooted in a deficient concept of the human person. These tensions are seen most clearly in philosophy and theology courses, which emphasise critical discussion about fundamental anthropological questions, in contrast to other subjects where teachers are discouraged from questioning fundamental ideas about the human person and the role of education;

• Third, existing options for ‘professional development’ are career-oriented rather than classroom-oriented. At the other extreme, intellectual history courses can be too academic. Teachers need access to forms of enrichment than are readily applicable in the classroom environment and which make clear the road to mastery of their subject; 

• Finally, there are practical constrains on teachers, financial, personal, and professional, which limit what they can afford to pursue in their spare time for enrichment and which can vary drastically from teacher to teacher. Many could afford neither the time nor the money to enrol in a graduate certificate in intellectual history or the liberal arts. Relatedly, teachers are after different depths of formation, in proportion to their subject, the level at which they teach their subject, and the resources they have at their disposal to pursue their own learning. 

A certificate in the history of ideas can attend to most of these needs:

• Studying the history of ideas, of their formulation and the consequences of their diffusion, supplies the richer anthropology without which the utility and purpose of education remains unclear. It achieves this by giving teachers a comprehensive perspective on the history of humanity and alerts them to the critical ways in which contemporary education falls short of presenting this to students, for instance by elevating certain elements of this history at the expense of others. 

• For the classroom, it enables them to perceive the underlying ideas and patterns of thought that have animated the development of their subject and how and why these ideas may have changed. It also affords them multiple perspectives on a variety of of problems, which is important for the classroom environment where analogy is instrumental in forging connections between familiar and unfamiliar contents. Teachers will thus be encouraged to see the connections between different subjects. 

• Finally, the history of ideas is very much like a history of problems and ways these problems were overcome, or conversely the manner in which certain fundamental questions keep on returning. Thus it is a useful paradigm to impose on many subjects, including science subjects. 

• Having said all this, we did feel that there would be an indissoluble tension between the level of study and assessment associated with a postgraduate certificate and the most basic needs of teachers. For this reason we determined to stratify the course into stages of development, beginning with a basic online course that could be accessed by anyone and which required no accreditation, gradually working towards content that could serve at a postgraduate level. 

We discussed various attempts to present the history of ideas, some which divided up thematically, others according to period or discipline. It is clear that, for our purposes, the content already exists, and it is simply a matter of choosing how to present it. It was suggested that a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) format would be appropriate for our needs for several reasons: 

• MOOCs are typically a series of pre-recorded videos that are hosted on a website. Participants can complete the course at their own pace and complete short quizzes to assess their comprehension of the content and to ensure active participation. We can host these straightforwardly on our TMF website or otherwise provide a link to a university provider that we partner with. 

• MOOCs are generally not accredited. There are many financial and legal (e.g. copyrighted materials) obstacles to an accredited course which may be better dealt with in the future, once we have a tried-and-tested product and a substantial outreach. Meanwhile, a university can sponsor the project without accreditation. St Andrews, St Mary’s University Twickenham, and the University of Notre Dame Australia have each produced or are producing similar programmes to ours and could allow us to re-present their materials in another MOOC format, provided an acceptable proposal can be made to them (see ‘next steps’ below)

• We can better integrate modes of assessment that are less academic and more practical, such as asking teachers to develop lesson plans based on what they have learned or producing an oral 

For these reasons, MOOCs are ideal for piloting a programme based on existing resources, rather than re-inventing the wheel as it were. It can be piloted with a small group of teachers from schools we have connections with, who already have a sense of the need for a programme that offers intellectual formation tailored to the classroom. From here, it will be possible to grow the program and to offer courses of varying depths, ultimately one that is pitched at the level of a postgraduate certificate and advertised as such. One the programme has grown sufficiently, we could then consider the possibility of in-person retreats. Such would be our ‘concentric circles’ approach to developing the programme, as one participant put it. 

It was suggested that the Diocese could be critical to the early stage expansion of the reach of the programme. TMF already has several contacts with them from developing the Eudaemonia resources. 

Next Steps

TMF will devise a proposal for the University of Notre Dame Australia to adapt their graduate certificate in Catholic Thought into a MOOC provided by us. This will not be a full certificate, but a brief online course which caters to the basic needs of teachers, such as a fresh perspective on the purpose of education, presented in relation to a richer concept of the human person; a renewed understanding of the possibility for knowledge to be integrated across subjects, especially across the sciences and humanities; and a clear sense of what these ideas mean for how we should teach. In line with one participant's suggestion, the mode of assessment will aim to relate the content directly to the classroom, e.g. by asking teachers to produce a lesson plan or some reflections based on the course content. 

In preparation for this, it will be necessary to determine the schools and teachers who would be willing to participate in a pilot of the programme. It will also be necessary to ascertain the cost of developing and running the pilot and how much of this can be supplied by Fundación Parentes and whether anything would need to be raised by the participants themselves. 

The stages of the development towards a postgraduate certificate will be considered in greater detail. The various levels at which people could participate in the future according to their particular needs and interests will be carefully delineated, in line with our concentric circles approach.