How a silversmith came up with the values that underpin Scottish educational policy

                              

The number of slogans and buzzwords in Scottish education beggars belief.  It feels as though an army of marketeers or ad-men in the Scottish government are paid to dream these up up and build them into policy. 

Here's one.  According to the "Statement for Practitioners" from HM Chief Inspector of Education, 

"The Scottish approach to the curriculum is values based. Wisdom, justice, compassion and integrity define the values for Scottish society.  

'For' is such a little word, but significant.  Why didn't they say 'of''? I guess because the values are being defined, well, for you.  They are not arising from the people, they are of not of the people. Perhaps they are, coincidentally; but in this case they are being defined for you.  And this is a tiny, but significant clue to the culture of education policy, management and training in Scotland, and as such an indicator of the culture of the implementation of those policies.

So where did these values come from? They are written in gold, gold apparently panned from Scottish rivers, and set in silver in the ceremonial mace which the queen presented to the Scottish Parliament when it opened.  As this post explains, Donald Dewar spoke these words to the nation in his speech at the opening ceremony in 1999. 

The Curriculum for Excellence was published only four years later, so it was decided that these values should underpin CfE.   But why these words?  As the author of that blog post points out: "There are lots of other great-sounding words after all - honesty, fairness, tolerance, trust for example. And since we are talking about Scotland, how about thrift, prudence or financial propriety?" 

It was the silversmith who made the mace who dreamed up the words.  Because Scotland is a village, the blog author's mum knew someone who knew someone who knew Michael Lloyd.  Apparently, "the words he chose were simply accepted, without the need for debate or approval by a grand committee". Does that count as "of the people". Apparently there was a fifth word:  'courage', but there was no room for it on the mace.