NORTHERN Ireland is redesigning what children will learn for the next generation.

The new proposed curriculum gives digital technology a prominent place from the first years of primary school.

Philosophy, meanwhile, is nowhere to be found.

That is quite an omission. Technologies will change repeatedly during today’s pupils’ lifetimes.

Sarah Creighton: Drumcree is a f*** you to nationalism. Is this really what victory looks like for unionism?

Dolores Kelly: ‘Drumcree has opened up the scars. The pain is real’

The fundamental questions they raise – about truth, evidence, fairness, responsibility and power – will not.

The Department of Education’s consultation on the new statutory curriculum closed yesterday.

Certainly, the framework is thoughtful and ambitious in many respects: it promises to equip children to reason well, exercise judgment and participate responsibly in civic life.

However, philosophy appears only in that looser sense of the term, as the curriculum’s “guiding ethos”, never as a discipline or body of knowledge to which children themselves should be entitled.

Ethics is cited once as an influence on “Personal, Social, Civic and Careers” education.

In Northern Ireland ethics and philosophy have traditionally been relegated to topics within Religious Education or Religious Studies. This has always been too narrow a home for them.

Philosophy examines religious and moral questions, but it also underpins science,........

© The Irish News