Scotland's new school syllabus, which will cover text messaging in English lessons, has been branded as “a curriculum for ignorance” by a former chief inspector of schools.

Chris Woodhead, England’s chief inspector of schools from 1994 until 2000, has condemned the government’s Curriculum for Excellence as “anti-intellectual” and “hopelessly utopian” and warned that it devalues teaching and will further erode standards.

Under the new guidelines, which are designed to make teaching more relevant to pupils, children from the age of three to 18 are expected to achieve “experiences and outcomes” across the eight areas of expressive arts, health and wellbeing, languages, mathematics, religious and moral education, sciences, social studies and technologies.

Woodhead said the outcomes were so vague as to be meaningless and said that the scheme had more to do with teaching children how to learn than imparting knowledge.

Woodhead also accused Fiona Hyslop, the education minister, of “a blatant attempt to impose a particular and deeply controversial view of education on every teacher and therefore every child in Scotland”.

Writing in today’s Sunday Times, he says: “It is a curriculum for ignorance which will further weaken an already weakened education system.

“This is a profoundly antiintellectual approach to education. If I were a parent in Scotland, I would write today to my child’s school to ask whether this Curriculum for Excellence is going to be dumped in the nearest recycling bin.

“Then I would write to my MSP to ask how much it cost to produce this rubbish and when the Scottish government is going to come up with sensible proposals to raise standards in the country’s schools.”

A recent survey of pupils’ performance across 59 countries found standards slipping in Scotland. The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study ranked Scotland 15th in the league table for science at S2, and behind Latvia and Kazakhstan for science and maths achievement.

Tens of thousands of children are failing to master basic literacy and numeracy by the age of 14. In some areas, in half of the schools, the majority of the children are failing to achieve minimum standards of literacy and numeracy.

In up to a third of schools in some parts of Scotland, most primary pupils are failing to achieve the benchmark standard in writing by P7. One in six pupils leaves primary school unable to read, write or add up.

Woodhead said that the curriculum, to be implemented next year, says little about what should be taught because of a fashionable belief among educationalists that teaching children specific facts is pointless because they are forgotten soon after sitting exams.

“Curriculum for Excellence says next to nothing about what should be taught in Scotland’s schools. It is clearly grounded in the fashionable belief that children should not be taught much, if any, specific knowledge about anything. What matters is that they ‘learn how to learn’,” he said.

“The experts who compiled this curriculum think a child who has learnt how to learn can find anything out for themselves, and that it is in any case futile teaching anybody anything because new discoveries render specific knowledge redundant before it has been mastered, and we forget everything we have been taught once the examination has been passed.”

“Knowledge matters. Children go to school to be taught things they would otherwise never know by teachers who know more than they do. They need to learn that the acquisition of worthwhile knowledge is not easy and may not always be enjoyable.

“This is not how the experts behind Curriculum for Excellence see education.”

Lindsay Paterson, professor of educational policy at Edinburgh University, said that the new curriculum had “completely avoided the discussion of the nature of knowledge” and dropped ways of understanding the world which had evolved over thousands of years.

The strategy has been well received by education authorities but teachers warned last week that it would fail unless more time and money was spent on training teachers and providing extra resources.

Hyslop rejected Woodhead’s claims. She said: “We do not want to import the kind of perspective on education shown by Mr Woodhead, and indeed some of his comments appear quite arrogant.

“Curriculum for Excellence will prepare our young people for the challenges of life in the 21st Century. The reforms are intended to raise standards by improving learning and teaching, with literacy and numeracy a key focus.

“Education will be provided suited to the needs of individual pupils, with teachers provided with the freedom to develop quality teaching and learning approaches within their own schools.”

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