The title is different, but the language is remarkably similar to the great, if now infamous, education reforms of the 1960s in England, which swept aside traditional methods of teaching and introduced the concept of “child-centred” education. The Newsom Report of 1963, entitled Half our Future, said that half the school population risked being marginalised by a lack of success at school, and new ways of engaging them had to be developed.

The Plowden Report of 1967 advised reforming a system which still had children learning times tables by rote and reciting poetry aloud in class. Instead of desks in serried rows, the report suggested that pupils should sit informally in the classroom, while teachers, were encouraged to give them individual freedom.

The focus, just as with the Curriculum for Excellence, was on creativity, self-expression and flexibility. The general climate of educational thinking was “one in which the superior importance of the pupil to the content of the curriculum was beginning to be recognised”, according to one expert of the time.

What went wrong is that the pupils went wild and the parents saw red. At William Tyndale School, in Islington, one teacher rebelled against the new system, claiming that nothing was being learnt, and that discipline had collapsed. Parents started moving their children to other schools.

Gradually, the mood swung against the new approach, and, when the Conservatives returned to power, they began to reverse the reforms, with a return to a “core curriculum” which stressed the basics of reading and writing.

Scotland never experienced these extremes, and, until recently, the education system could claim to be based on relatively traditional teaching methods. However, the impetus that led to the Curriculum for Excellence was remarkably similar to that put forward 50 years ago in England. Children, it was said, were leaving school without the balanced, all-round self-confidence that a good education should produce. Employers complained that they had candidates who had passed exams but could not hold their own in the workplace. There was a need for a broader approach.

Now, however, we are beginning to hear complaints that are remarkably familiar - woolly ideas and not enough clarity. The fact is, as Keir Bloomer seems to be pointing out, that you cannot educate without teaching; that a child will never acquire self-confidence without fundamental grounding; and that, however broad-based a curriculum may be, unless it teaches the basics, a pupil will go out into the world deprived of the essential framework of information within which all learning takes place.

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