Curriculum Reform or pondering the possibility of a NEW modern school movement
How do we reform the current (read: antiquated) general curriculum so that students actually can make choices for themselves? What should be kept as mandatory, necessary? What could actually be thrown out or placed in the “optional” or “electives” box? WHO is going to get to make these decisions? A lot of questions, I know. It would answer a lot for me, and change a lot for me, if school was both more broadly focused on just a couple of general subjects, once we achieved levels of literacy and numeracy, and then more narrowly focused, so that each student could start to specialize and explore interests (and have the freedom to change those specializations too) from fairly early on in their educations.
Although my father’s family was involved with the Ferrer Modern School, and my father was educated in a Modern School early in childhood, I had a much more traditional, suburban public school experience. But I like to think about my husband G and what I know of his childhood and early schooling. I envision him sitting on the floor at Montessori, reading Beowulf at the age of nine. G went to school on what was basically a beautifully restored old farm outside of Baltimore, MD. He took me there to see it when we were in Baltimore to visit his grandmother last month. The farm buildings had been turned into classrooms and meeting halls and exercise spaces and eating spaces. There was lots of room outdoors to play in fresh grassy spaces, there were ball courts and areas for specific sports, and meadows to wander in as well as to explore for nature study. There must have been structured study so that everyone acquired literacy and numeracy and musicality and artistry and all of the things that were valued at that school. But there was also much time for choice.
So in my mind’s eye, I watch little curly-haired G in his horn-rimmed glasses and his attitude of “go away and leave me alone”, reading his Beowulf, happy to be uninterrupted except for the moments when he had to go with the program and roll the coffee can of ice cream across the floor. Yes, apparently they made home-made ice-cream in a coffee can, which I would certainly consider a more valuable life skill than many things kids learn in school from the standard curriculum. The problem was that Montessori ruined G for any other form of schooling. From this open, free environment where he determined much of his own learning, he was then sent to a rigid parochial boys’ school where uniforms, requirements and regulations ruled the day. One can only imagine the disaster that resulted from this extreme dislocation of real learning.
The curriculum is only as deep and meaningful as the degree of engagement of the learner. If the learner truly doesn’t care about the subject matter, how can it ever be a domain of serious and lasting learning for them? Certainly it’s true that we can find ways to help students understand why they should know something, why they should care. And that is valuable and worthwhile, especially when we’re still teaching them the skills that they need to have at their command in order to take control of their own learning. But once they have enough skills to do that, they need to be able to take that very control. I wonder, though, about which pieces of the general curriculum we would keep if we were the ones making that decision. I mean, if we throw out global history, for example, and make it an elective, are they going to be at a disastrous loss later on? The answer is that if they are (and yes, they will), they can then choose to learn global history, to take that course of study…or explore it on their own. Perhaps what young learners need is to understand is what will be the necessary curriculum for what they want to do. And then what do they want to know about and explore simply because it gives them pleasure, not necessarily as a means to an end?
Lots of couseling and strong advisement would be really important if we had a more independent curriculum. The tension is that everyone does need certain components of the general curriculum — and not just skills. If people are going to vote, be participatory citizens, they really need to study some history. But the problem is that it doesn’t do any good to ram information down anyone’s throat when they don’t yet see the purpose of it, when they don’t yet desire the learning.
And I’m left to wonder, once again, why we are at a juncture in the history of education when we are testing more, teaching and learning less, making students more dependent on false reasons for learning (to pass tests, to get into college) rather than authentic reasons for learning (the desire to know).
