|
by Marion Brady NASSP Bulletin, May
1996
This article consists of seven subsections:
Introduction
Winning wars. That's what the curriculum at the army's West Point Academy
is all about. To that end, during the first years of the 20th century,
cadets were taught that victory on the field began with an artillery
barrage, continued with an infantry bayonet assault, and ended with the
cavalry mopping up the stragglers with sabers.
While cadets were studying these maneuvers perfected by Napoleon, German
industries were cranking out machine guns, poison gas, long range
artillery, tanks, aircraft, and submarines.
In a single year of World War I, 1916, there were approximately 2,000,000
battle casualties. Most were infantry. Advancing with bayonets at the
ready, they were leveled by machine gun fire. A smaller number were seamen
who lost their lives to German submarines as they manned ships loaded with
the vast amounts of hay necessary to feed thousands of unused cavalry
horses.
A poor curriculum is a dangerous thing. And teacher education shaped by
preparation for such a curriculum makes an alternative ever more difficult
to imagine.
The Traditional Curriculum
A poor curriculum is a dangerous thing. And the traditional secondary
level curriculum is a poor curriculum. Its inadequacies may or may not
translate into wartime casualties, but at the very least it is wasting
human potential, and making it far more difficult to solve our individual
and collective problems.
The present curriculum is based on the academic disciplines, and from that
fact many serious problems stem:
-
Like the turn-of-the-century West Point curriculum, today's general
education curriculum has no built-in mechanisms that adapt it to change.
-
Beyond and between the disciplines lie vast and extremely important areas
of knowledge, knowledge presently being ignored.
-
Individually and collectively, the disciplines are far too complex to
serve as a curricular framework. Every adolescent ought to be able to
understand the organization of the curriculum and explain its rationale.
That is not now possible.
-
Certain random disciplinary intersections notwithstanding, the disciplines
cannot be integrated in any functional way. They cannot, therefore, either
display to students the holistic, systemic nature of human experience, or
provide a coherent conceptual structure for organizing and relating
information.
-
No philosophical propositions drive the selection of content. We teach,
with minor variations, what we think is important. But we think it is
important primarily because it is what we were taught.
-
The disciplines segment reality in artificial, awkward, arbitrary ways. We
simply do not look at human experiences—marital relationships, ecological
disasters, management effectiveness, ethnic conflict, resource depletion,
or any other complex human problem or condition—by bringing the
disciplines, one-by-one, to bear on them.
-
The disciplines compete for time and place in the curriculum, a
competition the outcome of which is ordinarily settled not by logic, but
by tradition or political maneuvering. No authority mediates competing
claims, no agreed-upon instructional priorities guide decision making, no
one requires that the disciplines demonstrate that they contribute in
meaningful ways to overarching instructional goals.
-
Even if the current patchwork curriculum gave students a comprehensive,
integrated conception of reality, it is extremely inefficient and wasteful
of time. A single, coherent general education instructional program could
do a much superior job in far fewer hours, thereby opening up myriad
educational options not presently available.
-
The disciplines have become institutionalized. Means have become ends.
Many teachers are more interested in their disciplines and the supporting
textbooks than with those aspects of the real world the disciplines and
textbooks purport to explain.
-
Around disciplinary conceptual structures, bodies of factual information
of ever-increasing size accumulate. Instilling this information often
becomes the purpose of instruction, obscuring both the concepts which put
the information in context and the processes which generated it. A premium
is put on the single mental process of recall, to the neglect of all other
cognitive processes.
-
Ultimately, education is not primarily about accumulating knowledge, but
about identifying and exploring relationships between various aspects of
reality. Because, collectively, the disciplines neglect so much of
importance, and because they cannot be satisfactorily integrated, students
are deprived of the tools they need to create new knowledge. Of all the
problems with the traditional curriculum, this is almost certainly the
most serious.
As long as the academic disciplines hold the curricular center stage,
these and other problems will persist. Mixing or matching disciplines in
novel ways, bringing them to bear on random themes or concepts, using them
as tools for the study of student needs or social problems, putting them
in the service of multiculturalism or making them sources of "cultural
knowledge"—such efforts may sparkle for a time from the Hawthorne Effect,
but they provide no comprehensive solution to present problems.
Indeed, given the present encouragement of discipline-centered projects by
efforts such as Goals 2000, the situation is likely to get worse. Freshly
reinforced with scholarly but narrow input, the disciplines will attract
the kind of attention that will make an alternative, holistic curricular
base even less likely to get serious consideration.
The Objective
Much of the traditional curriculum's incoherence can be attributed to the
lack of an understandable, practical, primary purpose. Pressed for a
statement of what education is ultimately all about, the educational
establishment is of several minds.
"Students are being prepared for democratic citizenship," says one
faction.
"They're being prepared to engage in useful, satisfying work," says
another.
"Enabled to lead self-fulfilling lives," is the view of yet another group.
It is probably fair to say that statements such as these serve no useful
purpose. Terms are rarely defined, the benefits lie somewhere in a vague
future, and teachers feel no obligation to provide hard evidence that what
they are doing leads with certainty to the ends they profess to seek.
Here is a different statement of purpose: The primary goal of instruction
is to help students understand present experience. Understanding and
accepting this perhaps rather innocuous-sounding declaration would shake
the educational establishment to its foundations.
The Course of Study
Translated directly into traditional-style classroom instruction, the
phrase "understanding present experience" has the teacher facing the class
and asking, "What's going on—right here in this room, right at this
moment?"
From this simple beginning, all else stems. In the days, weeks, months,
and years that follow, as the students' horizons expand, the task is to
decide which aspects of experience are significant, what sort of
conceptual framework organizes these aspects most usefully, which aspects
are related, in what ways, and why. The role of the curriculum is to help
with this process as needed.
It may appear that the statement of purpose excludes just about everything
presently being taught. In fact, it excludes nothing, merely demands that
whatever is presented be anchored in meaningful experience, and related
systemically to all other knowledge.
Not long into a thoughtful study of the here and now, it becomes apparent
that, useful as they are in the description and analysis of certain kinds
of highly circumscribed phenomena, the traditional disciplines are not the
basic tools we use to organize our thoughts about reality.
They fit into certain niches in our total conceptual framework, but they
are not that framework's primary organizers, and they do not mesh with
each other sufficiently to reflect the integrated nature of perception.
Analyzing and describing experience, we seek five kinds of information. We
locate an experience in time, place it in a physical milieu, identify
participants or participant objects, describe action, and attribute cause.
That changing any one of the five significantly alters the experience
assures us of their centrality and interrelatedness.
When these five familiar dimensions of experience—time, place, actors,
action, and motive, and their respective elaborating conceptual
structures—replace the disciplines as the basic organizers of the
curriculum, a far simpler and much superior framework for general
education emerges, a framework with none of the problems noted earlier. It
is the key to a curriculum capable of lifting students to levels of
performance not now possible.
Instructional Materials
Teachers accustomed to leaning heavily on textbooks and other
professionally-created materials may be dismayed at the openness and
apparent unpredictability of a course of study that begins with the study
of the familiar and the mundane. Undeniably, it takes considerable self
confidence to close the textbooks with their memorizable, two-dimensional
descriptions of reality and turn directly to reality itself.
Obviously, however, to the basic curricular question, "What's going on
here?" those present are in the best possible position to answer. And, if
participants come to understand that the process in which they are engaged
is at least as important as are its products, they may discover that
learning can be intrinsically rewarding.
For those who undertake the exploration of immediate experience,
discomfort will in most instances be short-lived. What is being attempted,
after all, is not the teaching of another discipline with a specialized
jargon and an unfamiliar conceptual structure, but a rethinking of the
utterly familiar as it presents itself at the moment.
As the old saying, "A fish would be the last to discover water," suggests,
exploring the familiar is not without its challenges. However, since all
the tools for the task—the vocabulary, the conceptual structure, the
rationale—are already deeply imbedded in the assumptions of all
participants, instruction is a matter merely of bringing what is already
known into consciousness and organizing it formally.
Soon, familiar territories will be sighted. For example, students who,
looking around at their classroom, begin to raise questions about its
origin, size, shape, location, design, construction, heating, cooling,
orientation, and arrangement, and its population with their attendant
states of mind and patterns of action, will find themselves moving, at the
very least, into mathematics, art, architecture, geography, physics,
sociology, psychology, economics, and history. Whenever appropriate, these
disciplinary conceptual substructures of our cultural supradiscipline can
be called into play.
This is not to say that inquiry never moves beyond the bounds of the
classroom, but that, when it does, it is anchored in ideas which were
first shaped in a context that was immediate, powerful, and important.
Evaluation
When change is proposed, one of the many reasons for its rejection is that
students will not be prepared for one or another examination lying
somewhere in the future. Admittedly, the test-makers are sometimes the
tails that wag the dogs, but to cite them as a reason for teaching less
well than one knows how is surely indefensible.
And in this case, unnecessary. The curriculum being proposed does not
replace the disciplines. At the very least, it anchors them in reality,
and ties them together into a mutally reinforcing whole. As common sense
suggests and myriad research confirms, the hardest material to grasp and
remember is that which is not related in some meaningful way to
experience. Integrating knowledge inevitably enhances test-taking
performance.
Teacher Education
Conventional wisdom has it that the mainstay of teacher preparation should
be a thorough grounding in one of the traditional disciplines. For general
education, such training is almost certainly counterproductive.
Two sorts of teachers can handle curricula which move on a broad front to
explore human experience. The first sort know much about many different
things. The second sort do not, are comfortable admitting that they do
not, and accept the role of "lead student" in a cooperative search for
understanding. Of the two, the second is probably preferable, for it makes
of the teacher an appropriate role model.
Since much of what students will need to know in the course of living out
their lives no one yet knows, learning to look for answers makes more long
term sense than finding a few of immediate utility. Teachers who know (or
pretend to know) all the answers give students a shallow view of the
nature of learning, the dimensions of knowledge, and the challenge of the
future.
Unfortunately, given the fragmented traditional curriculum, many teachers
will resist undertaking instruction that deals with reality holistically.
State mandates, college entrance requirements, and other bureaucratic
demands create additional difficulties or perceptions of difficulty to
overcome. The simplest solution therefore is probably to team teachers
with a range of skills and abilities, assign them a large group of
students, give the students credit and grades for "component" courses with
familiar course titles, and proceed in whatever way the rules,
regulations, and teacher predispositions permit. Given the current level
of public suspicion and paranoia in many parts of the nation, the less
apparent change in the curriculum, the better.
What Now?
The traditional academic disciplines are the organizers of the curriculum
of nearly every secondary school, college and university in the nation.
Departmental lines within institutions are drawn by them. Budgets observe
their boundaries. Administrative structures reinforce them. Professional
organizations guard their interests. Lives of service are devoted to them.
Alternatives to them are almost literally unthinkable. They are not going
to go away. Nor should they.
That the disciplines are a highly productive way to segment reality for
the purpose of specialized study is undeniable. But they are inappropriate
organizers of the general education curriculum. We have had more than a
century to experiment and have not found in them answers to the most
elementary questions about the curriculum.
-
Which disciplines and which aspects of those disciplines--are of greatest
value in the struggle for survival?
-
How should knowledge be organized? Integrated?
-
How can neglected areas of knowledge be identified?
-
What can be done to make the curriculum self-renewing?
-
How can students be taught to generate new knowledge rather than merely
absorb or reorganize existing knowledge?
-
What can be done to make the content of the curriculum so immediately
useful, so powerful, so central to the successful living of daily life,
that grades, disciplinary measures, mandatory attendance laws, and other
evidences of failure become relics of the past?
A decade of particularly intense curriculum scrutiny lies behind us, and
the disciplinarians and interdisciplinarians have not discovered a
satisfactory answer to a single one of these questions, have instead
sought answers to education's problems in new facilities, novel shedules,
longer school days, statistical sleights-of-hand, alternative staffing,
more stringent teacher training, and other strategies.
Nothing much has changed, nor will it until what is taught is determined
by reason rather than a commitment to ritual. To continue down the
curricular road we are on does an enormous disservice to students, the
educational establishment, and the larger society.
The traditional disciplines need to remain healthy, and the new ones
constantly emerging need to be encouraged. The complexity of modern
society requires the specialized skills they create and the insights they
provide, and students need an opportunity to pursue those for which they
have an aptitude. But students also need—we all need—the means for
grasping the totality of experience.
Imbedded far more deeply in our thinking than the disciplines—so deeply we
have not recognized it—is the optimum organizer of the general curriculum.
Its major components are time, place, participants, action, and cause.
These, and the relationships between them, are the mainstays of the
conceptual framework that structures our language, organizes our thought,
directs our action, shapes our creations, allows us to dream. Upon this
foundation can be built a vastly superior general education curriculum,
and a program for preparing teachers to teach that curriculum.
Marion Brady
Back To Top
Back To Articles
|
