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by Marion Brady The Educational
Forum, Spring, 1996
At
my nearest supermarket, the milk is in the far right corner from the
entrance. Bread is in the near left corner. To buy these two
most-frequently purchased items, I have to walk the depth and breadth of
the store.
This arrangement, of course, is intentional. The store isn't in business
to serve my needs conveniently. It's in business to make money, and the
management's assumption is that the longer I stay, and the more
merchandise I see and smell and have the opportunity to touch, the more
money I'll spend. The traffic pattern, the width of the aisles, the
placement of goods on the shelves, the colors, the music, the special
displays, the small items at the checkout counter—everything about the
environment has been engineered in an attempt to separate me from the
maximum amount of my money.
What's true in my local supermarket—that the environment has been
deliberately designed to manipulate—is true in most supermarkets,
department stores, restaurants, and other retail outlets. And, although
the motive may not be to sell goods, the design of most public spaces
similarly attempts to cause those within them to act or think in certain
ways.
That how we act and think relates to the shape of the environment is
everywhere evident. We arrange the furniture in our homes to make it easy
to watch television, to stimulate conversation, or to achieve privacy.
Students learn in school that the failure of the ancient Greek city-states
to unite was in part because of the mountainous terrain, and that the
historic confrontational relationship between France and Germany has been
much affected by the lack of a defensible natural boundary between them.
However, like much else that we know, our understanding of the
relationship between human behavior and the shape of the environment is
rather vague and ill-formed. When the relationship is pointed out to us,
we say, "Of course." But then we build split-plan houses without giving
thought to their possible psychological impact on our children when
they're small, and we arrange our offices in ways that send negative
messages to those we want to impress positively. We exit department store
escalators to confront high-markup goods without consciously steeling
ourselves to resist impulse buying. We mourn the loss of neighborliness,
but design subdivisions that discourage all but the most determined
neighborly contact.
The Cost of Irrelevant
Education
One might think that a matter affecting, minute by minute, every dimension
of life—interpersonal relationships, commercial transactions, a sense of
community, regional economies, ethnic and international relations, and
much else—would merit a place in secondary curricula. Apparently, it
doesn't. Nowhere in the traditional middle or high school curriculum is
there formal study of the relationship between the shape of environments
and the actions and ideas of those who occupy those environments.
There are countless matters we need to know about to live life sensibly
and successfully that are ignored by the traditional secondary school
curriculum. And, as anyone who has gone to school surely knows, much
that's taught has no value at all. The hours available for formal
schooling are limited. It's critically important that we sort through
what's taught, decide what's mere ritual knowledge, and replace it with
something that helps us solve our problems and exploit our potential.
Why We Take What's
Taught For Granted
The popular press regularly explores just about every aspect of education.
Discipline strategies, the length of school terms, alternative scheduling,
the kinds and amounts of teacher training, appropriate levels of funding,
programs for special students, standardized testing, the role of
extracurricular activities, grading and evaluation techniques, the role of
technology, parental involvement—all are discussed in magazine articles
and newspaper feature stories.
Perhaps surprisingly, however, there's relatively little about the actual
content of the curriculum. Other than some politicized complaining about
two or three non-traditional programs, certain works of fiction, and the
so-called "national standards" for American history, this most important
aspect of schooling is largely ignored.
We teach what we think is important. But our assumptions about what's
important are based on what we were taught. It's a closed loop, and no one
has been pointing out its circularity. What gets taught, with minor
variations, is what was taught last year. What was taught last year was
what was taught the year before. The decades roll on, without even a
suggestion that perhaps the whole matter needs to be rethought. The
traditional fields of study—biology, government, chemistry, history, and
so on—have been locked in place for so long, and are so taken for granted,
alternatives can hardly be imagined.
But alternatives need to be imagined. There are serious problems with the
content and organization of the traditional secondary level curriculum.
Consider, for example, the inability of the present curriculum to deal
with even very ordinary cause-effect sequences: Automobiles generate
exhaust emissions, exhaust emissions contribute to the greenhouse effect,
the greenhouse effect alters climates, climates determine rainfall and
growing seasons, rainfall and growing seasons effect water tables and sea
levels, water tables and sea levels effect the economy, the economy
effects political stability, and political stability effects who lives and
who dies.
To study that sequence of fairly straightforward cause-effect
relationships, it's necessary to combine, at the very least, the subjects
of math, geology, chemistry, physics, meteorology, agriculture, economics
and political science. In traditional schooling, this combining of fields
of study just isn't done. Students are given a little of this subject and
a little of that, but are never shown how it all fits together. In the
real world, everything relates to everything. In school, almost nothing
relates to anything, except perhaps occasionally and incidentally. Even
when we recognize the problem and deliberately attempt to deal with it,
the relationships we point out to students tend to be random and
superficial.
What's Being Done?
The general lack of dialogue about the secondary curriculum
notwithstanding, many educators accept that there are serious problems
with what's being taught. Most school systems have committees working on
curriculum improvement. Thus far, however, it seems fair to say that
nothing much of consequence is happening. Some schools are experimenting
with interdisciplinary instruction—mixing and matching the old subjects in
new ways. Others advocate organizing instruction around social problems,
or student needs, or the recommendations of Mortimer Adler. In the late
'80s, after the publication of C. H. Hirsch, Jr.'s list of "5,000 things
that everyone ought to know," a few schools around the country adopted a
curriculum based on his book, Cultural Literacy. Still other schools
ignore the issue as they concentrate reform efforts on acquiring high-tech
information delivery systems, altering organizational structures, adopting
novel schedules, pushing magnet programs, or engaging in other experiments
that shuffle the traditional courses and subjects but leave their content
pretty much intact.
The current curricular fad in education is "theme-based instruction."
Teachers organize instruction around the rainforest, crime, a local lake
or river, or something else hyped by the media or of possible interest to
students. Because, to study the theme, it's necessary to pull information
from many fields, it's believed that the problem of fragmented learning is
solved. Often these fields aren't mentioned by name, but they're still
there in the teacher's mind, artificially compartmentalizing thinking. The
topic may be the rainforest, but it's the rainforest viewed from a
biological perspective, an economics perspective, a political science
perspective, a meteorological perspective, a sociological perspective.
Underneath all the "new" approaches is the assumption that, whatever
aspect of the world is being studied, the best way to understand it,
finally, is to look at it through the eyes of the traditional disciplines.
Problems With the Status Quo
Educational fads come and go, but the familiar fragmented fields of study
remain the backbone of the secondary level instruction. As long as that's
the case, the curriculum will continue to be fundamentally flawed.
Nostalgic recollections of older generations notwithstanding
(recollections that drive periodic demands that schools "get back to the
basics"), the curriculum wasn't any better 25, 50, or 75 years ago than it
is today. It was poor back when many remember it as being good, it's poor
now, and it will continue to be poor as long as it's made up of random,
unrelated, specialized studies. Here are some (but by no means all) of the
problems with the status quo:
A curriculum based on the traditional fields of study ignores extremely
important knowledge. What falls between the cracks, and therefore isn't
taught, equals or exceeds in importance what's taught.
School subjects "slice" the world around us, the world we're trying to
understand, in awkward, artificial ways. Many educators assume that the
various fields of study began life as products of a thoughtful parceling
out of responsibility for the study of various parts of reality. That's
not true
Secondary level students arrive at school with an incredibly complex,
integrated network of ideas about how the world is organized and how it
usually works. To make useful sense and be remembered, new knowledge must
either mesh with this network, or the network must be changed to
accommodate the new knowledge. The fragmented nature of the traditional
curriculum makes such meshing impossible.
Schooling based on the familiar fields of study has no universal,
overarching goal. Within the educational establishment there's no shortage
of grand statements of purpose ("Prepare students for meaningful,
satisfying work," "Create democratic citizens," "Solve social problems,"
"Realize personal potential," etc.), but such statements have little or
nothing to do with what's actually taught. Lacking a clear goal, educators
can't track progress. The vacuum is filled primarily with standardized
examinations of the student's ability to remember mundane, transient,
largely insignificant information.
A secondary level curriculum based on a random mix of school subjects is
bulky, time-consuming, and inefficient. Certainly, because the world grows
more complicated by the hour, specialized knowledge is essential. At the
same time, however, the need to understand the whole of experience in
order to put narrow aspects of it in perspective increases. Right now,
specialized and general study are on a collision course. If something
isn't done, "practical" education with its promise of short-term payoffs
will push aside general education, with its subtle, but in the long run
more important, benefits. We'll know what to do, but not why we should do
it.
A secondary level curriculum made up of separate subjects disregards basic
principles of learning. Students are flooded with information presented at
a rate and in a form that assures little of it will make useful sense, and
even less of it will be remembered. Generally, the goal is to "cover the
material," a goal that has little or nothing to do with effective
instruction. What students need are big, powerful ideas that help them
organize what they already know, and guide their search for new knowledge
A curriculum based on the traditional subjects puts students in passive,
information-storing, rather than information-creating, roles. As a study
of typical final examinations will show, the only thinking skill demanded
in most classes is recall. Rarely are students required to hypothesize,
generalize, classify, synthesize, or engage in other thought processes
they need in order to survive in the real world. Those mental skills, if
they're learned at all, have to be picked up on the street.
Much of what's now taught is irrelevant. Formal schooling serves many
purposes. Unfortunately, teaching knowledge of immediate usefulness (the
only kind that gets remembered long enough to be worth the trouble) isn't
one of them. "Better learn this, " the teacher says, "because you'll need
it sometime." If "sometime" ever comes, it's usually in another school
course equally irrelevant to life as it's lived.
Like every other human institution, education has an inherent tendency to
turn means into ends. For many educators, teaching his or her subject has
become more important than teaching about that part of the real world the
subject is supposed to help the student understand.
That these problems add up to failure on a massive scale should be
obvious. No wonder that for so many, education is dead. Students come to
school propelled by one of the deepest of human drives—the desire to
explore, to learn, to know. But along about third or fourth grade—about
the time the traditional subject matter boundaries kick in—they discover
that understanding the world around them isn't what schooling is all
about. From then on they have to be pushed and pulled along with threats
and promises. That rigid discipline policies, mandatory attendance laws,
and external motivators such as grading systems are necessary to keep the
system going is strong evidence of fundamental flaws in present practice.
Any one of the dozen or so problems noted above would be reason enough to
send students home from school until a solution is found. At the very
least, solving the problems should be the most important item on the
educational establishment's agenda. If H. G. Wells was right when he said,
"Human history becomes, more and more, a race between education and
catastrophe," solving the problems should be the most important item not
only on the secondary schools' agenda, but on America's agenda.
At the heart of the problem with the status quo is the assumption that
today's courses and subjects can provide both a specialized and a general
education. They can't.
Continued > > >
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