by Marion Brady The Educational
Forum, Spring, 1996
(continued .
. )
A New (But Very
Old) Organizer of Knowledge
Alongside the present subjects and courses that pull reality apart into
unrelated pieces, there needs to be a course of study that recognizes
reality's wholeness, and constantly demonstrates that that wholeness is
far greater than the sum of its parts.
Such a course can be created. The raw materials are at hand—so familiar,
so commonplace, so simple, so straightforward, we've overlooked them.
It isn't possible, in a few pages, to describe what a new, multi-year
course of general study would include. But it is possible to briefly
describe the kinds of knowledge such a course of study would embrace, and
suggest its general system of organization.
When we look at the world around us and try to understand some aspect of
it, we seek just five kinds of information. We want to know the who, what,
when, where, and why of a particular experience. We make sense of whatever
it is we're trying to understand by fixing it in time and space,
identifying the participating actors or objects, describing the action,
and giving reasons for that action. In describing or analyzing anything—a
chemical reaction in a test tube, a shopping trip, a crime, the eruption
of a volcano, the performance of a symphony orchestra, a love affair, a
world war, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or anything else in
fact or in imagination—the five are sufficient.
Time. Place. Actors. Action. Cause. These are the basic elements that
organize our collective unconscious, the elements we use to construct our
perceptions of reality. All knowledge lies within their boundaries, and
the purpose of symbol systems such as mathematics, language, and art, is
to model them. Everything now taught—indeed, everything we know—can be
described by elaborating the five in various ways. Everything we'll learn
in the future will come through the discovery of presently unrecognized
relationships between them.
Think of the five as subjects to be taught, but as subjects so intimately
related that they're always studied simultaneously, with a particular
concern for the ways in which a change in one triggers changes in the
others. Think of the five also as "natural," as fitting exactly the way
the brain sorts and stores information.
No way of organizing the secondary level curriculum yet proposed comes
even close to this in intellectual richness or potential productiveness.
The approach takes in all knowledge. It points out extremely important but
presently neglected kinds of study. It pulls together everything known and
makes it part of a single, logical framework of ideas. It's compact and
efficient. It doesn't require the learning of a special jargon. Its basic
system of organization is already in place in the minds of even small
children. It allows the old, familiar fields of study to remain intact,
just puts them in a larger context.
But more important than anything else, this way of organizing what
students are taught allows them to achieve levels of understanding of
themselves and the world around them that are simply not possible using
the intellectual tools provided by the present curriculum.
Such benefits are unlikely to be immediately apparent. When Sir Isaac
Newton "discovered" gravity in 1666 (something so obvious no one had ever
noticed it), few would have guessed that the idea would revolutionize the
physical sciences. Nothing evades our attention as persistently as that
which is taken for granted. Organizing the general education curriculum
using the five kinds of information considered basic by our culture will
have the same long-term, revolutionary consequences.
A Course of Action
The standard QWERTY computer keyboard layout was developed in 1873 by an
engineer named Christopher Sholes. Early typewriters had a tendency to
jam, so Sholes solved the problem not by making mechanical improvements in
the typewriter, but by deliberately arranging the keys so awkwardly that
typists were forced to slow down. The Remington Sewing Machine Company
then decided to use the QWERTY layout on a typewriter they were mass
producing, and thousands of typists learned to use it. Now, change is out
of the question. The status quo is locked in, and every one who uses a
keyboard has to live with its awkwardness, taking longer to learn to type,
typing more slowly, and making more mistakes than would be the case if an
alternative design had been adopted.
An equally idiosyncratic, haphazard process gave us the present
bits-and-pieces school curriculum, and it's now locked in as rigidly as
the QWERTY keyboard. Just about every secondary level school in the
country above the elementary level has a curriculum that's based on
separate, isolated subjects or ideas. For many educators, any other
approach is literally unthinkable. But an alternative approach has to
start being "thinkable." We can survive an awkward computer keyboard, but
we can't survive a curriculum that wastes student potential at the rate
the present curriculum wastes it. Most of the courses now offered in
school should continue to be taught, but they should be put in a holistic
context.
Any major attempt to alter the traditional disciplinary content and the
departmental organization which has a vested interest in that content will
almost certainly fail. The course of action most likely to succeed simply
walks around the existing bureaucratic rigidities. Secondary schools
should establish autonomous general education departments. The single
objective of these departments should be to help students tap into their
society's natural way of organizing knowledge, bring it to the surface,
and use it to weld everything they learn in school and in life into a
single framework of logically related ideas.
Helping students grasp the holistic, systemic nature of the world around
them should be the central aim of every school. When the existing
curriculum has built into it a bias against such a perception, as it does
in magnet and other schools with high-profile, specialized programs, the
need for a curriculum component that gives students a larger perspective
and reminds them that they are more than mere means to some economic,
political, or social end, is especially important.
Evidence of educational crisis is everywhere. Concern for the welfare of
children is not presently a driving political force. Special interests
pursue narrow agendas without regard for the impact of those agendas on
the young. Commercial and business interest in education is often biased
and self-serving. Political parties push simplistic reforms calculated to
attract voters. Blind commitment to ideology shuts off debate about
educational policy prematurely and makes compromise impossible. The gap
between the rich and the poor continues to widen, with the haves often
assuming that the have nots are to blame for the situation in which they
find themselves and therefore undeserving of special educational effort.
And each level of government tries to shift as much responsibility for the
status quo as possible elsewhere.
Traditional secondary level education isn't just irrelevant to much of
present human experience, it's an active creator of the problems. Because
it displays reality to students in isolated bits and pieces, it denies the
essential oneness of all things. What students don't learn—what they can't
learn from the present curriculum—is that everything is connected to
everything. No course of study helps them grasp firmly what we know
intuitively but dimly, that when we attack or exploit each other, or the
environment, or any part of creation, we are attacking ourselves as surely
as would be the case if we held an axe in one hand and used it to chop off
our other hand.
The young deserve a truly basic education, an education that acquaints
them with the essential oneness of all reality. Every middle and high
school in America should have a comprehensive, integrating course of study
in place alongside the specialized disciplines. At best, today's
fragmented education helps students make a living. Only an education that
teaches the connectedness of all things will help them make sense out of
life.
Marion Brady
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