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by Marion Brady NASSP Bulletin, March
1995
"A fish," according to an old saying, "would be the last to discover
water." The extremely familiar tends to lie, undisturbed, below conscious
levels of awareness.
Curriculum reform efforts illustrate the phenomenon. Most of the
reformers—administrators, teachers, lay advisory committees—are products
of the curriculum they're trying to reform. As a consequence, major
problems with present practice are rarely apparent. For many, genuine
curricular alternatives are, in every sense of the word, unthinkable.
Reform, then, tends to be superficial. Arguments rage over the treatment
of minorities in history textbooks, over creationism in science texts,
over required reading lists in literature classes. Other educators argue
more abstract issues: Should the focus of study be on student needs?
Social problems? Cultural literacy? Multiculturalism? Themes? Something
else? Through all of this, however, runs a constant—the academic
disciplines. Subject matter emphases may change. Educational objectives
may change. Teaching methods may change. School organizational structures
may change. But the disciplines go on forever. They're the bedrock of the
curriculum.
Not that the disciplines are perfect, the reformers agree. They give
students a fragmented view of reality. But the problem has a solution. All
that's needed is for schools to adopt interdisciplinary approaches to
instruction.
Wrong. Significant improvement in the curriculum isn't that easy. Another
old saying—"You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear"—suggests why.
The disciplines are useful specializations, and interesting
interdisciplinary intersections abound, but they aren't the raw materials
from which a comprehensive, coherent general education curriculum can be
fashioned. Individually and collectively the disciplines have serious,
inherent weaknesses.
Here are several problems that, no matter how interdisciplinary the
curriculum design, won't go away:
1. The disciplines, even when combined, aren't comprehensive.
Between and beyond the disciplines lie vast and important areas of
knowledge, knowledge more vital to understanding reality than most of
what's now taught. Nowhere in the traditional curriculum, for example, are
students led to think about the fundamental assumptions that structure
their actions and undergird their emotions, assumptions about matters such
as time, causation, self, others, nature, the supernatural, and the good
life. Students spend their lives in extremely complicated secondary
environments, yet never study how those environments affect their action
and thought. They're pushed and pulled by vast, complex social changes,
but they're never led to think about the dynamics of those changes.
2. The disciplines segment reality in awkward, artificial ways.
Many educators assume that the disciplines are products of a thoughtful
parceling out of responsibility for the study of various aspects of
reality. They aren't. The disciplines took shape at different times, for
different reasons, at different levels of abstraction, with
often-incompatible conceptual structures. There is a logical, natural,
extremely useful way to "slice" reality into intellectually manageable
pieces, but that way bears almost no resemblance to the organization of
the traditional curriculum.
3. The disciplines provide no comprehensive, all-inclusive conceptual
structure for organizing either "school knowledge" or ordinary experience.
There is, of course, no real distinction between school experience and
ordinary experience. Experience is experience, and each of us deals with
it using a single, vast organizing mental framework most of which we've
borrowed from our culture . New information that fits the framework sticks
with us. Information that doesn't fit is forgotten. Because the conceptual
structures of the disciplines don't mesh with the already-in-place mental
frameworks students bring to school, much (maybe most) instruction is a
waste of time.
4. The present curriculum lacks universal, overarching goals.
There's no shortage of grand statements of purpose within the educational
establishment. "Prepare students for meaningful, satisfying work"; "Create
democratic citizens"; "Solve social problems"; "Realize personal
potential"; are some of them. What's missing are connections between the
statements and what goes on in classrooms. Since the disciplines can't be
combined to form a coherent structure of knowledge, it isn't possible for
a unified statement of goals to emerge from them.
5. The disciplines don't disclose the systemic nature of reality.
It's possible to find all sorts of shared disciplinary territory upon
which worthwhile interdisciplinary lessons can be built. Unfortunately, a
comprehensive curriculum can't be fashioned from random conceptual
intersections. Reality is systemic. In a truly integrated curriculum,
everything relates to everything.
6. Discipline-based curricula provide no criteria for determining the
relative significance of various kinds of knowledge. Scholars steeped
in their disciplines tend to see reality through the windows of those
disciplines. Understandably, each is convinced that his or her perspective
is the most important one. In the absence of criteria for settling
disputes over which knowledge is of most worth, curricula tend to be
shaped by tradition or by institutional politics.
7. The present discipline-based curriculum doesn't disclose the
subjective nature of perceptions of reality. The "evidence" of
ordinary experience, reinforced by ethnocentrism and faith in science,
combine to convince us that reality is as we perceive it. That it looks
different from the perspective of different societies may gain a measure
of intellectual acceptance, but the extent to which our perceptions of
reality are subjective is little understood. The traditional disciplines
do little or nothing to help students appreciate the limitations of our
tools for "proving" our view of reality. Neither do they provide
alternative perspectives on it.
8. The present curriculum is bulky, time-consuming and inefficient.
The world grows more complex by the hour, and acquiring the necessary
specialized expertise to cope with that complexity takes ever longer. At
the same time, the need to understand the whole of experience in order to
put specialized expertise in context increases. The two are on a collision
course. A general education cobbled together from the disciplines takes
far too much time. If something isn't done, "practical" specialized
instruction will continue to push general education aside.
9. Discipline-based curricula disregard basic principles of learning.
Students in traditional classes are inundated with information. As
research expands the disciplines, textbooks become encyclopedias, 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 have a lasting impact.
10. The traditional, discipline-based curriculum puts students in
passive, information-storing rather than information-creating roles.
In occasional "hands on" instructional activities, students confront
reality in all its intellectually stimulating complexity. In most classes,
however, students merely read or listen to "expert" opinion as it emerges
from the disciplinarians via textbook and teacher, and try to remember it
long enough to pass the exam. The only thinking skill demanded is recall.
Rarely does traditional academic work require students to hypothesize,
generalize, classify, synthesize, or engage in other cognitive processes.
11. The traditional curriculum is inherently static, with few built-in
mechanisms that help it adapt to change. Education is one of the most
conservative of social institutions, and the present curriculum is one of
the major reasons why it's always behind the curve. The instructional
emphasis tends to be on specific, current, factual information as it
emerges from the disciplinarians. Not only is such information transient,
it almost always arrives in the classroom late and in a simplistic form.
The emphasis shouldn't be on passing along current knowledge, but on
developing permanent conceptual equipment for processing knowledge. Get
that right, and information retention will take care of itself.
12. Much of the traditional curriculum is irrelevant, and the
practicality of that which isn't irrelevant is rarely apparent to
students. Formal schooling serves many purposes. Unfortunately,
teaching immediately useful knowledge isn't one of them. What's presented
usually has more to do with what the discipline-taught elders know than
with knowledge that contributes in demonstrable ways to an understanding
of reality.
13. The present discipline-based curriculum is institutionalized.
Like every other human institution, education has an inherent tendency to
turn means into ends. The disciplines are now more important to most
teachers than the reality they were originally created to model.
A curriculum with any one of these 13 problems would be seriously flawed.
The traditional curriculum, from the elementary level through the
university, suffers from all of them. It fails. It has always failed. And
as long as the disciplines serve as its core, it will continue to fail.
Here's a quick primer on starting fresh:
1. Stop thinking of the traditional disciplines as the building blocks
of general education. They're academic specializations. Make them
elective.
2 . If the school is organized departmentally, create a one-course
general education department.
3. Make clear to all that the purpose of general education is to expand
understanding of reality. All reality. Explain that, despite initial
reaction, this is a reasonable assignment. The task isn't to "cover" all
of reality, but to build a comprehensive, integrated conceptual structure
for thinking about it. Allow two or three hours a day for this.
4. Start off in the right direction. Just about everything that's wrong
with the traditional curriculum stems directly or indirectly from the
awkward, artificial, arbitrary way the disciplines take reality apart to
facilitate specialized study. Offer an alternative way to segment
reality—the "supradiscipline" implicit in our ordinary, non-school
approach. This supradiscipline has five components. Dealing with reality,
we note (a) time frame, (b) setting, (c) participant actors, (d) physical
action, and (e) the states of mind that "explain" the action. When? Where?
Who? What? Why?
These five "mega-concepts," with their supporting conceptual
substructures, encompass, organize, and integrate all present knowledge.
All future knowledge will be a product of the exploration of relationships
between them. The instructional challenge is to make our implicit
supradiscipline explicit, elaborate it until it encompasses and organizes
everything known, and make it our major tool for understanding reality and
coping with life.
Marion Brady
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