"A Seamless Curriculum"

(continued . . )

PROBLEMS /OPPORTUNITIES

 Neil Postman — "There is no longer any principle that unifies the school curriculum and furnishes it with meaning."

Harlan Cleveland — "It is a well-known scandal that our whole educational system is geared more to categorizing and analyzing patches of knowledge than to threading them together."

Daniel Tanner — "Faculty and students will not derive from a list of disjointed courses a coherent curriculum revealing the necessary interdependence of knowledge."

Robert Stevens — "We have lost sight of our responsibility for synthesizing learning."

 

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 1:
A coherent education will be guided by a clear, overarching aim. A vision of what's being attempted will be shared by students, parents, teachers, administrators, and the larger society. At present, there is no agreement on the purpose of a general education.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 2:
The real world — the world we're trying to understand, and help the young understand—is systemically integrated. The curriculum we're using to model that world is not.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 3:
Knowledge is exploding, but no guidelines say which new knowledge is important, or which old knowledge to discard to make room for the new. We teach what we think is important, but the main reason we think it's important is because it's what we were taught.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 4:
Whole new disciplines are appearing, but the system isn't open to them. The familiar courses and subjects ignore vast and important areas of knowledge lying outside the traditional disciplines.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 5:
Despite massive research affirming their value, we continue to consider physical training, art, music, drama, and other activity as extra-curricular “frills” only marginally related to intellectual development.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 6:
The content of the general education curriculum is made up mostly of "expert" opinion in various fields of knowledge. Intellectually, there isn't much that students can do with such content except try to remember it. The main thinking process students are asked to use is memorizing. All other thought processes — classifying, hypothesizing, generalizing, synthesizing, valuing, and so on — are ordinarily neglected.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 7:
Trying to provide a coherent general education using a random mix of specialized studies rather than a holistic, integrated design is so inefficient it leaves little time for students to discover and develop their individual abilities and interests. We give lip service to respecting individual differences, but present curricula do not deliver.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 8:
We continue to treat students condescendingly, as passive absorbers of existing knowledge rather than as active creators of their own knowledge. When little changed from generation to generation, that was appropriate. Now, it isn't. We don't know the answers to tomorrow's questions. We don't even know what the questions are going to be.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 9:
We make a very weak case for the usefulness and relevance of what we're teaching. If students are as perceptive as we should hope they are, telling them, "You'll need to know this next year," or, "It's in the book," aren't very convincing arguments for investing time, effort, and emotion.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 10:
All students have in their heads a way of organizing knowledge imposed on them by the culture within which they've grown up. To make sense, to be remembered, and to be useful in dealing with the challenges and mysteries of life, everything taught must fit logically into this system of organization. The traditional curriculum makes no provision for "surfacing" this knowledge-organizing framework of ideas so that students can examine, evaluate, and refine it, and adapt it for their own use.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 11:
Research has given us important new insights into how the brain processes information. The implications of this research are largely ignored.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 12:
Change is inevitable and is everywhere apparent in the natural and human-made worlds. The curriculum has no built-in mechanisms forcing it to adapt to change.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 13:
The desire to learn, to ask questions, seek answers, and explore new experience, is one of the deepest of all human drives. However, instead of cultivating that intrinsic human drive, student attention is focused on extrinsic rewards — grades, certificates, diplomas, praise, the promise of future benefit.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 14:
Traditional instruction’s narrow focus on short-term memory, a consequence of which is that most adults recall little of what they once “learned,” is powerful evidence of an intolerable waste of effort, time, and money.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 15:
Dazzled by technological accomplishment and pressured by special-interest groups, the education establishment tries to direct the most capable students into narrow specializations, particularly science and mathematics. Specialized expertise not balanced by an awareness of the ethical and moral implications of the possible consequences of the exercise of that expertise is dangerous.

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 16:
Current assumptions about the meaning of “accountability” are simplistic and superficial. Standardized tests are concerned primarily with student ability to interpret and manipulate symbols — letters, words and numbers. Basing life-altering decisions on the results of such tests denies the richness and variety of humanness and limits expectations of student performance. (And, not incidentally, turns the evaluation process into a tool for political manipulation and demagoguery.)

PROBLEM/OPPORTUNITY 17:
The traditional curriculum doesn't lead students in any systematic way through ever-increasing levels of intellectual complexity.

To exploit the full potential of the opportunities these problems present, the general education curriculum must reflect the holistic, systemically integrated nature of knowledge.
 

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