TWO OF TEN

The Second of Ten Arguments for the Elimination of School

CURRICULUM

NOW WHAT?
Now that we have the kids in school, duly segregated by age into grades and classrooms, we’d better figure out what we expect them to do. Enter the Curriculum.

The curriculum determines what outcomes are expected as a result of a youngster having spent nine or so months per year in his pre-determined grade and up to thirteen years in the school system. A tremendous amount of work and verbiage has been spent creating the curriculum for the public schools in British Columbia. (I’m sure the same applies elsewhere.) To get the idea, just glance at the Ministry of Education’s website http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/irp/gc.php You’ll be delighted to see hundreds of pages of mind-numbing “Prescribed learning outcomes,” with so-called outcomes divided into countless steps and subdivisions.

If you’re wondering who does all this work and who puts the stamp of approval on it, the answer may be found in the Q & A section on the website noted above.

“The provincial curriculum is designed to prepare students for life after secondary school, with a holistic approach that goes beyond marks and includes human, career and social development. Research and public consultation form an integral part of the ministry’s ongoing process for revising existing or developing new curricula. The process includes consultation with educators and subject-area experts, as well as opportunities for public review and feedback.”

Considering school’s obsession with testing and grading, the phrase “a holistic approach that goes beyond marks” is simply laughable. (More about marks and grades in the next argument.) Rest assured that, even though the process allows for “opportunities for public review and feedback,” the real “process includes consultation with educators and subject area experts.” Thank goodness this is not left in the hands of a bunch of ill-prepared parents or even kids who might just come to school with interests and expectations of their own.

A couple of examples:

In “English Language Arts—Grade One: Purposes (Thinking and Reading) Students who have fully met the Prescribed Learning Outcome are able to:
Create a representation (e.g., draw a picture, dramatize a section)
Identify connections between a picture and text (e.g., “What does the picture tell us about the story?” “What do the words tell us about the picture?”)
Tell how story events or characters are the same or different from their own experiences (text-to-self)
Make text-to-text connections by comparing two versions of the same text and expressing a preference

To quote just a few “outcomes.”–
By the time the student has completed Grade Five, he or she will now:
Discuss their favourite texts and why they are personally meaningful
Compare their responses to texts with the responses of others
Identify powerful passages from texts and describe why they are personally meaningful
Respond to text by drawing or writing, making personal connections (text-to-self), connections to other texts (text-to-text), and connections to related events (text-to-world)

It’s hard to believe, but there are hundreds of pages of this kind of stuff.

WHY NOT HAVE A DETAILED CURRICULUM?

Well, why not? What’s wrong with laying out all this detail, step by step, prescribing what the results of classroom learning should be? Of course, the answer is right there in the question. Does learning ever take place in an organized step-by-step manner? Just think of how you learned something; say, baking a cake, or riding a bicycle, or playing street hockey.

Wait! I hear you say, don’t things like cake-making involve a step by step process? Yes, there are steps: beating eggs, mixing dry and wet ingredients separately, etc. All the time, however, the end product is in sight, and you will carry out the whole process from breaking the first egg to taking the finished cake out of the oven with that end in mind. Cake-making, like most accomplishments, is not a simple matter of following directions, and there is no such thing as starting with an easy cake and working your way up. The only way is to dive in and do it, and there will be a lot of trial and error. However, the entire operation, even to a novice, makes sense from beginning to end. It’s perfectly clear how each part works to create the whole.

You’d probably have more fun and even learn faster if you had an experienced cake-maker—a person that you liked and identified with—to work with you along the way. You could watch them (the way I used to watch my mother make cakes and pies—she was a whiz at it!) and learn some of the details of the operation. This would be a good start to developing skill of your own. You could also get a cookbook and tackle the task with someone like Irma Rombauer or Betty Crocker at your side in spirit. With some practice, you could become a pro at baking cakes. You would only do this, however, if you really wanted to and if you really enjoyed the process. The surest way to kill any possible pleasure you might have in such an endeavour would to have it be a task imposed by someone else, an expert perhaps, who believed that it would be good for you to learn how to bake a cake.

If you decide at the outset that baking a cake is too messy and too much bother, you will simply go out and buy one. Using a cake mix is, in the eye of a true cook, like cheating. But, what the heck, go ahead, there are no rules about this except for the ones you make up by yourself. Cake-making, like riding a bicycle and playing street hockey, is not on the curriculum. Thank the powers that be that the experts have not turned their attention to such pleasant activities. You can choose to do any of these things if you have friends who do them and if they appeal to you. Whereas, in school, you do not have a choice about what you are expected to learn, you do not make up any rules for yourself, and the one-by-one tasks do not, by themselves, make sense. It’s absurd to assume that “create a representation (e.g., draw a picture, dramatize a section),” will somehow eventually “prepare students for life after secondary school.”

Real learning tends to be messy, haphazard, and involving of pals, mentors, guides, or other people that you enjoy being with. Those people might even be the writers of things like cookbooks or travel guides. Maybe you’ll learn to love reading because your dad loved books and your mother read to you when you were growing up; maybe you’ll learn about electricity, as I did, by tinkering with doorbells and batteries; maybe you’ll love music because your grandfather had and played a collection of opera records; maybe you’ll learn about photography because your brother had a camera and a darkroom; maybe you’ll learn about foreign languages because your friends speak Italian or Mandarin at home. There is no curriculum for genuine learning.

CONCENTRATE!

One of the chief notions of school is that kids should always pay attention and try hard. The only reason that there is such a thing as school discipline, with its bells, grades, tests, and class divisions, is that the curriculum does not make sense to the kids, only, presumably, to the experts who created it. Therefore, it requires enforcement to keep it going. It’s impossible to explain to a child how those “learning outcomes” will ever add up to a successful life. Constant efforts and, yes, threats (fail at school, fail at life), must be directed at students to engage them or get them to pay attention to the teacher. I remember a senior teacher who regularly exhorted her classes to “Concentrate!” On the other hand, have you ever seen anything more concentrated than children at play? No exhortation and no curriculum required.

Oh, you say, I remember a teacher who made everything so interesting that I loved her/his classes. Yes, there is the very rare teacher who is inspired with an infectious love of learning accompanied by an unconditional love of children. You can be sure that this teacher is more involved in the interests and pleasures of students than in the learning outcomes predetermined by experts.

PUBLIC SCHOOL AND THE PRUSSIAN ARMY

Most people either do not about it or would rather not think that our public school system is based military innovations devised by Friedrich Wilhelm I, King of Prussia from 1713 to 1740. He introduced the notion that an army should be a fighting machine, made up of battalions of identical soldiers trained to execute a precise series of actions in unison. The men were drilled relentlessly within a harsh disciplinary regime. An important part of the innovation was that each movement or manoeuvre was broken down into small incremental steps, each to be mastered in sequence. For example, in order to load and fire a single round, soldiers were trained to perform twenty-two separate actions in rigid sequence. Uniforms were identical, and hair and beards were worn and trimmed to strict regulations. The result, of course, was that the Prussian army became a powerful and fearsome fighting machine. In other words, the success of the Prussian military was based upon a one-size-fits-all, do-as-you-are-told, do-not-question-authority, and drill, drill, drill.

Not surprising, I suppose, was that this idea of rigorous and uniform practice was extended to the Prussian education system. It was seen that a highly disciplined universal and compulsory schooling could produce a docile and unquestioning population. Attendance at school was made compulsory, and a detailed system of step-by-step learning was to be universally and rigidly followed. Then, in the early 19th Century American educators and politicians became fascinated with the Prussian system. Many of them visited Germany to see how it worked. They saw an opportunity to transform the ragtag one-room schools that served a mostly rural populace into an organized system that would produce a unified and predictable product: a manageable and well-trained public. After his visit to Germany in the 1840s, Horace Mann returned to America inspired by the Prussian system, which he immediately sought to introduce into the state of Massachusetts. Thus, by 1852, attendance at school was made compulsory, a state-wide curriculum was created, pupils were segregated into grades, and teachers were trained and certified in approved methods.

The school system that Horace Mann and his many Prussian-admiring cohorts established in the 1850s is not much different from that of today. No doubt discipline is less harsh and a bit of nonconformity is tolerated here and there, but the basics of the Prussian system are in effect. Children are compelled by law to attend school starting at a given age; certain standards of behaviour are demanded; they will be taught by someone who is certified by the state as qualified to teach; and they will progress through the proscribed curriculum in an orderly step-by-step fashion until deemed ready to be set free into the world of work. Throughout this process, they will be assessed and judged by relentless standardized testing. They are trained, as it were, “to perform twenty-two separate actions in rigid sequence” just like the Prussian soldiers.

The solidification of a rigidly systemized schooling continued into the 19th century, and in 1918 Alexander Inglis published his highly influential Principles of Secondary Education. Reading through this book (it’s available on line) is like reading a design for an assembly line factory. In fact, it was about the same time that the Prussian system of dividing all processes into small parts and treating people and animals like machines was spreading to the means of production and agriculture. Indeed, Inlgis lays it all out in minute and precise detail, speaking of educating the young in the same way that one would speak of assembly-line manufacture of automobiles or sewing machines. The basic assumption is to put each child through a minutely designed and universally applied process, and, voilà, identical citizens will come out at the other end. With this in mind, you will not be surprised to read: Our schools are… factories in which the raw products are to be shaped and fashioned… And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down. (Ellwood P. Cubberley in the 1922 edition of Public Education in the United States)

Forgetting that children are not machines to be processed on assembly lines, schools still, by and large, operate on these 18th and 19th Century theories and assumptions. They are as influential as ever in today’s public schools: attendance is compulsory, teachers are trained not educated, pupils are segregated into grades, a curriculum determined by experts is applied throughout, and the process is regularly assessed by tests and examinations. I remind the reader that schools in Canada are modelled closely on those of the United States, not of England or other European systems.

In 1924, H. L. Mencken wrote: The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever pretensions of politicians, pedagogues other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.

His words are as true today as they were in 1924. If you doubt that, just look around.

Advertisement