What Should the Content of Curriculum Be?

After reading The Child and the Curriculum by John Dewey, E.D. Hirsch’s work entitled Cultural Literacy and the Schools, and Sara Corbett’s Learning by Playing:  Video Games in the Classroom, I have concluded that the answer to “What Should the Content of Curriculum Be?” is not simple, unattainable, or hopeless.  Instead the answer is complicated, debatable, and uniquely diverse.  Yet, easily stated in my own personal opinion, the content of the curriculum should be based on the notion of child development and balance.

During my time not only considering curriculum content within my own thoughts and opinions, but also discussing content of curriculum with colleagues, one statement seemed to continuously reappear in the conversations.  In The Child and the Curriculum, John Dewey wrote, “To learn the lesson is more interesting than to take a scolding, be held up to general ridicule, stay after school, receive degradingly low marks, or fail to be promoted.”  What does this say about this educational torture, in which we call curriculum that we are inflicting on our students?  I know that referring to curriculum as torture may be a bit harsh, but when I think about the absences of children’s voices, child development, and balance regarding curriculum, I am almost sickened.  Why do large educational corporations, such as Pearson, and educational policy makers get to decide the curriculum that we teach to our students? Where are the students’ voices?  Do teachers even have a say about the curriculum that needs to be taught the children that they instruct for seven hours a day, five days a week? 

Currently, in the state of Arizona, the 3^rd, 4^th, and 5^th, and 6^th graders are “preparing” for the state’s standardize assessment, AIMS.  This means that the 3^rd, 4^th, 5^th, and 6^th grade teachers are using their teacher manuals, based on state standards of course, to “teach” our students.  This is serious stuff.  Standardized tests are important - but at whose expense?  Students are joining after school clubs to further assist them with academic support only to go home to parents that continue this inappropriateness by having their children complete worksheet after worksheet of released AIMS questions.  I agree with John Dewey – we have taught our students that learning a “lesson is more interesting than to take a scolding, be held up to general ridicule, stay after school, receive degradingly low marks, or fail to be promoted.”  This is not curriculum. It is not even interesting.  John Dewey believes in “the case of the child.”  Does our educational system?  Here is my answer, simply stated: nope!  According to E.D. Hirsch, “We have too readily blamed short-comings in American education on social changes (the disorientation of the American family or the impact of television) or incompetent teachers or structural flaws in our school systems.  But the chief blame should fall on faulty theories promulgated in our schools of education and accepted by educational policymakers,” usually the ones that have never stepped foot into the classroom. 

To be honest, I am full of personal opinions, thoughts, complaints, recommendations, and some more complaints regarding our educational system, specifically the content of the curriculum that we implement in our classrooms.  However, I am the first to admit that I do not have a solution to the educational flaws within our schools.   Even though I don’t have a solution, I am not discouraged by this frustration.  Instead, I continue to educate myself, in hopes that one day, I will make a difference.  That is the reason that I became a teacher in the first place!  While reading the articles Cultural Literacy and the Schools and Learning by Playing:  Video Games in the Classroom, I am beginning to believe that the content of curriculum should be developmentally appropriate for our ever-changing students while providing a sense of balance between educational learning experiences related to everyday life and “traditional” content.  E.D. Hirsch states, “One can think of the school curriculum as consisting of two complementary parts, which might be called the extensive curriculum and the intensive curriculum.”  Is this the beginning steps to free our students from educational torture?  He continues with writing, “The conception of a two-part curriculum avoids the idea that all children should study identical materials.”  Why should our extremely diverse students all receive an identical curriculum?  We all know that students are individuals that come to into our classrooms with diverse life experiences, socio-economic statues, prior knowledge, learning styles, etc. yet they all receive an identical curriculum.  Sara Corbett wrote, “What if teachers gave up the vestiges of educational past, threw away the worksheets, burned the canon and reconfigured the foundation upon which a century of learning has been built?”  What if the content of curriculum was developmentally appropriate for our ever-changing students while providing a sense of balance between educational learning experiences related to everyday life and “traditional” content? Albert Einstein defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  When is the insanity in education going to end?