At Odds with the Natural Desire to Learn: the Standard ‘Core’ Curriculum—adapted from the work of Marion Brady
Updating and remodeling a 19th-century curriculum approach that is constraining and problematic by virtue of how it rigidly shapes and defines school organization is by far the most important beginning step in improving our schools. In particular, we need to address the fragmentation of learning caused by an assembly-line allotment of time and a piecemeal approach to subject matter. The standard “core” curriculum breaks knowledge apart, ignoring its systemic, mutually supportive nature.
There will be no significant improvement in learner and school academic performance until learner experience, systems theory, and authentic thinking replace school subjects and disciplines as the primary organizer of information and general knowledge.
Long before our present attention to “standards” and “competencies”, or a “Common Core,” the centuries old, traditional “core” of courses offered in almost every school—language arts, math, science, social studies—along with the time allotment and teaching methods- have been dramatically limiting education. Here are some of the ways in which this continues to happen.
1. The standard “core” curriculum breaks knowledge apart, ignoring its systemic, mutually supportive nature. Understanding any major problem or issue—crime, urban gangs, discrimination, energy sourcing and distribution, environmental concerns, taxation, public services, international conflict, waste disposal, poverty, infrastructure, abuse of power, resource depletion, land development, corruption, etc.—requires an understanding of links between human behavior, economics, statistics, societal norms, technology, biology, demographics, public media, historical change, and often much more. Classes sometimes focus on issues, but usually in superficial ways featuring arguments of people for and against whatever is being discussed. Nowhere does the curriculum deal with relationships between such things as attitudes toward the future and investment, links between shared insecurity and growth of religious feeling, or dysfunctions caused by faulty assumptions (e.g. “Merit pay improves performance”). To understand complex reality, students need to understand its underlying systems, the interrelationships that create and determine those systems – physical, environmental, social, economic, political, etc.- and the meta relationships between and among them. Solving any problem requires an in-depth understanding of the significant systems that are linked to that problem. This may sound far more difficult than it is in reality. Even younger, “elementary” students who are given simple concepts for “system analysis” can use those concepts in creative ways to develop their understanding of themselves, of each other and of the world around them.
“The result of teaching small parts of a large number of subjects is the passive reception of disconnected ideas, not illumined with any spark of vitality. A child should make important ideas in the worlds his or her own, and should understand their application here and now in the circumstances of their actual life. From the very beginning of schooling, the child should experience the joy of discovery. The discovery which he/she has to make, is that general ideas give an understanding of that stream of events which pours through into life, which is life.”
—Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education”
2. The standard “core” curriculum is keyed not to learner aptitudes, abilities, and interests, but instead to age-alike cohorts. Virtually every course taught in today’s schools assumes that students in each class should proceed in lockstep, and that all are capable and interested in learning at the same rate. This is, of course, at odds with reality in two ways. First, the role of curiosity, even with students who wish to succeed or please, is powerful, and a learner’s lack of interest, ability to make choices or sense urgency, will seldom sustain their interest. Second, learners vary hugely, and even within a class of students supposedly selected for ability, students will differ a great deal in their grasp of ideas. One fundamental principle is routinely ignored: until and unless a learner has a grasp of whatever idea or concept is the present focus of instruction, there’s no point in moving on to the next idea or concept. Ideally, education wouldn’t ignore the individual differences between learners, but would instead build on them, moving each toward her or his maximum potential. This, of course, requires a dramatic rethinking of many of the ways schools remain traditionally organized.
3. The standard “core” curriculum ignores vast and important fields of knowledge. Missing, for example, are studies of principles of group dynamics (essential knowledge for the workplace), principles of graphic communication, historical forces such as group responses to loss of autonomy, polarization that leads to conflict, the close relationship between economic diversity and stability, ways to analyze effects of technological development on human behavior, ways of dealing with problems in interpersonal relationships, the effects of emotion in selective perception, and much more that lies between and beyond the traditional disciplines.
4. The standard “core” curriculum emphasizes secondhand rather than firsthand knowledge. Acquiring understanding first hand means acquiring it from reality (or by analyzing direct evidence such as primary sources). This allows the exercise of cognitive skills far beyond those needed for passive, textbook-based learning, and actively involves the learner in the learning process. Active involvement in investigation and problem solving increases the learner’s pleasure in learning (Bronowski), and ensures that what is learned will be understood in more depth and retained permanently.
5. The standard “core” curriculum vastly overworks short-term memory. Digital textbooks, instructional manuals, model units, etc., virtually all sources of teacher lessons focus on conveying a large body of information to the reader, then tests retention of that information. Recall and limited low-level application are the only significant mental operations expected. Some students excel at the kind of short-term memorizing this standard approach requires, but most don’t. And as we know there’s virtually no correlation between that memorizing ability and later success in life.
6. The standard “core” curriculum treats brain-building play, the range of arts, music, design, animation, dance, games and gaming, and so on, as “frills.” There’s a growing body of evidence from brain studies that indicates that the arts and design, patterned movement, music, and similar activities contribute in a major way to growth and successful development of learners, while improving academic performance.
“We turn to a building body of neuroscientific research on the brain’s so-called default mode network (DMN). This network is thought to be important for narrative construction (i.e., for thinking about the self and others across time and in relation to values and ideas). Because this network’s functioning is dampened during task- and action-oriented thinking, it is possible that overly and consistently focusing students on tasks requiring immediate action and task orientation could undermine the long-term cultivation of giftedness. There is a fundamental tension between the expression of creativity, which requires breaking consensus to push forth new ideas, and organizational culture (school-based), which values individuals who conform to the group. We argue for a need to shift the school culture to accommodate creative expression, and for more time spent on skills supported by the DMN to allow students’ creative giftedness to shine through. “
—Gotlieb, Hyde, Immordino-Yang, Kaufman, ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
7. The standard “core” curriculum is implemented in ways that ignore research on retention in grade, class size, length of school day, homework, need for a sense of autonomy, and other important issues. For years now, non-educators—philanthropists, legislators, and state governors—have been allowed to make decisions based on vastly oversimplified ideas about education. They’ve been ignoring powerful evidence that suggests that those ideas (and the policies that they engender) are, at minimum, ineffective, and often harmful. Naïve assumptions about learner and teacher motivation, the value of market forces, the efficacy of computers, and the causes of failure, for example, have been tested and found to be wrong, but wrong-headed policies remain in place.
8. The standard “core” curriculum has no criteria establishing what new knowledge to teach, or what old knowledge to discard to make room for the new. The amount of information is expanding geometrically, becoming simply more overwhelming each day. Textbooks, be they hard copy or digital, are out of control, overloading students with more and more information. Without mental tools for sorting and organizing what they’re learning, and practice doing that, students are certain to forget most of the vast number of “facts” to which they’re exposed. There’s a bigger underlying problem here that we talk about but have never come to grips with: the erroneous assumption that education is about absorbing information; a giant, expensive game of Trivial Pursuit. Education should focus clearly on the development of skills for information gathering, mental processing, communicating, and problem solving. Further, education should develop learners’ understanding of the kinds of relationships and meta-relationships that characterize all of reality, i.e. an understanding of systems.
9. The standard “core” curriculum has no built-in mechanisms that allow or force it to adapt to change forces –social, political, environmental, etc . Education today is almost entirely information based (textbooks, standards, etc.), with a host of negative consequences. The information in textbooks and the high-stakes tests that follow is largely dictated by the expectations of those doing the selecting, and this is a powerful force keeping innovation to a minimum. What the selectors expect to see is what they’re used to seeing. Unfortunately, there’s no way to anticipate much of the knowledge that learners will require as adults, but it is certain to differ a great deal from the contents of those textbooks, which already don’t fit learner’s needs.
10. The standard “core” curriculum is silent on complex ethical and moral questions. Most ethical issues are related to values and assumptions that come into conflict. These may differ from person to person, group to group. Despite their importance, study of values and assumptions are not a significant part of the traditional curriculum. For example, if those in power assume “those living in poverty just lack incentive to improve their condition” their society will tend to perpetuate social stratification. By reasonable standards, rigid social stratification is an ethical issue. Understanding ethical and moral issues also requires a grasp of the complex consequences of personal and group actions. Some of these subjects may be “covered” in school, but understanding their interlocking relationships are certainly not a focus of present-day curriculum, and those relationships are at the core of ethical problems.
11. The standard “core” curriculum isolates educators in “fields,” making dialog about their shared task difficult. Reality is seamless, and breaking it up into disciplines creates unnecessary barriers. For example, language arts may have the goal of helping the young send and receive information effectively via words, but communication that is isolated from the world of humans and their surroundings (the focus of other disciplines) is an empty exercise. Why not combine courses and disciplines, so the young read, write, observe, illustrate, and in general develop a wide range of communication skills while simultaneously applying these skills to subjects such as science, social studies, and history? This would bring educators from different fields into the same room, working with the same group of learners, and everyone would benefit.
12. The standard “core” curriculum gives thought processes other than recall short shrift, or no attention at all. Our learners should be inferring, generalizing, hypothesizing, analyzing, finding analogies, making inductive and deductive leaps, valuing—using many complex forms of thinking that are vitally important in real-world problem solving, but are nearly impossible to evaluate “objectively.” However, because prevailing pedagogies and machine-scored tests predominate, and these only evaluate memory and low-level application of information, more complex thinking skills are ignored. This is an old problem, but one that isn’t going away, despite “Common Core” lip service to critical thinking. One major reason these practices persist is our reliance on our memory-and-information approach. Textbooks, digital or otherwise, and lessons overwhelmingly contain pre-processed information—conclusions formed or adopted from elsewhere by the author. All the complex thinking was done before the textbook was written, leaving nothing for the kids to do but remember conclusions they read in the book, and perhaps apply that information in some simple, standardized way.
13. The standard “core” curriculum is so inefficient it leaves little or no time for apprenticeships, internships, co-op programs, projects, and so on. The reasons for inefficiency—passive learning, too much random information, failure to engage students—are described elsewhere in this list of problems. The time used in schooling is way out of proportion to the amount learned. Increasing this time—one of today’s “increase the rigor” trends—doesn’t improve the amount students learn significantly. Learning is far deeper and more effective when the learner participates actively in the learning process, rather than passively reading and listening. Opportunities for active learning are disappearing from our schools and lives; even laboratories and workshops are fading away. Given little chance to apply what they’re learning, it’s not surprising learners soon forget most of it.
14. The standard “core” curriculum costs a great deal to “deliver” but represents shallow learning. A great deal of what is happening in classes is expensive, and those costs are increasing, while what little learning is engendered by traditional information-based, passive education is inefficient and shallow. Much of the knowledge and even the skills that are “covered” in school are soon forgotten, because they aren’t exercised by being applied to the real world. We ring our hands over the “summer break learning loss” but it’s clear that anything learned was learned superficially, and wasn’t truly understood.
15. The standard curriculum emphasizes reading to the neglect of other ways of learning. Long before kids go to school, they’re learning by observing, by poking and prodding, by playing, by listening and mimicking, by trying out possibilities, and the like. These forms of learning are largely ignored once school is begun, giving learners the false impression that reading is the only significant way of acquiring knowledge and then we follow up by making that come true. Second-handed, pre-processed versions of reality, rather than reality itself, become the focus of almost all schooling. Life beyond school requires abilities to observe and make sense of the surrounding environment and the humans that impact each person’s experience. Developing those abilities is hardly ever a part of what goes on in school. Most of the answers to future personal and shared problems won’t be available from words on a page or screen. Methods of learning called “inquiry”, “discovery”, “constructivist,” “hands-on”, or “active,” are essential to generating the intense experiences needed for in-depth learning. These experiences exercise the full range of cognitive processes that learners need for life-long problem solving.
16. The standard “core” curriculum lends itself to “minimum standards” testing rather than maximum performance evaluations. Every learner, every child, is different. Those who could excel and lead their fields as adults aren’t being challenged by lock-step education. Those with special talents and interests are largely ignored. Education now focuses on improving math and reading skills of that group of learners who are performing below some arbitrary level, as indicated (often inaccurately) by tests. Evidence suggest that even the goal of raising performance of those students lacking in adequate reading and math skills isn’t being achieved by many subjected to present-day reform rigor.
—This essay is adapted from the works of Marion Brady and several of his commissions and work groups.
