Step 1: Forget about subjects
The easy way of thinking about curricula is: "These are our school subjects (math, geography, music, etc.); each subject has this number of classes over the course of a school year; now let's fill up that time with interesting things from these fields of knowledge". Hard mode, for many, is then "making these things 'relevant' for students in a next step. Let's not do this. Step 2: Think about skills first Skills-based curricula have been around for a while. Once it gets pointed out to you that education should be about enabling students to do things, rather than filling them with knowledge, using curricula that say "students should know this and this and this" seems kind of awkward. So in accordance with this insight, many of the old curricula were rewritten to focus more on skills. Unfortunately, this did not change anything about the contents. Instead of "these are the three main types of drama", they now read "students can distinguish between the three main types of drama". Instead of "here's why authoritarianism is a problem", they read "I can reason about the problematic effects of authoritarianism". This, I assume, was not what the original proponents of skill-based curricula had in mind. Instead, think about skills first. This goes right to the bottom of what we are trying to achieve with education: What do we want our students to be able to do when they leave school? What are the most important skills they will need to lead happy and successful lives? These go first. (Being able to acquire new skills and to care for one's own mental and physical health should be somewhere near the top of that list, for example.) Then, if there's still room, ask: what other skills might help the students get ahead in the world? What skills did I need? What skills could I have used that would have made my life much better if I'd only learned them at school? What new skills may students need in the future? Then ask others the same question, ideally people who are very different from you. Because you're just one person, and most students will not be like you. Step 3: Think about knowledge too Knowledge is important, but it is strictly subordinate to skills, i.e. what you can do with it. (To forestall any arguments about "procedural knowledge" and such, I am talking about declarative, factual, explicit knowledge here.) You need this sort of knowledge for three things: 1) Some skills require knowledge. Being able to do first aid requires knowing where and how to push if you want to get someone's heart going again. Being able to find mathematical information online requires knowing that WolframAlpha exists and/or that Google Infoboxes will give you good answers to the most common questions if you're marginally competent at phrasing them. 2) Whatever you do with your life, you are likely to encounter new questions that need answering and new problems that need solving. You can do that a lot better if you have what we call a "knowledge framework" that allows you to locate questions and problems in a particular field of knowledge, so you have an easier time finding out if other people have answered that question or solved that problem before. For example, knowing that people have been studying cults and their tricks for a while may be useful when you're getting sucked into one, just as knowing that there's a difference between factual questions that can be settled empirically and ethical questions that depend on your basic assumptions can nip many unnecessary conflicts in the bud. 3) Some concepts are relevant both across many different fields of knowledge and to everyday life. If you know about the concepts of evolution and electrical conduction, for example, you will a) have an easier time grasping why humans and other animals behave in such weird ways once this becomes relevant to you (it will!), and b) be less likely to autodarwinate by getting electrocuted. Step 4: Reduce You've collected a lot by now. Lots of different people are telling you about lots of different things that people absolutely need. It's too much, and you know it is. So go through the collection again and take out everything that does not seem absolutely necessary. Don't discard it; all of this goes into the Honors folder. There will be students who need more, who can do more and think further than the absolute minimum. But don't make it compulsory. You need a minimum standard, what grade-obsessed people call a pass grade. Your trimmed-down curriculum is that pass grade for your school. If you can't teach kids these skills, you fail. If you can teach them a lot more in addition, good on you; but you need to set yourself a failure condition, if only to make sure that you put enough effort into really making this part work. For skills, the obvious questions driving the trimming process should be "is this relevant for most people?" (rather than just for me), "how much will it hurt most students if I cut this?", and "is this something that I can expect most students to pick up from somewhere else or on their own anyway?" For example, finding a place to buy food cheaply is a good skill to have, but probably not something we need to teach. Figuring out how to buy and prepare food that is both cheap and healthy, on the other hand, is not something that we can just "leave to the parents". ("That's the parents' job" is never a good excuse, by the way.) For knowledge, it helps to make the knowledge curriculum really explicit. Do not use questions or broad "know about" statements. "What are loans?" Well, that's a great question and I'm sure we could spend a sememster exploring different takes on it. But your job as a curriculum designer is to figure out what exactly students will need to know about credit so they can do something with it. "Most banks will give you a loan of this size under roughly the following conditions: [list of conditions]", or "this is how you find out if you're eligible for a loan" is concrete and usable information. Phrasing your knowledge items like this also makes your curriculum auditable: people can see if what you've put in there is correct and/or useful, without asking you for explanations first. Most importantly, however, it will keep you from cluttering the curriculum with things that seem "good to know" in some vague way without actually being sure what "knowing about that" would entail. Specifity helps with both parsimony and reflection. ~ ~ ~ At OPENschool, we have completed step 2 and are working on steps 3 and 4 in parallel at the moment. Critical feedback and comments on the first draft of our skills curriculum are very welcome.
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