Three curricula all schools teach

I think it is interesting that students spend 480 weeks or 12,000 hours in school by the time a child graduates from secondary education. If they continue to post-secondary immediately after graduation, they will typically add on another 110-140 weeks or approximately 2600-3000 hours in school. That is a long time to spend in an academic institutional setting consecutively.

The big point from this reading was the implicit curriculum that schools teach, one of them being to set up students for the real-world outside of secondary education. Eisner mentions how “children will not have jobs in adult life that is interesting; most jobs do not provide for high degrees of intellectual flexibility; most jobs depend on routine” (n.d., p.90), which implies that secondary education is purposely designed to set up students for that lifestyle afterwards. Secondary education prepares students for one-way communication and hierarchical organizational structures in the workforce. It is also mentioned that the current design of the curriculum fosters competitiveness through grading of students. Something I have noticed while in schooling is that students are very competitive amongst each other when it comes to grading, with some students even going as far as “sabotaging” classmates by not helping or lying when asked questions about assignments. Eisner mentions that grading “fosters differentiation of classes into ability groups” (n.d., p.91). This is the idea that students who achieve higher grades get placed into honours classes and programs. Some honours programs offer different credit track systems within the school curriculum speeding up a student’s progress. This now becomes unfair as it does not give students an opportunity to be part of this program. In an example from my high school experience, I have seen some students who excelled in mathematics opt out of the honours mathematics program and take “normal” math to get a better grade as the content is not as challenging. Implicit curriculum also teaches students how to be cognitively flexible, ie. be able to shift problems and adapt to new demands on schedule; teach intellectual and social virtues such as punctuality and willingness to work hard on tasks; and defer immediate gratification in order to work for distant goals. Interestingly, I have noticed these implicit curricular teachings through my elective classes in high school through mechanics, automotives, and even home economics. The teachers I had for these courses talked to us like adults and taught life-lessons in the classroom and made me realize that my courses were training us to be able to manage busy homework and study schedules and conform to authority.

If the [explicit] curriculum of secondary education is to teach students to have English literacy, numeracy, and academic knowledge to prepare them for post-secondary education, then the mandated BC Provincial Curriculum achieves this. The mandated BC Provincial Curriculum also includes some aspects of the implicit curriculum that Eisner discusses in this paper. The BC curriculum tries to connect academic learning to life skills for students to succeed if they choose not to further their education after secondary. The BC curriculum also includes some of Eisner’s idea of the “null curriculum.” Eisner defines the “null curriculum” as information schools do not teach. For example, most students complain about not knowing how to do their taxes however, I think this is taught in a BC mandatory graduation class; it could use further emphasis so students can retain this information longer than from a single lesson on taxes and finances. There are some skills schools may not offer completely as they do not have the resources to teach such as an automatives program. BC curriculum should work with school districts to try and accommodate this by bringing in guest presentations of people who work in those fields to educate students and provide opportunities to learn more through apprenticeship or volunteer programs.

Reading:

Eisner, E.W. n.d, The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach. The Educational Imagination On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs. 3rd Edition. Stanford University. Pp. 87-107