High school: What students take versus what they need
by Scott McLeod
Imagine the following HS requirements being recommend to the School Board:
• 3 years of economics and business
• 2 courses in philosophy – one in logic, the other in ethics
• 2 years of psychology, with special emphasis on child development and family relations
• 2 years of mathematics, focusing on probability and statistics
• 4 years of Language Arts, but with a major focus on semiotics and oral proficiency
• US and World history, taught as Current Events - backwards from the present
• 1 Year of Graphics Design, Desktop Publishing, and Multimedia presentationOutrageous? Hardly – if we do an analysis of what most graduates actually need and will use in professional, civic, and personal life. How odd it is that we do not require oral proficiency when every graduate will need the ability. How absurd it is in this day and age that students aren’t required to understand the capitalist system. How sad it is that physics is viewed as more important than psychology, as parents struggle to raise children wisely and families work hard to understand one another. Requirements based on pre-modern academic priorities and schooling predicated on the old view that few people would graduate and fewer still would go on to college make no sense. Ask any adult: how much algebra did you use this past week?
I took the equivalent of nine years worth of music while in high school and earned a Ph.D. in science and mathematics education.
Wiggins' list of what he believes should be required of every high school student is just the reason why I refrain from being "the curriculum police." If I tell you what to teach, you have a right to tell me what to teach. I'm just not going there. I am certainly not going to prescribe what every student should learn.
For someone who professes to be an advocate of "Authentic" learning and "Authentic" education, Wiggins seems awfully quick to predict what every "new" student should learn and even when they should learn it.
This contradiction comes as no surprise!
Wiggins and his partner McTighe have made a fortune teaching educators how to pretend to be interested in the individual learner and their desires while coercing them to reach an arbitrary curricular goal (Understanding by Design). This often results in highly imaginative and "Authentic" projects, like "making a menu." (see http://bit.ly/dAq5Jz)
In Wiggins' original text, he eventually argues against standardizing the curriculum, but he can't have it both ways. Either you "design" education for each learner (TEACH) or you allow each student to learn. It's a subtle point, but those two goals are often in violent opposition.
I truly suggest that educators concerned about learning and honoring the learner abandon the Wiggins and McTighe stuff and read http://bit.ly/aCLUf It offers a much more thoughtful, modern and learner-centered approach to teaching than Understanding by Design.
Ain't AmeriKa some piece of work? Education for whom? By whom? Through what?