Curriculum and Society: Rethinking the Link

I agree initially with the article. Just reading the abstract and knowing the history of schooling in the US, I see schooling now as playing catch-up, rather than one-up. It used to be that an education got you ahead in society; it allowed you to see wider viewpoints, and there was more of a disparity between the uneducated and educated. You were able to get a better paying job, had an advantage over other job applicants, and did better than your parents.

Now, you need an education just to maintain a level of adequacy in society. There's no guarantee that you will do better than your parents; and as a teacher, I feel like I am racing to teach them all the things they should know before I even think of preparing them to handle the possibilities of the future. I no longer start keyboarding in third grade; now I'm told to start it in Kindergarten because by second grade they are set in their ways. In eighth grade, I am now preparing them to pass technology competency tests offered by several of the high schools.

My curriculum is slowly being mandated by the government, NETS, the ISBE, and the Archdiocese of Chicago. I don't seem to have the time anymore to let them see an I Spy game all the way through to the end, even though it helps develop more visual-spatial-language relationships. I don't have the time to teach them the complete history of computers; it's been relegated to an after-school enrichment offering. I am now playing the juggling act of my fellow teachers - finding enough time to teach what they need to know, what is mandated, what they should know, and what they are interested in.

I agree that school is "a political- educational project constituted by a synthesis or an articulation of cultural elements derived from fights, impositions and negotiations amongst different social subjects." (481) Someone once put it simply that it was created to indoctrinate children to the general beliefs of society at the time. And I see that in the past. It was said that Abraham Lincoln wanted to educate all the newly freed slaves to make them more productive members of society. However, education was also seen as freedom, and it was easier to keep the less educated oppressed if they didn't know or understand what they were missing.

I agree that the dividing lines between subjects have been blurred. We are even supposed to teach students their inter-relatedness. However, I see students getting more easily confused by this. Take the holidays, for example. You used to say "the holidays" and it meant Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's, and possibly Halloween, although Halloween used to be a lot more minor than it has become. Now, thanks to cultural contact and the multiple interpellations it produced, Chanukah, Kwanza, Ramadan, Eid al-Fitr, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Birth of the Bab (Baha'i holiday), and Dia de los Muertos are thrown in the mix, just to name a few. And that's only in November and December! You can find places on the net that show daily holidays, like World Aids Day (December 1) and Day Without Art (December 1). Many have several holidays applied to them, confusing things further.

We, as an American society, are trying very hard to be the ultimate melting pot, where no one group is seen as bigger, better or higher than another. We are trying to create a level playing field and allow all groups to fully keep their identity while becoming fully American. Yet this is clashing with education by defining any subject so broadly that it gets lost within itself and the sphere of curriculum as a whole. If it was more partial and less "imperialistic" (487), it can be redefined in a way acceptable to society as a whole.

On the whole, I found this article more confusing than the last! I am hoping I got the gist of it, and the above is my interpretation of what it meant. Please let me know how far I am off the mark. At the end of the article, it sounds as though reworking curriculum subjects can now ultimately change society, while society changes the subjects to fit a larger world view.