Seth Godin wrote a provocative post about reimagining the curriculum last week. It is not often that parents forward me blog posts, but 4 different parents from our district have sent me the post, each adding a comment like, “This is what we need for our kids.” And I wanted to respond back, “We are doing it!”
First, here is the premise of Seth’s post:
We’ve spent 130 years indoctrinating kids with the same structure. Now, as some of us enter a post-lockdown world, I’d like to propose a useful (though some might say radical) way to reimagine the curriculum.
It’s been a century of biology, chemistry, arithmetic, social studies and the rest. So long that the foundational building blocks are seen as a given, unquestioned and unimproved. The very structure of the curriculum actually prevents school from working as it should.
Godin has a new list of courses he proposes including: statistics, games, communication, history and propaganda, citizenship, real skills, the scientific method, programming, art, decision making and meta-cognition. It is a great list. And like Godin argues, I am sure this resonates for the skills we want for our children as we prepare them for the world we live in for both work and citizenship.
British Columbia refreshed its curriculum over the last decade and it has received a lot of global attention, and I would argue it is doing much of what Godin proposes – detailed lists of facts have been replaced by big ideas and curricular competencies, core competencies including thinking, communication and personal and social are put at the centre of all curriculum and Indigenous perspectives have also been embedded throughout the curriculum.
Having been part of discussions that date back over a decade around modernizing BC’s curriculum, there were ideas like those Godin suggests, of swapping out “old” courses for “new” courses. In the end the shells of the traditional system were maintained in BC, the subject areas are largely the same now for students as they were for their parents, other comforts including labeling courses by grade (e.g. you take French 9 and then you take French 10 – largely in groups of students the same age) were maintained and the basic structure of high school courses all being just over 100 hours was also kept. Now, within these courses the massive changes I described above took place – and the experience has been modernized.
The beauty of Godin’s model is it radical. It does not allow you to keep doing what you have been doing before. The old courses are gone and replaced by new ones. Of course its great strength is its great weakness. Very few students, teachers or parents I encounter are looking for radical shifts in education. While we are interested in High Tech High and other schools that seem to be living Godin’s vision, these schools seem to exist as alternatives not the mainstream. While the education community appreciates the notion of change, they want change within the context of a system that is comfortable for them.
It is not that we are broadly anti-change, but we are more incremental than radical. I think most people agree with Godin:
We’re living in the age of an always-connected universal encyclopedia and instantly updated fact and teaching machine called the Net. This means that it’s more important to want to know the answer and to know how to look it up than it is to have memorized it when we were seven. Given the choice between wasting time and learning, too many people have been brainwashed into thinking that learning is somehow onerous or taxing.
So, here in British Columbia we have tried to do this by dramatically transforming the curriculum (the what and how of learning), yet not really changing the comfortable boxes we are used to. For us, the strength of this is that we are able to make major changes while not radically disrupting the system. And the downside, you can keep doing what you have always been doing – Social Studies 9 is still Social Studies 9 filled for 100 hours a year by a group of 14 year-olds – this shift relies on the commitment of everyone to the higher ideals of the change.
Since the turn of the century the calls for an overhaul and transformation have grown louder. We have heard them come out of the globalization conversation and we have now heard them as a product of the pandemic. I want to believe we can have the shifts that Godin and others write about within our current structure. The realist in me says that this is actually the only way. I like how David Albury recently described this work, “One of the tricks of transformation is to combine urgency and passion with courageous patience.” We need the big thinkers like Godin to push us, and then we need to make these shifts within our reality. We need to hold onto the comforts of the system we all have known while continuing to modernize the experience within it.
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