Subscribe to our Blog
Education is Learning What You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know
In our posting “A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing” a few days ago, we discussed the plan to dumb down the Ontario curriculum. The reasoning behind this decision is apparently well summed up by the Toronto District School Board’s description of the current curriculum as “a series of overly robust subject-based documents which are disconnected, overwhelming and full of content reflective of 20th century knowledge. The curriculum does not engage students within their current realities nor does it effectively balance and integrate the required skills and content society hopes to see in a successful 21st century learner.”
Where to begin? It would be a piece of cake to debunk the “overly-robust” part - since the curriculum clearly is not very robust at all and anyway robust is good. Subject-based? Well, hello? Content reflective of the 20th century? Last time we checked, two and two was still four and oxygen still had two atoms. Most of the idiocies in the Tedious Board’s diatribe are readily apparent, but we would like to spend a little time on their contention that the curriculum “does not engage students within their current realities”, since the problems with this criticism take a bit of thought.
Education should introduce students to an exciting new world of ideas and knowledge and give them a chance to become more aware and cultured than they would otherwise be. If a curriculum restricts itself to elements of students’ present world, it unnecessarily limits their chances to expand their horizons. It is common for elementary curricula to begin with the children’s immediate environment in grade 1 and gradually ripple outward to include less familiar environments and happenings as the children advance through the grades. This is a mistake. Children of all ages greatly enjoy learning about far-away events and places. The Core Knowledge Foundation makes available an excellent core curriculum that exposes young children to interesting and mind-expanding topics right from the start, engaging them in their education and enriching their school experience. The Core Knowledge curriculum is currently being used in hundreds of schools with great success.
Like most of the other twaddle in the Tedious Board’s rant, the criticism that the Ontario curriculum does not engage students within their current realities is completely wrong-headed.
I agree completely. To make things worse, we don’t have international standards as it is!
Now, bottom line, they want to water down the curricula even more !?!
One of these days, too many of the bureaucrats’ and teachers’ wants (asking for higher and higher salaries while doing less and less) will cause the whole system to collapse under the shear weight of very costly incompetency. Until then, it’s terrible the money they’re taking from taxpayers and even worse is the fact that the children are being robbed of a decent education.