The Mission of Schooling and the Purpose of Curriculum: Engaging in an age-old debate

What is curriculum? Who should design it? Who should control it?

In life, from the beginning of human creation before there were "teachers" or "students" and "textbooks", when one was faced with a curiosity to master any given skill, one had to perform a series of trial and error before coming to the realization of what procedure works best. As humans we hold the intellectual capability not only to solve problems through our natural abilities but also to communicate the solutions of recurring problems to others. With these talents that no other creature on Earth can perform with the same magical perfection and complexity, the human race has advanced. We have developed a system of schooling to avoid wasting time waiting for situations to happen upon us in order to speed up the rate at which our civilization develops. All too often, we lose sight of contemplating our purpose of existence and get caught up in the superfluous, mundane routine of living to complete a to-do list of tasks instead of looking at the broader goals of life. As a race of people, we have lost sight of why we value learning. Imagine the butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling the first man to master the craft of fire experienced. We no longer share that excitement each time we turn the knob on our gas powered stove-top ranges to cook the chicken that someone has so kindly killed, cleaned, cut, packaged and delivered to our door. At the same time, we have made little advances in the realm of reforming outdated educational practices to actually achieve the goal we set out to complete when we created the first school - progressively moving forward. The world, as we know it, is seated on the precipice of a tremendous climactic change that will revolutionize the way we live. That change will occur inside the abstract, intangible mind of every living human being on this planet, and it will only happen if we start to pay attention to the broader purpose of why we exist in the first place.

If the goal of a teacher is to make their student a replica of himself, then change will never happen, only a stagnant pool of people that can only accomplish up to his or her instructor's abilities. Luckily, or perhaps hopefully, this is not the case in the American educational system. The goal of teaching is to create a body of students who are even more capable than their professors in order to progress. Unfortunately, the teachers of today see a disconnect between pedagogical studies in their universities where they became qualified sages and what actually occurs once in the classroom. Many factors play a role in the teacher's inability to teach well. Besides the federal and state standards and the luck of the draw on administration styles, the most important tool a teacher has for efficient instruction is their curriculum. A curriculum is a well planned itinerary for causing the student to perform in such a way that reflects successful understanding and critical thinking. Many teachers fail for the same reason why students fail - a lack of understanding and practicing the curriculum to ensure the outcome fits into the "big picture".

Today, teachers are bound by following state standards and district mandated curricula to complete a paced, artificial learning list of drills and memorization instead of following a highly organized procedure to attain their desired performance results. At every level, the student should be aware of "how the learning goals will be met, how work will be assessed and graded, and what the course calendar looks like in light of those goals (Wiggins and McTigue 2003)." While the content of the curriculum can be pre-determined by experts in education or government offices, the way in which this information is given to learners is completely at the disposal of the individual teacher, isolated like islands scattered around the building, city, state, and nation.

Giving the teachers the power to take their respective content and standards and collaborate with one another to design a framework where they create a set of cornerstone performance demands as goals for what the learner will be able to do once they acquire key skills will transform old-fashioned and counter-productive teaching into a valuable way of teaching transfer and meaningful understanding. Instead of presenting the material to be learned and hoping the students successfully absorb it's value through osmosis, the students would be continually practicing and refining their personal and internal procedure of problem solving. This allows the student to own his or her learning, empowering him or her with the ability to think critically and enabling an independent mind that can adjust or modify itself in the face of varying challenges.

Students and teachers alike should be able to take the time to reflect on their own, and each other's, practices. Once compiling the feedback, they can then review their goals and change their plan of action in order to achieve those goals. Every learner needs to know where they were, where they are, and where they are going in order to find success. Districts should hand the power of adjustment over to the teacher instead of allowing them to thoughtlessly move along with "covering the content irrespective of results (Wiggins and McTigue 2003)." Avoiding passing students on from one grade to the next without arming them with the skills they need in order to advance will help us to overcome this obstacle of dormancy found in the products of our education system. Getting our schools back to the reason they were created in the first place, optimal learning and performance, requires a reform of current practices in curriculum writing and the intense study of how people learn.