CYCLE FOUR: HOW SHOULD CURRICULUM BE GENERATED?
This course cracks me up. No, really, it does. Every time I sit down to write one of these entries into the blog-o-sphere, I find myself addressing a cycle question that has goaded me as long as I have been in education. So get ready, because here comes more of the same hard questions and non-answers you’ve come to love about my posts. What is it with teachers and curriculum writing? I’ve never, not even for a moment, thought that it was or is my place to author curriculum. I’ve argued against it as long as I have been at Central, and in doing so, I’ve always used the same analogy:
“Just because I drive a car doesn’t mean that I know how to fix a car, and it sure as heck doesn’t mean that I know how to build one.”
Simple and overstated? Yessir. Accurate and applicable? You bet. Then who should be tasked with generating curriculum? Our elected officials whose jobs do not have “experience”, “insight”, or “skill” as requirements? Maybe not. How about out administrators, you know, those fine men and women who must answer to their state elected officials…oh never mind. Let us consider the readings, and then consider my school for a moment. The first reading illustrates exactly the concern that I have always had with all elected officials, local, state or otherwise. As a government teacher, I start each term by telling my students not to ask me for my opinion, because it won’t be forthcoming. I tell them a simple fact: as their government teacher, it is far too easy to indoctrinate them politically through my teaching. My job is to teach them the approved government curriculum, not Young’s values and politics. Sound’s a lot like my last post, eh? Except for this point: I am at least qualified to do my job, which may or may not be true about those who approved the government curriculum that I choose not to waver from. One of the key Board members in Texas is a dentist for petesake.
A dentist.
A DENTIST.
I used to fix toilets at a nursing home…I guess I’m qualified to make curricular decisions that affect an entire state’s children.
Really? Now, let’s be fair here. Our Founders were far from qualified to govern a new nation or write a national set of laws, which they screwed up before they authored the Constitution. They were, however, men who saw themselves as servants of the public will, not elected dictators of majority. James Madison, the original American philosopher, referred to these as “factions” and considered them the gravest danger to human liberty. Jefferson thought those who trampled the just will of the majority should be shot. Hamilton just shot people. The afore mention dentist lost his leadership post due to concerns held by the Texas State Senate regarding his religious convictions. If he had been acting as a public servant, how would the Senate or his next-door neighbor know what his convictions were? His actions would have reflected those people he represents? His words would have echoed their values and desires. In other words, he would have represented them, not himself. Let me tell you, if that fella ever ends up in a time machine set for 1795, he better watch his back. Jefferson and Hamilton may have hated each other, but they hated sycophants even more. Musket balls to the back.
Tyler’s ideas, at least theoretically, are meant to save us from the State. Locally authored curriculum would, logically, better represent the locality it would be provided to, and would bear some trace of expertise as it would be developed by educators rather than dentists and toilet repairmen. I agree with some of his critics when they argue that Tyler is politically naïve, in part because I am not convinced that he sees educators as inherently political. That and he makes the assumption that so many of my colleagues have: I teach a curriculum, therefore I can author one. My classical logic professor would have jumped all over that one.
I’m going to conclude this criticism by considering my own school, specifically my own department. Up until this year, when a new principal laid down the “If you don’t see it in the state curriculum, don’t even think about it” law, our American history teachers were required to teach an entire unit about the former Yugoslavia. The whole story of its collapse and subsequent infighting, not just American involvement. The entire story of the genocides there, not just the lack of American involvement. Why, you might ask? Our department chair authored the unit, and the curriculum map that our teachers are required to follow. Our department chair is married to a Bosnian man she met in Bosnia on a mission trip. The subject is important to her. I can’t blame her, it would be important to me if it were my spouse. Yet the personal feelings of individuals don’t define what our kids should learn anymore than the political or religious values of a Texas dentist.
My point in all of this? People are people. Politicians are people. Administrators are people. Teachers are people. We are subject to the products of our own minds and the tugging of our own hearts. Should any of us be allowed to decide and then define what the curriculum our kids will receive should be? No. Not unless we place ourselves second to the public that we serve, whether we agree with them or not. Otherwise we are no better than the Texas dentist whose political and religious pontifications make him everything that our Founders didn’t want in our elected public servants. It is ironic that such a person spends his time arguing on behalf of what he is certain are the beliefs of our Founders, while such arguments continue to show just how little of their beliefs he understands.
