Effects of Media: Curriculum — The Design of the Prerequisite

[Explor­ing Life] The pur­pose of a cur­ricu­lum is to impose a uni­form scope of and sequence of knowl­edge and skills that are to be taught to a group of peo­ple. The pre­sup­po­si­tion of cur­ricu­lum lies within the con­cept of the pre­req­ui­site. In other words, the design of edu­ca­tion orig­i­nates in the assump­tion that the impo­si­tion of a pre­de­ter­mined scope and sequence of knowl­edge and skills over time is the most effi­cient and effec­tive way to orga­nize and deliver the expe­ri­ence of edu­ca­tion. Cur­ricu­lum is a kind of tech­nol­ogy since it rep­re­sents an appli­ca­tion of knowl­edge (i.e. — the scope and sequence of knowl­edge and skills) that is used to meet an objec­tive or solve a prob­lem (i.e. — to pre­pare peo­ple for par­tic­i­pa­tion in soci­ety).

For, after all, oblit­er­a­tion of indi­vid­u­al­ity, the max­i­mum inte­gra­tion of the indi­vid­ual into the hier­ar­chy of the edu­ca­tors and schol­ars, has ever been one of our rul­ing prin­ci­ples. …The hier­ar­chic orga­ni­za­tion cher­ishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the real­iza­tion of that ideal. (Hesse 1970)

We expe­ri­ence the cur­ricu­lum edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions over a period of many years. Since edu­ca­tion dom­i­nates the early stages of life the effects of cur­ricu­lum have a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on our for­ma­tive years. What are these effects? In order to explore the effects of cur­ricu­lum we first need to reveal the char­ac­ter of its under­ly­ing struc­ture. This struc­ture is unre­lated to the spe­cific kinds of exper­tise being com­mu­ni­cated. In other words, the con­tent of what is being taught is of less inter­est to us here than how the expe­ri­ence of the cur­ricu­lum con­di­tions our mind and sensibilities.

The Under­ly­ing Struc­ture of Curriculum

Time: Cur­ricu­lum con­trols the use of time. The first source of con­trol is manda­tory atten­dance. Most soci­eties leg­is­late the min­i­mum amount of time that a stu­dent must be in school by com­monly requir­ing them to reach a min­i­mum age before leav­ing school as well as min­i­mum amounts of time to be spent in school in order to be eli­gi­ble to grad­u­ate each year. Grad­u­a­tion also increases the options we have for employ­ment. Those stu­dents that do not com­plete the min­i­mum edu­ca­tional require­ments imposed upon them by soci­ety may face neg­a­tive con­se­quences when enter­ing the work force. Grad­u­at­ing through the min­i­mum time require­ments are a right of pas­sage, but not a guar­an­tee, to bet­ter employ­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties and there­fore the hope of an improved mate­r­ial lifestyle.

Time is also micro-managed by cur­ricu­lum. For exam­ple, the amount of time given to a spe­cific kind of sub­ject mat­ter is spec­i­fied on a daily or weekly basis. This use of time is enforced whether or not it makes sense to devote more or less time to some­thing. In other words, there is lit­tle to no flex­i­bil­ity to alter the use of time on a daily basis.

Place: Cur­ricu­lum, in har­mony with time, con­trols place. To meet the min­i­mum time require­ments also means to be in a spec­i­fied loca­tion for spec­i­fied amounts of time. Dur­ing our for­ma­tive years this place is called school. Atten­dance is the inte­gra­tion of time and place. The school sys­tem is a dis­trib­uted net­work of phys­i­cal loca­tions through­out soci­ety that enforce manda­tory atten­dance requirements.

Age Seg­re­ga­tion: Within the school sys­tem time is bro­ken down into a sequence of school years, most com­monly from grade one through grade twelve (with vari­a­tions on either end). The third area of con­trol is age. The twelve years of school are often divided into sys­tems, ele­men­tary and sec­ondary. Within this struc­ture we may find fur­ther divi­sions based on age, for exam­ple, the pri­mary, junior and inter­me­di­ate divi­sions of ele­men­tary school. Stu­dents of the same approx­i­mate age are grouped into grades, thus grade one is typ­i­cally com­prised of stu­dent that are approx­i­mately five to six years old.

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion: Cur­ricu­lum results in a sys­tem of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that is dis­tinctly one to many. The source of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the scope and sequence of knowl­edge and skills out­lined in the cur­ricu­lum itself. Schools sys­tems are man­dated to dis­sem­i­nate this cur­ricu­lum to its local com­mu­nity. The main agent of dis­sem­i­na­tion is the teacher, and the main recip­i­ent of com­mu­ni­ca­tion is the stu­dent. Stu­dents com­mu­ni­cate back to the teacher in response to the demands of the cur­ricu­lum. Teach­ers com­mu­ni­cate the rel­a­tive suc­cess of stu­dents to the admin­is­tra­tion and com­mu­nity in a man­ner that is framed by the cur­ricu­lum. While other kinds of com­mu­ni­ca­tion obvi­ously take place, the under­ly­ing struc­ture of the envi­ron­ment remains dis­tinctly one to many.

Right of Pas­sage: The cur­ricu­lum will spec­ify what con­sti­tutes suc­cess or not. Teach­ers use meth­ods of eval­u­a­tion in order to assess the stu­dents’ abil­ity rel­a­tive to the cur­ricu­lum. Eval­u­a­tion, or the power to deter­mine suc­cess or fail­ure, rep­re­sents another sig­nif­i­cant source of influ­ence in cur­ricu­lum. Suc­cess means that stu­dents acquire the right of pas­sage through grad­u­a­tion and there­fore increase their oppor­tu­ni­ties in the work place. Fail­ure means that stu­dents do not grad­u­ate and sig­nif­i­cantly impair their oppor­tu­ni­ties for employment.

The for­mal author­ity granted to cur­ricu­lum to con­trol time, place, age seg­re­ga­tion, com­mu­ni­ca­tion and right pf pas­sage over a period of sev­eral years is absolute. These five areas con­sti­tute, to my think­ing, the most basic ele­ments of the under­ly­ing struc­ture of cur­ricu­lum. You may have noticed that I did not describes par­tic­u­lar kinds of sub­ject exper­tise such as geog­ra­phy, his­tory or sci­ence. The rea­son for this is that I believe the spe­cific nature of the con­tent pre­sented in cur­ricu­lum is not as rel­e­vant in describ­ing its effects on our mind and sen­si­bil­i­ties. Describ­ing cur­ricu­lum in these terms seems to invoke a sense of con­fine­ment and sub­mis­sive­ness, how­ever, cur­ricu­lum is pre­sented as a means to pro­vide guid­ance and assis­tance to peo­ple in order to help them to be suc­cess­ful in society.

What are the Effects of Cur­ricu­lum on Our Mind and Sensibilities?

Each of us emerges from our school­ing in dif­fer­ent ways. For some of us, our edu­ca­tion may have put us on a path that allows us to pur­sue our pas­sions and tal­ents. For oth­ers, edu­ca­tion may have helped us to attain the knowl­edge and skill required to obtain a desired form of employ­ment. There are oth­ers, how­ever, that may com­plete their edu­ca­tion with­out really hav­ing a sense of what they want to do. And finally, there are those that do no fin­ish their education.

And it is only in those terms, stand­ing aside from any struc­ture or medium, that its prin­ci­ple lines of force can be dis­cerned. For any medium has the power of impos­ing its own assump­tion on the unwary. (McLuhan 1967)

Anonymity: One of the most fun­da­men­tal effects of edu­ca­tion is that we develop a deeply rooted belief that learn­ing is some­thing that is done to us. Even though learn­ing is some­thing quite dif­fer­ent than edu­ca­tion, the mean­ing of both learn­ing and edu­ca­tion have become nearly syn­ony­mous in use. The effect of this is a habit­u­a­tion toward reliance instead of the devel­op­ment of self-reliance. Since the cur­ricu­lum does not rec­og­nize nor is it influ­enced by the thoughts and ideas of stu­dents, the stu­dents must become sub­servient in order to be suc­cess­ful. The stu­dents and teach­ers are resigned to being anony­mous participants.

Abstrac­tion: The level of abstrac­tion in edu­ca­tion is sig­nif­i­cant. Although the con­tent mat­ter for thought may change in the form of sub­jects, the con­text of the con­tent remains remark­ably sim­i­lar. For exam­ple, the envi­ron­ment that his­tory is expe­ri­enced in is not sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ently than the envi­ron­ment that math­e­mat­ics is expe­ri­enced in. Both take place in a class­room presided over by a teacher whose pur­pose is to dis­sem­i­nate the scope and sequence required by the cur­ricu­lum to the stu­dents. Most of this takes place through lec­ture and print-based mate­ri­als. Other class­rooms such as sci­ence, art or music may inte­grate other kinds of tools to enhance the deliv­ery, which can help to enhance the edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence. How­ever, the stu­dents learn about his­tory not by doing what his­to­ri­ans do, but instead by being pas­sive observers of history.

This is not, to be cer­tain, a crit­i­cism of teach­ers or school sys­tems. It is, how­ever, a weak­ness in cur­ricu­lum design. In attempt­ing to effi­ciently and effec­tively edu­cate stu­dents, the cur­ricu­lum has in fact ster­il­ized and abstracted the expe­ri­ence of learn­ing. Our mind becomes an instru­ment to manip­u­late the sym­bols of lan­guage rather than engag­ing in the actual expe­ri­ence of the con­tent. The end effect of this is we tend to develop a pref­er­ence to read and write about expe­ri­ence, rather than par­tic­i­pat­ing in the authen­tic experience.

Frag­men­ta­tion: Since time is used as a means to divide expe­ri­ence into con­trolled chunks of con­tent, our sense of con­ti­nu­ity and unity suf­fers. Our minds strug­gle to make con­nec­tions across the implied bound­aries that are now hard wired into our brains. Exper­tise is a hole that keeps dig­ging itself deeper, and before we may real­ize we have become immersed in it and have lost our view of other pos­si­bil­i­ties. It may be that one of the rea­sons many peo­ple are grav­i­tat­ing toward more uni­fied and inte­gral modes of expe­ri­ence is the deeply rooted sense of iso­la­tion and frag­men­ta­tion that has been caused by years of cur­ric­u­lar confinement.

Sub­servience: To be suc­cess­ful in edu­ca­tion demands sub­servience to the imposed cur­ricu­lum. The con­cept of suc­cess is there­fore also closely aligned with being sub­servient to imposed demands. Eval­u­a­tion is not some­thing that comes from within, but is instead a gen­er­al­ized sys­tem of clas­si­fi­ca­tion that orga­nizes peo­ple in to classes of achievement.

Sum­mary

The expe­ri­ence of edu­ca­tion orig­i­nates in the design of cur­ricu­lum. The cur­ricu­lum is a sys­tem designed to impose con­trol over time, place, age, com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and right of pas­sage. Its under­ly­ing struc­ture has effects on our mind and sen­si­bil­i­ties result­ing in a sense of anonymity, habits of abstrac­tion, frag­men­ta­tion of expe­ri­ence, a lack of self-reliance, and a sub­servience to exter­nal demands.

The teacher, par­tic­u­larly the teacher ded­i­cated to lib­eral edu­ca­tion, must con­stantly try to look toward the goal of human com­plete­ness and back at the natures of his stu­dents here and now, ever seek­ing to under­stand the for­mer and to assess the capac­i­ties of the lat­ter to approach it… For there is no real edu­ca­tion that does not respond to felt need; any­thing else acquired is tri­fling dis­play. (Bloom 1987)