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I’m going to do a write up of how I think education curriculum should be reformed. For context: I went through highschool in Ontario, Canada. The way it worked was from kindergarten to grade 8, we’d have a set curriculum every kid in the grade followed, with lots of english and math classes, some science classes, history, geography, French, and gym, and one each of art, music, and health classes a week. Then starting in grade 9, which is highschool, we are given two elective choices, where we choose a minimum of one between art, drama, and music, and the second may also be a general technology course or a general business course. Each year of high school there are more electives choices offered and fewer mandatory courses, with the priorities of what the school system requires us take being the same as elementary school. There were also choices between more difficult and easier options for some classes like math, english, and science as well. Universities and colleges would also require higher level math and sciences for STEM programs too, and there is a standardised literacy test needed to graduate.
I think a lot of people when talking about school want to just add more requirements without thinking about what to cut. It’s very easy to say “all kids should learn to program” or “all kids should have PE every day”, but if you’re adding you either have to keep kids there longer, or cut something. First, I think the elementary school program is basically good, I wouldn’t change anything there. Maybe take a little of time out of science and add it to more PE.
For highschool, I would start more drastically reworking it. First, I would basically replace English with history in the mandatory curriculum for everyone who is literate. Learning about Shakespeare and studying themes in classic novels, while not completely useless, is less useful than learning about real historical events. You gain the same “critical thinking” skills analysing what motivated the people in WWI to conflict as you do analysing what motivated the people in Hamlet to conflict, plus it actually happened, giving it substantially more value. The same english classes will be kept as optional electives, like how history is optional in higher grades now. Science will only be mandatory in grade 9, and computer science will be mandatory in grade 10.
Gym class will be mandatory every year. There is a crisis in how unfit people are today. I recently joined the military. They have drastically reduced requirements, shortening basic training from 13 weeks to 8 weeks, and the weighted march from 13km to 5km. Because people weren’t fit enough to pass. A great many jobs, even today, still require physical fitness, and gym class offers more professional preparement than just about any other possible class other basic literacy. On top of that, being healthy is just healthy, and that’s good for every single person.
There will be extra emphasis on making sure every single person who graduates is literate and numerate. I wouldn’t really require anything else to hand out a highschool diploma, but if they can’t do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic, they don’t get the diploma. They’re stuck in adult night classes until they can or they give up. Ontario high schools also require 40 hours of volunteer community service which I like and anywhere else that doesn’t have that should implement it.
It might be a good idea to have a class on how to get the most out of AI too because it’s looking like that’s becoming an ever more important skill, but it’s changing so fast I don’t know.
If you eliminate mandatory English classes, the only people who will take them as electives will be those who will benefit the least from them. All those who hate reading, writing, and grammar will avoid them for four years, then suddenly find themselves unable to graduate when they fail the basic reading and writing tests their senior year. And no, the kids aren’t going to do their required history reading, so that’s not going to help. They’ll also use ChatGPT to write their papers (this is already happening), so their writing skills will atrophy as well.
Understand the concern, but I'm unclear as to why this is a problem for reading and writing about World War I and not for reading and writing about, say, The Scarlet Letter.
Would the students not wish to skip the reading and use ChatGPT to write the papers regardless of the subject matter?
Oh, they will, but at least they’ll be forced to deal with English grammar and reading comprehension in their English classes (through lectures, quizzes, in-class assignments, etc.)—hopefully enough so that some of it will stick.
I think you can teach grammar and reading comprehension about historical subject matter that's real instead of fiction. The benefit of fiction is that it's entertaining and kids will pay attention to it more, but you lose that benefit with stuff like Shakespeare that the slow kids won't pay attention to either
I’m not convinced, mostly based on my own school experience. I attended parochial elementary schools and a public high school. I can still remember the shock I felt when, in my freshman Honors English class, we started going over adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, direct and indirect objects, etc. In Honors English. It turns out that this information—which we learned in first and second grade—was largely new for many of the public schools kids. I have no idea what the regular English students were learning.
Now, you could argue that grammar isn’t all that important, but if it is, I don’t see how you’re going to teach it in history class. Or take metaphors and figurative language. I’ve seen college students struggle and fail to understand Swift’s Modest Proposal and Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. Unless you integrate your English literature and history classes (as OracleOutlook suggested), a good chunk of these students will never understand what is basically just written sarcasm.
If they're still at that level, they aren't really ready for Shakespeare either. I am talking about replacing Shakespeare and To Kill a Mockingbird with history. Below that, fiction is fine.
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I just want to make sure I understand: you are claiming that you don't understand how one could teach grammar in a history class?
You could teach grammar using any written sentences. You could teach grammar using the comment you just made!
Perhaps it would be helpful to use a made-up sentence or short dialogue for the purposes of educating a student about metaphors and figurative language. I guess that technically counts as fiction. But do they really need to read a Shakespeare play or Swift or Lewis? I'll be honest, it seems to me that you really want students to read classic literature and are perhaps reaching for whatever justification is handy. Am I way off?
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