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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.
I'm going to take the opposite position and insist that schools shouldn't be wasting time on gym at all. I don't think the point of school is to provide children everything that we think is "good". Schools should not be thought of as substitute parents with a broad mandate to produce good student life outcomes in general. Schools should be narrowly focused on basic instruction in reading, writing, math, and science.
I also don't think there's any place for literature in the curricula of any non-elective classes in middle school to high school. Literature is entertainment. It can be used as a vessel to teach reading and writing, but you could just as well do that with nonfiction. So you might as well be teaching them about things that are actually true or things that actually happened. This is doubly the case for older literature (e.g., Shakespeare or anything from the ancient world), which is not something that is easy for modern readers to understand or be interested in. Frankly, I think the emphasis on it borders on snobbery in many cases.
Yeah, that "old literature is unlikeable" meme is marketing-addled cope on the level of "how could I enjoy a trip two states over when it's so far awaaaaaaay and anyway their food is weird?" For a solid 350 years I'm not aware of anyone complaining that Shakespeare was especially hard to read, and certainly nobody found him boring. Same was true of classical literature for 2000+ years. If all that suddenly changed in the ~50 years since the invention of cable TV, is it likelier that a play's 36th decade contains some sort of magic cultural expiration date, or that we're just experiencing a long superstimulus-driven atrophy of kids' ability to read, focus and explore?
Or, of course, you're mistaken about how readable and enjoyable people thought these works were in the past.
English-language fiction and drama weren't taught in schools until (I believe) the 1900s? 1890s? So prior to that time, nobody would have read these works at all unless they enjoyed them and found them valuable. Some university lecturing on drama seems to have started up a decade or two earlier, 1870s, but that would be about sophisticated analysis of the rhetoric for students who already loved the content, like a film studies class today-- certainly not walking through the plot.
And yet, famously, the general American public of the day was so organically into Shakespeare that speeches from the plays were popular additions to vaudeville acts, and audience members would shout back lines at the actors. I've encountered lots of writing pre-1950 casually referring to how delightful and meaningful Shakespeare is, and it's interesting how free from defensiveness or concessions those statements are: nobody feels the need to add "... although obviously it's really hard to understand the words" or "... even though of course it's pretty boring and confusing," because they don't seem to find those things to be the case.
If we have 350 years of human beings demonstrably finding Shakespeare entertaining, meaningful, and easily comprehensible, followed by 70 years of intensifying complaints that the words are now too hard and the sentences now require too much focus, then my assumption is something has changed about our vocabulary, reading ability and stimulation threshold, not about the plays themselves.
Anti-excellence hot takes are pretty fashionable in these narcissistic times- the SBF-style "old books are booooring and useless" meme rhymes well with the education professors' "algebra is white supremacy," the admissions officers' "the SAT doesn't actually measure anything" and the fat activists' "actually size has nothing to do with health"- but I notice that they suspiciously often come from people who failed at those things themselves, thus have strong ego-defense incentives to convince themselves that anyway the grapes are sour.
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