A curriculum is a diet of other people’s ideas that is fed to children in schools. It is designed by a group of people assumed to be much better qualified than mere parents – let alone children – to decide exactly the type of information that should be fed, and when, and how its digestion should be measured. However, that very process results, more often than not, in what I call “fast food education.” It is no wonder that many students have to be forced to eat this diet…and in many cases fail to digest it. Its standardized content is often bland, bulked up with fillers, and short on flavor. Its delivery is regimented and, many times, uninspired. School children are seldom consulted as to their tastes, or even level of hunger, let alone trusted to understand their own nutritional requirements or dietary quirks! The force-feeding process is so relentless that many students gag on it, in some cases becoming permanently soured on learning.
In spite of catch phrases like “child-directed learning” and many good intentions, fast food education is the norm because a curriculum diet is an easy, efficient way to feed facts simultaneously to large groups of people. For purely management reasons, school systems feel they must chop up knowledge, parcel it out, and feed it to children in small portions. Whether or not the parcels make sense to a particular learner, or the portions are of the correct size, are secondary to the need to get everyone fed at least something. And to make things worse, each meal-sized portion of each subject area is desiccated, premixed and fed by teachers who have minimal knowledge of, or connection to, what other teachers are feeding, and who are not able to provide context tor the disconnected facts they’re shoveling into their students’ mouths. As John Taylor Gatto puts it, students never receive a complete experience at school, except on the installment plan! The information provided often has no relation to the lives of the learners, especially those who aren’t part of the dominant culture. And few tools are provided for decoding the information, or for thinking critically about it.
Unfortunately, home educators aren’t immune to feeding educational fast food. Their motivation is usually to comfort themselves (and those “authorities” who are mandated to oversee their children’s learning) by attempting to control what is a very mysterious process. Learning is open-ended and often invisible. It is difficult to observe and manage. Papers and plans can be something to hold onto when a child’s intellectual growth process seems chaotic or obscure (or doesn’t measure up to Jimmy’s next door). Yes, there is a great deal of comfort involved for everyone in the use of curriculum…except, of course, for learners, who often end up frustrated, confused, bloated, and yet still hungry.
Languid acceptance, half-hearted digestion, and mindless regurgitation are not a good recipe for developing minds that will be able to think us out of the social, economic, and environmental messes we have put ourselves in!
The meals created by hungry individuals weaving together their own education using their own timetables and the resources found in their communities are so much more delicious, nourishing and useful! Call it “slow learning!”
(This essay is adapted from the book Challenging Assumptions in Education.)