Curriculum as an Agenda for Social Reconstruction
Curriculum as an Agenda for Social Reconstruction
Image 7: social reconstruction
- Assumes no society is perfect and education exists to improve it.
- Curriculum is an agenda of knowledge and values for improving society.
- Ranges from teaching set changes to building critical thinking and the will to ask what should change, how, and why.
The seventh and last image points outward at society. Where the discrete-tasks image comes from the world of job training, this one comes from a vision of education as a force for changing the world. Putting the two side by side shows how wide the field of curriculum really is.
Curriculum as a force for change
The seventh image starts from a bold assumption: no society or culture is perfect, and the purpose of education is to improve it. On this view, the school should hand learners an agenda of knowledge and values that guides them to improve society and the institutions, beliefs, and activities that hold it up.
How that agenda is set can vary. It may draw heavily on input from learners themselves, or it may be shaped mostly by the decisions of teachers and educators about how learners should be taught to reconstruct society. Either way, the curriculum is pointed outward, at the world the learners will go on to change.
The method ranges across a wide span. At one end, the school simply teaches learners the desirable changes that ought to be made. At the other, it equips them with critical thinking and a genuine desire to keep asking the hard questions: what should be changed, how, and why? In both cases the curriculum is an agenda for cultural reconstruction, but the second trusts learners to direct the change themselves.
Give learners an agenda to improve an imperfect society
It assumes no society is perfect and education exists to make it better. Methods range from teaching set changes to building critical thinking and the will to ask what should change, how, and why.
From teaching set changes to building critical questioners
At one end, learners are simply taught the changes that should be made. At the other, they gain critical thinking and the drive to ask what should be changed, how, and why, and to act on it.
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