The Need for a New Common Sense

The decline of the community and family leaves a society with a problem it cannot ignore. People still have to get along, resolve conflicts, and make sense of a complicated world, but the tools that once did this no longer work. The curriculum is asked to help build new ones.

The challenges these changes pose

The social changes already traced set four clear challenges for curriculum development. A modern curriculum needs to build:

1. A new common sense fit for modern conditions.
2. Social understanding of how society now works.
3. Methods and techniques for resolving social conflicts.
4. The elimination of class bias from the curriculum itself.

The first of these is the key, and the others depend on it.

Why the old common sense no longer works

In simple community life, ordinary common sense was enough to handle issues and problems. Disputes were settled by face-to-face relations, by the common experience of the group’s members, and by the mature judgement of the senior members of the community. People knew each other, shared a world, and could trust an elder’s verdict. That was common sense, and it worked.

The cultural changes of a modern society demand more than this. Old common sense is still useful for dealing with relations among neighbours and within a community. But it is unsatisfactory for dealing with issues between people and huge social organizations, such as corporate enterprises, business interests, farmers, labour, and professional bodies.

These large-scale issues cannot be handled with the ideas and attitudes meant for the intimate relationships of a community; trying to do so only ends in disillusion. Big organizations set policies to suit their own interests, not what would be desirable in the life of a small community. Those policies apply equally to everyone, ignoring individual interests, desires, or needs, and to an individual they feel like rigid structures that limit choice and action. The trouble is that the old common sense no longer works here, and no new common sense has yet taken its place.

Flashcard

How were disputes settled by the old common sense of a simple community?

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Answer

By face-to-face relations, shared experience, and the judgement of senior members

People knew each other and trusted an elder’s verdict. This worked for neighbours but is unsatisfactory for dealing with huge impersonal organizations.

What the new common sense and the developer must do

A new common sense is needed for a period in which relationships are of an impersonal nature and remote, growing out of the interdependence of modern society. It must be broad. It has to include rules and ideas for governing the relationships between people and organizations, and between organizations themselves, in the large social groups that have displaced the old community and its simple life of intimacy.

This points directly to the role and responsibility of the curriculum developer. Their job is to provide chances for children, young people, and adults to engage in the common task of rebuilding ideas and attitudes, so that those ideas and attitudes become suitable for social adjustment and action in a period dominated by a complex web of impersonal social relations. The curriculum, in other words, becomes the workshop where a society builds the new common sense it can no longer inherit.

Flashcard

What must a new common sense be broad enough to govern?

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Answer

Relationships between people and organizations, and between organizations themselves

The old common sense governed neighbours. A new one must handle the impersonal, remote relations of an interdependent society. The curriculum is where learners rebuild the ideas to do this.