Curriculum Development

As most people know, curriculum is the Latin word for racetrack. It is the course which chariots, horse, or humans run; it defines their ambit, and hence their ambition (which is the driving force behind their performance on the track).

The point about curricula is that they are courses laid out with a certain amount of planning. A straight course, like a 100m sprint, is an explosion of power and grace aimed in one direction; a curved course allows some manoeuvre and perhaps the display of slightly more complex skills; a 10,000m race or a marathon — the latter run across a rather more tortuous course — allows the display of fortitude and resource management as well.

In all cases, there is a plan. There is a central idea behind the layout of the course, there is an idea of what we are to be testing and how we are to test it.

Unfortunately, in many institutions, the idea of curriculum development has become something more akin to the design of a fun fair or an amusement park. You see freaks of all kinds, extreme performances, ostensibly all connected to one or more themes, but in reality just designed to put people through their paces in peculiar and novel ways, and collect money from them.

That's not to say that a fun fair or amusement park cannot have a rigorous curriculum design. Some can indeed show curricular excellence. What I'm saying is that a fun fair or amusement park need not have a rigorous curriculum design, and hence curriculum development is of no import to the economic model thereof.

My fond hope is that holistic curriculum design and development will be elevated to the necessary art it is in the sphere of education. What I'm now seeing is teams of bickering specialists carving out little fun fair and amusement park booths and tents for themselves. As long as they have space in the fairground or park, they're happy. They have no thought at all for their relationships with the rest of the carnival.

COPS

Sometimes, people ask me stuff like, "What is the model on which you base your ideas about curriculum planning and development?"

To be honest, I don't have one of those name-branded models. I've read too much stuff to attribute my ideas to specific researchers or specific models. What I think is a reasonable answer is this: In any endeavour targeted at humans, we begin with the human basis, and then we follow up with continuations that humans can accept as rational.

Today I was chatting with an officer from the Tower of the Book. She effectively asked me that very question. So I said, "It's all about COPS!" To her quizzical look, I continued, "Culture, Organisation, Process, Sense-Making."

That was an impromptu effort, actually. But it does cover the four basic ideas I have.

In any enterprise of the human sort, you should start out by examining the state of the art, the situation, the environment, the background or context of the matter. This is Culture.

Then you organise the material you have found in a way that is easy to see, to analyse, or whatever else you want to do with it. This is Organisation.

You then work out the necessary things you have to do with the material you've organised. This is Process.

Finally, you package it nicely and sell it to other people as the fruit of your consultancy. This is called Sense-Making (although some people call it Salesmanship, Story-Telling, or Scenario-Planning).

And there you have it. A new model, just fresh off the press.

I will close by noting that the meta-skill required to do this is itself the product of such thinking. It is either cyclical or recursive. I have yet to make sense of it, but it pays the bills.

Enrichment Programmes

This phrase has been rattling around in my head more frequently than usual over the last few days. There have been three main contexts in my mind.

The first context is school activities. Someone asked me how to choose a good enrichment programme for the sprouts. I replied that it's always good to ask yourself what you mean by enrichment.

What I mean by enrichment in an educational context is some process by which the mental soil becomes more fertile and the potential depth and breadth of future education become greater. In that sense, limited 'enrichment programmes' which are focused on specific activities (e.g. 'Math Olympiad') are less enriching than those which have broader or more fundamental application (e.g. 'How to Understand a Language Which You Have Never Seen Before').

The second context is nuclear proliferation. It has been amusing and yet frightening to see how the Stuxnet virus targeted and discombobulated the Iranian nuclear facilities over the last few months. In order to concentrate useful nuclear isotopes such as uranium-235, finely-calibrated centrifuges are used to separate raw material by mass.

The Stuxnet virus sabotaged the centrifuges, thus knocking the Iranian enrichment programme off its stride. This is one danger of having over-specialised enrichment programmes, I suppose: you become too dependent on a specific mechanism.

The third context is charity funding. Over the last few years, we've seen quite a lot of what I call 'enrichment programmes' — that is, programmes in which a constituency (a congregation or a support population that gives to a particular charity) put lots of funds into building something rather than doing something.

Wealth is thereby concentrated in one place but not released to do good. For example, if a charity buys a piece of property at $8m as an investment to be sold at a higher future price, then $8m in contributions go stagnant until the property is sold. If the property develops negative equity, then the contributions are provisionally wasted.

It has been an enriching experience to see all these kinds of enrichment programmes and to think about how education can indeed be enriched. I think that it's a good thing to have a sort of pyramid model for enrichment programmes, with strong basic modules at the base and a bunch of interesting but not so broad-based modules further up. If you build a base on modules that are not foundational, then the pyramid tends to crumble and enrichment is uneven, erratic and perhaps dangerous.

Scorched Earths

The People's Republic of China controls 95% of the world's rare earths. To a chemist, this is a statement that should already hint at the world that is to come. A small number of nations appear to control petroleum, but the USA and USSR used to be net exporters while convincing everybody that the Arabs were sitting on all of it. And petroleum and natural gas are to be had all round the world.

But the Chinese control 95% of the world's rare earths. What does that mean? It means that catalysts, electronics, and about 500 other industries will all be paying higher and higher amounts to the Chinese, should they decide to clamp down on export. It is the reason I once said that if one could invest, one should invest in Chinese rare-earth mines. If. Failing which, of course, one should buy up the remaining 5% as much as possible. A lot of that, however, is in places like Mongolia. Or Tibet. And maybe Afghanistan.

It's hard to think of the educational future when the syllabi and curricula of this present moment are constructed on abstract premises that don't quite meet the realities of the world, the flesh and the Devil. Natural sciences, human sciences, and applied sciences, that is, for many of the people in these benighted days.

And what of the humanities and aesthetics? I think they ought to have been removed from the formal curriculum a long time ago.

What? Why?

Because the humanities and aesthetics should have been made part of our lives ages ago. That they have to be taught to young people shows us what a hash we've made of things in the name of pragmatism. The old ways of telling the young where we've come from, what our family, clan, community and social history is all about — those things are rare. And an appreciation of aesthetics, most often found in the young, evanesces too quickly and is gone.

So the second best solution is to keep the humanities and aesthetics prominent, while working out a curriculum that will teach people why the fact that China controls 95% of the world's rare earths is a very significant fact indeed.

Integrated Programmes (Part V): Psychological Spacecraft

The title of this last part of my little 'space programme' series has an unusual genesis. It comes from the first line of a recent article in the venerable NYT. In that article, Benedict Carey summarizes the difference between modern findings about the student brain and peculiar but long-accepted ideas which amount to little more than 'psychological witchcraft'. Among these ideas are the concepts of 'learning styles' and 'multiple intelligences'.

I have mentioned Howard Gardner before, here and here. I have reconsidered my feelings then. I no longer think Gardner was scamming people, because I have read more of his stuff and I perceive that he genuinely worked his way from irreproachable truth about what education should be, to 'psychological witchcraft', and then recantation of such things. Then again, he's off on another tangent lately.

But in Atlantis, all too many people fell prey to the cult of Polygnostic Gardnerism and or that of Learning Styles. They both sounded so logical, so reifying. At that point, most people should have paused to think. As in Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man, there are two main fallacies in all of educational and cognitive research — the fallacy of ranking and the fallacy of reification. In the former, we rank things that cannot or should not be ranked, because our sensory input is based on the comparison of values. In the latter, we simplify the complex overmuch because our brains are adept at eliminating detail in order to preserve focus.

The Integrated Programme of the Citadel fell easy prey to these cults. Instead of working on a solid foundation, the Citadel ended up deciding to build castles on sand, or in air, or out of cloud and light.

In a document I remember attempting to present at a convocation of the Magistratum, my team had attempted to point out that we should define a relatively compact core of content material, while also focussing on methodology of delivery and supporting activity. The sequence of material was to have been coordinated across all disciplines and woven explicitly into a whole by means of deliberately-crafted links and through specific teaching modes.

While trying to work on this basis from 1999 to 2004, the core team was assailed by people who wanted to secede from the integrated model. They found it too tiresome to justify each unit in terms of theoretical grounding and relationships with other units. They found it too tiresome to put together the exhaustive documentation we wanted. And finally, they went to the Grand Inquisitor and told him to disband us tiresome people. And so he did.

The consequence, as Gnomus put it in runes of fire that appeared upon my scrying-glass one day, was: "Inferior product. Dodgy curriculum [content]. No oversight. Unsound assessment policy. No review mechanism. No curriculum model. How to use?"

Gnomus was absolutely right. The spaceships that we were to launch had been cut down to shuttles. And the shuttles, according to the Grand Inquisitor, were to take us to the stars. "Per ardua, ad astra!" we could imagine him saying (although he took pains to tell us that he was not into 'flowery language').

What he then did was a very simple thing. As in C M Kornbluth's infamous prize-winning SF short story, The Marching Morons, the Grand Inquisitor launched the equivalent of a spacecraft design competition, in which many spacecraft were designed and decoratively advertised. Our in-house designer was kept busy producing lovely artwork for non-existent starships that were actually something like submarines. The spacecraft were purely psychological. They existed only to blast people into space. Whether they would actually get anywhere because of the spacecraft was doubtful.

The only thing that saved the programme, in the end, was that the young astronauts came with their own personal spacecraft. Some could fly unassisted, some lacked only fuel or guidance systems. Fortunately, some of us were good at supplying the missing parts. I have to say, though, that those young astronauts of the 2006-2007 batch were far better than the Grand Inquisitor could ever have dreamt. You should have seen the look of sick relief on his face when the results came out.

Integrated Programmes (Part III): Shuttles, Not Spaceships

You will probably have noticed by now that my posts on the Integrated Programmes of Atlantis have titles reminiscent of 1960s American space programmes. This is true for a very good reason. I grew up in that era; I was two years old when the Apollo 11 mission delivered Eagle to the moon, and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on it. "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." The memes are still alive for me.

Similarly, the launch of the Atlantean Integrated Programmes occasioned much fanfare. When the Temple of the Flaming Book consolidated under its Chinese name on the Hill of Tin, allying with the Ladies of the Southern Ocean, it was a big thing (and a very clever move by the latter, for those who were observing closely). When the Hall of the Gryphons reunited with their sisters to form the Gryphon Academy, it was a big thing (and the Jade-Green Hill is now covered with a sprawling campus in black, white and green, although the sisters remain at a distance). But the convoluted mess that evolved organically from the Citadel of Wyverns and its titular masters of methodology was quite something else.

The thing is that everything was launched as if on Boeing Saturn V rockets. We were promised spaceships, but we ended up with shuttles. From the promise of deep blue ocean navies, we ended up fishing along the littoral in tiny boats (and one fast schooner, which I will get to some time in the next few posts). What do I mean, and how did this come to be? Let me bring you behind the scenes.

On the evening of 28 October 1999, the Argonaut and I drafted the first proposal for the Wyvern Programme. It was entitled 'More, Not Less' and it was a direct riff off the 1997 'Teach Less, Learn More' slogan. In that first draft, we were thinking big, and were encouraged to do so. In our minds, we had nothing less than a grand unification theory, in which every member of the Grand Congregation would have a role to play.

By 2002, things had bogged down. (Of course, by then our names had been removed from the front of the proposal and somebody else's name was on it.) We sat around 'writing songs that voices never shared.' The Hierarchs had been mulling over our proposal for more than a year. And then the Thaumaturge summoned us for two meetings, in April and again in July.

In those meeting, he chastised the Grand Inquisitor for pusillanimous behaviour. He wondered aloud why we had so constrained our great vision. The Thaumaturge was himself a Wyvern, and you could tell that his patience was wearing thin. I watched the Grand Inquisitor sweat. He blustered a bit. I continued taking notes.

We found ourselves in a mighty city upon the Southern Ocean in March 2003. That was when I was stunned when the Grand Inquisitor told me to begin preparing a course in the humanities. It was the beginning of the end—not because the humanities are less than the sciences, but because they are greater, and he had just made me a very large target.

Some time after, we began on the project codenamed 'In His Service'. The original vision was to create a gateway course that would prepare all our students for gainful work in any humanities discipline. After planning a broad and challenging outline, the draft went to committee. I will never forget what happened next.

One by one, various teachers complained the material was too difficult to prepare, and that the students would not be able to handle it. Others complained it was too different from the ordinary courses already being taught. And then, I was accused of empire-building. The course was shredded, reduced, and a new chairperson appointed. The rockets were going to launch shuttles, not spaceships.

The other project I worked on was codenamed 'Capsule'. The Grand Inquisitor had almost named it 'iPod', but we had had to tell him about the penalties for infringement of trademark. He wanted to know who had dared to use that name. We sniggered.

Unfortunately, the other project was taken over by philosophers who fancied themselves mathematicians. Even more unfortunately, Iron Man, who was nominally in charge of the project, found himself blindsided by other people's enthusiasms. I have only one thing to say, and it is found in the writings of St Augustine: "The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and confine man in the bonds of Hell." Not that I have anything personal against most mathematicians, you understand.

And so, we entered into the Dark Ages, bearing bright torches that we hoped would illuminate the way. And they did, despite the huge amounts of smoke they gave off.

The Core of Education

Over the last few years, I've been exposed to many education debates. These debates have been about whether 'holistic education' is a viable educational concept, what an education ought to consist of, how educational results should be interpreted, how educational reform should be carried out and what its objectives should be, and many other related matters.

I've mentioned a lot of these matters on this blog. Some of them have exercised me more than others, and some have infuriated me or amused me more than others. But I think that there are still some basic questions that all educators should think about before they debate the more specific issues.

For me, the basic questions are: "Who do we educate?", "To what end(s)?", "With what curriculum?" Questions that are also very important but not so basic are: "In what way?", "Developing what skills?", "How do we evaluate success?" and "Where are the material resources?"

We educate students. This means we need to know what the range of human ability is, and how such ability is developed. Lots of new disciplines have developed in the 1990s and 2000s. We now know more about how the brain works, and how flexible it is in achieving goals, for example. We know it adapts dynamically in many ways.

The ends of education are almost always rooted in usefulness to society. In a fishing village, catching fish for survival and trade is a main objective. For our society, we should think carefully about what ends serve it best. We can't just say, 'Everything!'

The curriculum must be carefully constructed. You can teach skills like chewing, but without food, this skill is a lot less useful. It follows that skills are less important than context, ability and content — because of the adaptability of the brain. Learning to read, for example, is different for many people; there is no one specific technique. What's important is that there is something to read, and that there is a lot of it. Preferably, what there is to read will be useful in attaining other objectives.

Once we know who we're educating, why we are doing it, and along what lines, then only should we think about whether we can evaluate success. Logically, given sufficient education, students should be able, at some point, to continue their own education on whatever foundations have been built. They should also be able to do the equivalent of catching fish in a fishing village context.

As for material resources, it's surprising how much you can do with limited resources. Isaac Newton's work on light, gravity and calculus (among many other things) did not have the benefit of the more than 300 years of technology accumulated since his time; yet, we still study a lot of it.

A few years back, I posted some thoughts on an ideal education. Since then, I've thought a lot more, but not deviated significantly from those ideas. (Well, actually there is one deviation: I no longer think that all educational outcomes necessarily imply the presence of an education that is designed to produce those specific outcomes. It's a bit like thinking about intelligent beings, realising that 'intelligent' is a self-bestowed term, and that it doesn't necessarily indicate an intelligent designer. Haha.)

The bottom-line has to be increased functionality. We teach reading because we converted spoken language to symbols millennia ago, and the main method of effective persistent communication between humans relies on decoding those symbols. It's dysfunctional to be illiterate or sub-literate in this human context. But teaching something like chemistry is a lot less generally applicable, although it may be a lot more powerful for those who will be using it for something specific.

What we need, therefore, is reading material that will challenge the student's ability to decode symbols and derive meaning in as lossless a way as possible. Finnegan's Wake might be too extreme, but a fairly high standard of competence in at least one language should be developed.

The next stage is the ability to compose using these symbols, in such a way that effective communication is achieved. This is attained when a majority of people reading your stuff can understand it or at least decode it enough to see what you intend to communicate. The closer they get to your intended message, the better you are. After that, of course, you can write for elegance and beauty and stuff like that; it's just like building a house — walls and roof first, other stuff later.

Looking back at 2007 and the young people I taught in that bygone era, I realise that they were already good. What on earth were we teaching them, then? If the bottom-line was increased functionality, did we give them that? Or were the examinations just a way to rubber-stamp existing proficiency? Questions, questions...

Two Days

Well, we're almost there... I figure that if I have shifted something like 50 litres of water a day over a distance of about 50 metres, that makes it 2500 kg-metres. Since I have been lifting it against gravity, I have therefore burnt something like 25 kJ of energy. That's about 6 food calories, and one Oreo™ cookie would feed me back another 40-50 food calories anyway. ARGH.

Fortunately, I am an inefficient human being, and I therefore know that I have burnt a lot more than 25 kJ of personal energy. In fact, I am so inefficient that I have probably burnt a whole lot more than that. Yay, me. I can now go for dinner tonight and eat a lot with minimum stress and lots of joy.

I have also managed to spend enough time at the flat to put part of my library into functional order. That makes me happy, and if the Hierophant were there, I am sure he would have been happy too. The only problem is that the flat has NO coffee in it, unless you count those frozen beans which are a little useless without a grinder of some sort. Sigh.

In breaking news, I am about to embark on the writing of two new modules. Just to refresh everyone's memory, I recently finsihed writing modules on 'Belief Systems' and 'Humans and Other Species' for the new IGCSE subject, 'Global Perspectives'. I am about to begin on 'Water' and 'Conflict and Peace'. I wanted to do 'Law and Criminality', but that's off the agenda for now.

Life is good. My brain has worked very hard, and it is happy.

Global Themes (Part I): Belief Systems

It's funny. Just the other day I was musing about the new Granta Syndicate syllabus on Global Perspectives. Then I got an email requesting that I prepare an outline for the first theme in the syllabus, Belief Systems.

How does one go about this task? I realise that in the past, I used to sit down and churn these things out while my then-boss appropriated them and touted them as his own stuff. That was driven home to me in a big way when a report my colleagues and I wrote was submitted to the higher authorities with no changes at all, except that our names had been deleted and replaced with another name. Heh. Fortunately, while the hardcopy and softcopy may have been sold for a mess of pottage, the software and hardware are resident in this shell. I can still generate things like that, and I can do so more lucratively, as I was telling a friend not ten minutes ago.

I have now decided to adopt a 'Creative Commons' approach for any of my educational consulting projects in which I generate resource materials. Advice is given freely for reproduction in not-for-profit endeavours. But if you want to make money out of your customers by using my stuff, you will pay.

Digressions apart, here is how one goes about doing such things.

Any package of this kind has a structure consisting of five sequential parts, more or less. (The craft of knowing what other parts to add and when to add them is a separate issue, not covered here.) These five parts are: Overview & Intent, Key Points, Cases & Examples, Links & Extensions, Sources. Each part can be extended or elaborated into multiple sections. When you have exhausted all the sections, you have a package.

A package outline consists of a framing device which covers the five major parts so that your client can see what those parts look like and how they work together. If the client wants to know more, or if the client thinks he's smart enough to reverse engineer the package concept on sight, that's his choice. But you must ensure there is enough on display for such a choice to be made.

In the case of Belief Systems, the obvious approach is to begin with a quick historical survey of what people have believed and why. The intent would be to ask why people believe, and then explain the strands which make up different belief systems. The first part therefore contains an historical overview of animism, religion, magic and science as the four main kinds of belief and how these four strands of belief can be compared to the modern paradigms of faith and reason.

The second part must then give the key points of major belief systems and how they demonstrate their coherence. Marxism is as much a belief system as Buddhism, and you can probably say the same for any reasonably coherent philosophy which informs the way people think about life; a belief system is the system that underpins a worldview or a way of life.

The third part would probably include cases of religious, humanist and mathematical belief systems. But since this is a course on global perspectives and not one on philosophy, you'd have to show applicability to life choices and the impact of large movements based on these belief systems on things happening in the world today.

The fourth part would show links to the other fifteen themes; one good example would be how a belief system affects a people's belief in universal education and the form it should take.

The last part would reference some of the more useful or convenient available sources. I always begin by recommending other people's good packages. For example, J M Roberts has a knack for summarising huge historical ideas in a few pages. It isn't for the purists, but it does generate a greater sense of accessibility.

And there you have it: my belief system regarding the generation of educational curriculum packages.

Disciplinary Philosophies 102

Oh, very well. Sigh. If you're going to insist that I teach a subject called The Disciplines: Philosophies of Knowledge, then I suppose I should give it a shot. BANG! Now clean up the blood on the floor, there's a good administrator.

Really though, when I last posted on this topic, I received a lot of verbal feedback but no comments. It must really be a sticky topic, redolent of the pitcher plant and other such traps. So what I'm going to do is go back a bit to a workshop I once ran in the Second Age of Humanity, in which I forced a bunch of educators to consider the answers to some silly question involving sports apparatus and its distribution.

It turns out that people have no problems thinking about stuff that either has no particular labels automatically assigned to it, or has very specific labels automatically assigned to it. The first kind of stuff has no labels (either implicit or explicit), so people aren't forced to think too hard; the second kind has the labels already pasted on, so it's not a problem. It's like being in a supermarket. The cashier looks at your stuff. If it is supermarket stuff and it is labelled, PING, and you pay $xx.xx. If it is not supermarket stuff, then nothing happens. Simple. But if it is supermarket stuff with a faulty or damaged barcode (i.e. it is stuff with no proper label but it has a kind of label) then it takes a significantly longer time to process.

One purpose of education is to teach a person how to make her own labels so that she can process things faster. In fact, if she can ascertain the value (intrinsic value, situational value, utility value, relative value, whatever) of something, life becomes a lot easier. And another purpose of education is to teach a person to use labelling so cleverly that other people agree with her.

So when we teach a language, it is important to know a few things. Where did the language come from? What were the main uses of this language? What is the history of this language? Does it automatically put a bias on certain things? How can you use it to express yourself honestly, biasedly, and manipulatively? How can others use it? How do others use it? What is the philosophical justification for saying something is well-said, well-written, or well-balanced in that language?

These are examples of the kind of question you should ask when learning about a new discipline – in this case, the study of a specific language within the larger group of linguistic disciplines. When I began to pick up languages, I learnt them in little pieces just like everyone else. But along the way, I also picked up lots of historical, social and cultural factoids linked to these pieces. And slowly, I learnt that there were philosophical questions and elements unique to the learning of language, or more suited to that kind of endeavour.

For example, one hardly thinks of science as a vehicle for conveying and maintaining cultural identity. One might make a case for history, but not economics. But the arts – language arts, performing arts, visual arts, etc – are prime candidates for this function. Hence, the learning of such things carries a specific kind of philosophical baggage.

To conclude this short post, if I had to teach a course called The Disciplines: Philosophies of Knowledge, I would approach it along these lines. What are the questions that pertain more to one discipline than another? How do we answer them? And what are the implications of the answers we might find? For this is what such a course has to be about.

An Ideal Education

I don't think I would have chosen to be a teacher if not for two things. The first thing relies on what is easily confirmed as fact, and most people would accept it to be a valid excuse; the second relies on what is much less easily confirmed as fact by the scientific paradigm, and is sure to be hotly disputed by many people.

The first thing is that I come from a family heavily laden with teachers. Studies have shown that this tends to correlate with the chance that someone will also become one; it is the apprenticeship phenomenon – growing up surrounded by the instruments (red pens, record books, test papers etc) and methodologies (inquiry-based learning, small group study, project work etc) of a trade tends to make one adopt the behaviours associated with that trade. I know for certain that very nearly half of my ancestors and siblings are or have been teachers. Some of my unfortunate students have thus had multiple doses of a teaching philosophy which is roughly the same and just as vexatious.

The second thing is that I believe I have a gift for a peculiar kind of teaching; it does not focus well on details but is good for weaving an extensive web of connections. Victims of this teaching mode, should they succumb to it, therefore learn a lot about many things and occasionally not enough about specific things. I've learnt to remedy that by pointing out where the specifics can be found. The crux of that matter to me is this: it is easy to find details and specific answers (search engines, anyone?) but it is not so easy to bring concepts together from across the spectrum of human knowledge and link them into something useful. However, I confess that this makes me a pain to some students.

Further to the first point, I have to say that the kind of family I came from is characterised by traits conducive to learning:

• high implicit standards of achievement
• a lot of tolerance for eccentricity and experimentation
• reservoirs of good humour (and horrendous puns)
• long-suffering patience mixed with rare moments of terrifying wrath at stupid behaviour
• a love of multifarious erudition
• a tendency to hoard books on many disciplines, in many genres, from many periods, with many perspectives

Further to the second point, I believe that teachers who are good at thinking across many areas of interest keep their brains more active that those who don't. By this I do not mean that teachers who teach a specific subject are fools, or that specialists are like idiots savant. I mean that while a teacher might teach a specific subject, that teacher cannot keep focussing the mind onto a tiny subset of that subject (like what my mother once called "an expert on four texts and useless elsewhere"). The broader the range, the greater the challenge.

Which brings me, at last, to the point. What is an ideal education?

I believe that the roots of an ideal education lie in cultivation of the soil, metaphorically speaking. A fertile mind is the result of painstakingly tended soil, adequate nutrients and watering, proper periods of light and darkness, and some periods of reflective calm or peaceful weather (in between the storms and floods, presumably). Planting seeds in a fertile mind results in growth if the fundamental substance is present. A good farmer can optimise this growth by pruning and other interventions. Rare is the plant that prunes itself to outstanding effect; however, the natural balance of regulatory hormones can do this fairly well in many cases. Some plants therefore come with built-in advantages for a given terroir. It's worth it to remember, however, that accidents of nature and incidents of management can make any plant do very badly or very well.

So what does this translate to in application?

The first thing to master is word-based communication. It initiates a specific feedback loop. Once you can talk, you can give feedback and ask for detailed and useful responses. Babies have hardly any comprehension, calculation, consideration or contemplation. They are limited to imprecise learning for a time. But to be educated, a person must have control of language in at least one aspect. People should minimally have functional ability to communicate intelligibly within their social context. It must not stop there. There must be opportunities for extension.

The second thing to master, therefore, is the ability to understand large chunks of word-based material. It is all right to base this on unwritten forms only if you come from a strong oral tradition. People who don't read need prodigious memories by our standards. So everyone should read a lot if they are not going to spend the effort to memorise everything they hear. This second mastery demands the interactive use of both ear and eye to handle the spoken and written word well. Literature follows language; the two feed off each other and regather to greater effect in the mind. As you read, so also do you learn how others have expressed their thoughts, and you learn ways to express your own thoughts more lucidly and exactly.

If I had to plan a curriculum, therefore, it would begin with language and literature. History, geography and all other accounts of living behaviour would creep in. The world of ideas and of mind would follow. The ability to apply the mind to problem-solving, information gathering and manipulation of the environment would follow. Design and technology, mathematics and engineering would be mobilised at this point. What of music and the other arts? I think those should be part of the learning environment. Eventually, if I had to summarise the game plan for an ideal curriculum, I would condense it to three points:

• learning to explore and synthesize from what is found
• learning to define different areas of knowledge and choose appropriate tools or paradigms based on this
• learning to develop a personal curriculum, plan of study, or schedule of self-education

Thank goodness I don't have to plan all of this curriculum. It's already available out there if you look hard enough, and I am glad that my ancestors had similar ideas.

In recent years, a lot of my students have taken to speculating about what skill-sets I possess. I can only say to them: nothing that you can't surpass. I honestly believe that at least 40% of my students are much brighter, much more talented than I am. I am amazed by their ability. What some of them need is the self-belief to look beyond the constraints of school curriculum (which in every place and time is necessarily narrow) and aim for the far horizon. For the best is yet to be. Heh.

Disciplinary Philosophies 101

Just for a moment, if I were asked to be in charge of teaching a course like The Disciplines: Philosophies of Knowledge, I would take a deep breath and then say, "No." Or maybe, just say, "Know."

Why?

Because it has occurred to me that teaching this to students guarantees, under the majority of present systems of education, that they become largely independent of all but the best teachers. The rest would be superfluous, and that would upset them for various reasons – loss of authority, power or control; loss of prestige; loss of meaningful exertion (or pretense thereat); and of course, loss of income, logically speaking.

But let's just for the sake of argument say that I was going to do it. What would I include?

I think it would be hard. We'd have to begin with the earliest forms of knowledge, forms dating back to times before formal education (or at least, literate formal education). How to see. How to listen. How to tell a story. How to remember. How to hunt and/or find something. Magic. Cooking. Sex. Life. Farming. How to make stuff. How to make things out of the stuff you made.

And then, we'd have to look at literacy and numeracy, and their descendants. Then systems, patterns, relationships – and how to invent them, create them, modify and confuse them. The art of religion, the religion of art. The alchemy of beauty, the beauty of alchemy.

Then it occurs to me. We of the old pantheon did try very hard to do it. And it was all set aside. Too difficult for the children, some people said. Whoever they were. And that brings me back to the beginning of this odd post. "No."

Curriculum Development

One of the phrases which is always percolating near the front of my mind, metaphorically speaking, is curriculum development. Broadly speaking, this refers to the conceptualisation of a course of study, its objectives and aims, its delivery, structure and support - and how these elements are realised.

The odd thing was that this phrase came to mind when I read this article. I am sure that the clever people amongst us will understand exactly why I thought that way. I myself, not being so clever, fail to see the connection. But I have my suspicions, and I must think more deeply on this.