Last month’s historic decision of state and commonwealth education ministers to begin introducing a national curriculum raises a question about the kind of curriculum now required in our schools.  Is the challenge simply to iron out differences between existing state curricula?  Is the answer to be found in curricula of the past?  Or should we be taking this opportunity to redesign the school curriculum for the future?  These questions deserve careful and broad community debate.

First, a school curriculum should provide young people with an excellent preparation for further learning, life and work beyond school.  A question for debate is how well the present curriculum is doing this.  For example, are current physics, chemistry and biology courses the only or best ways to prepare young people for careers in science, engineering and technology?  Given that the nature of scientific work itself has changed, with more scientists working in multidisciplinary teams, often in more commercial contexts; that Australia faces a shortfall of perhaps 20,000 scientists over the next six years; and that relatively small numbers of senior secondary students are now taking these subjects, should we be radically rethinking the senior science curriculum?

How well do schools currently prepare young people with skills for life and work, including skills in teamwork, communication and problem solving?  What about attitudes and values?  Is there a place in the curriculum for features such as the International Baccalaureate’s community service requirement?  Posing questions of this kind is not an attempt to water down standards, or an attack on academic rigour; these questions must be debated if the school curriculum is to remain both rigorous and relevant.

Second, a school curriculum should make clear what students are expected to learn, know and be able to do as a result of going to school, as well as specifying minimally acceptable standards for skills such as literacy and numeracy.

This focus on the desired outcomes of schooling is in contrast to an earlier preoccupation with inputs.  In traditional classrooms, the job of teachers was to teach the syllabus, and the job of students was to learn.  If teachers covered the syllabus, then they could be judged to be ‘teaching’, even if nobody in the room was learning.  Today, greater efforts are being made to clarify and measure desired student learning.  Not surprisingly, those who would prefer a return to the past oppose this focus on ‘outcomes’, erroneously linking it to a range of other perceived ills, such as constructivism, whole language and fuzzy maths.  But the question for debate is what outcomes we now want from our schools.

Third, a school curriculum should promote the development of higher-order skills and deep understandings of subject matter.  The development of basic skills is an essential but not sufficient objective of a national curriculum.  For example, the ability to read and understand an opinion piece such as this depends first on basic skills in recognising and decoding words.  But a deeper understanding requires skills of critical analysis: perhaps an ability to read between the lines; an understanding of the nature of an opinion piece; an appreciation of the stance a newspaper has taken on an issue; and an understanding of the connections and motivations of the writer.  Higher-order skills of this kind are a defence against the control and manipulation of information and debate and are essential skills in democracies like Australia.

Research into human learning has made clear the importance of deep understandings of concepts and principles.  Knowledge of facts and procedures is crucial, but deep understandings allow knowledge to be organised and conclusions to be reached about what knowledge is relevant to a problem.  School curricula that emphasise large amounts of factual content can work against deep understanding.  International studies show that, while Australian students are outperformed by students in many other countries on tests of factual knowledge, they are among the best performers in the world on tests of higher-order reading skills and the application of mathematical and scientific concepts to everyday problems.  Should we be giving greater emphasis to factual learning in our schools?

Fourth, a school curriculum should be flexible enough to allow teachers to address individual needs and local contexts.  Children begin school with very different levels of development and readiness, and large differences between students are found in each subsequent year of school.  In some subjects, such as mathematics, these differences appear to increase over time, so that, by the end of primary school, the highest achieving students can be as much as six years ahead of the lowest achieving students in their grade.  Under these circumstances, treating all students as though they are equally ready for the same syllabus can lead to frustration for less advanced students and boredom for the more advanced. 

Research is clear: a one-size-fits-all approach is less likely to result in successful learning for all students than teaching which first identifies and then takes account of individuals’ levels of progress and readiness.  Research also is clear about the importance of connecting teaching to the interests and motivations of individual learners, of helping students to understand the relevance of what they are learning and of giving students a positive image of themselves as learners.  Efforts to develop more customised (or student-centred) approaches to teaching and learning are not a ‘new age’ obsession with making students feel good, or a rejection of the importance of explicit teaching; they are research-based strategies for improving learning.  The question is: What kind of curriculum best supports these strategies?

The time is right for a vigorous debate on these and other questions about the Australian school curriculum.

This article was originally published in Education Review. (‘More Curriculum Debate Needed,’ by Geoff Masters, Education Review, Vol 17, No. 03, May 16 2007, P19.)

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