CURRENT APPROACHES TO CURRICULUM

      What should the young be taught?  Ask a dozen educators, and there'll likely be a dozen different responses: "The main purpose of educating is to introduce students to the various fields of knowledge," ". . . to teach them to think," ". . . to prepare them for useful, productive work," ". . . to create democratic citizens," ". . . to develop individual potential," ". . . to teach the basics," ". . . to transmit our cultural heritage," ". . . to meet student needs," ". . . to instill virtue," ". . . to improve scores on standardized tests," and so on.
      Perhaps because of the lack of agreement about overall direction, what's happening today in most classrooms is best explained by what happened last year.  What happened last year is best explained by what happened the year before.  What happened the year before is best explained by what happened the year before that.  And so on, back to the 19th century when chemistry, psychology, biology, economics, physics, sociology, language and the other familiar disciplines took on distinct identities and began to be taught as subjects and courses.
      Underlying the disciplines is the assumption that reality—the world around us we're trying to understand—is so complicated it has to be "taken apart" to be understood.  However, these "parts" are also complicated, so complicated no one can master more than one or two of them. A "good" education, therefore, is thought to be one that gives the student a little of several disciplines and a lot of one of them.
      This assumption about the organization of knowledge could be represented graphically like this: