Why I Dislike the New Curriculum

Here's something else to keep you occupied over this fabulous Spring break. This is about the new curriculum, which will be implemented after I graduate high school. It's an article I wrote for the school newspaper. If you want to read more from our school newspaper, take a look here: https://uhillhawkseyeblog.wordpress.com/

My school journey has been special. It has been a jumbled pile of programs, schools, teachers and curricula. Based on this, and the following accounts, I intend to demonstrate that I am quite qualified to speak on the effectiveness of the new curriculum; at least, more so than some ministry bureaucrats that last attended school 30 years ago.

After finding class overly easy in grade 4, I was volunteered, by my school, to take an IQ test. I scored highly enough that the compilation of enigmatic determiners of my future decided to deport me from traditional learning at my comfortable downtown school, to the contemporary and whimsical learning at the MACC program, located on the other side of the city. Oh, the MACC program – what a fantastical flop of education that was. The MACC theory: you get 30 kids, in grades 4 through 7, who score over 130 on their IQ tests, or are deemed to have incredible artistic abilities, and you put them in a room together – you see magic happen.

Assuming that you’re a logical reader, the question you’re presently asking yourself is the ever-important “how?” I’ll give you the laughable answer that the idealistic organizers thought of – “let their minds run free!” This is where MACC, an idea with potential, becomes a farce. To take 10-13-year-olds, no matter how big their brains, and expect them to have a distinguishable passion and enough insatiable desire and motive to innovate upon that passion is absurd – and I say that nicely.

So, when I hear that the new curriculum is meant to provide more free-reign to students, my post traumatic stresses from MACC become resurrected, and I shudder. After 3 years of MACC, and after a year of “Hamber Academy”, a program similarly developed off the principle of Google’s “20% Time”, I can assuredly say that the proposed programs are not in the students’ best interests.

Am I advocating for something so ultra-traditional that it mimics the educational system that my parents were trudged through in Socialist Yugoslavia? Not at all, I’m merely encouraging school to provide its most essential service to its -and society’s- most valuable consumers – children. I mean, looking at the children who have come here from traditional-style schools in, say, China, what we see is kids who are staggeringly better at both exams and at innovation. Why? Because innovation is impossible without a solid base of traditional-learning.

School’s purpose is to expose children to as many activities as possible, so as to allow for children to discover a talent or passion, which they would then continue on later in life. Generally, children cannot find a passion themselves, not only because humans are innately lazy creatures, but because they don’t have a breadth of resources and activities on their doorstep. If this dangerous transition in school’s role, and in students’ lives, takes place, it poses a threat to a plethora of sectors: pro-traditional-learning parents, namely immigrants, like mine, will be enraged with the lack of concrete work. This has already happened at Norma Rose. The importance of teachers will diminish, as they will begin to be seen as supervisors instead of educators. After all, my MACC teacher was easily replaceable. And, most critically, we will see an increase in unprepared students graduating; students who may have viewed their “inspiring” learning-hub as an excellent excuse for wasting-away. And no one would notice, because, obviously, the marking system would have to be changed as well, and would likely move to one more akin to the MACC one, where each student grades themselves. Kids need direction and they need adults. Let’s ease-up on them gradually, but equip them with a traditional-learning-base first – they can’t be creative without one.

I turned out an ambition-less, depressed and lazy child. I had potential, but it disintegrated without guidance. Transitioning to U Hill was difficult, and I cannot accustom myself to it still, but I definitely have learned something in this system. No number -no IQ- will ever change that. I was not an aberration. Out of my MACC class, I know of two kids who had already discerned their passions at 12, worked on them, and flourished in a way that would not have been possible in a regular school environment. That’s 2 out of 30 – I may be failing math, but even I know that those aren’t very good odds, especially when applied to all children, not just the “gifted” ones. MACC was a failure – a lot of us emerged less smart; a lot of us exploited the freedom, but who could blame us? We were just being kids. The same will happen with the new curriculum.