There’s no getting around it. The traditional general education curriculum, the one presently frozen in bureaucratic place with subject-matter standards and standardized tests, is fundamentally flawed. It ignores extremely important fields of knowledge, denies the fundamental, systemically integrated nature of knowledge, and lacks criteria establishing the relative importance of various content. It vastly overworks memory to the neglect of all other thought processes, has no overarching aim, and no mechanisms forcing it to adapt to social change. It doesn't move smoothly through increasingly complex conceptual levels, disregards the brain's need for order and organization, and fails to address complex, critically important moral and ethical issues. It casts learners in unnatural, passive roles, neglects alternatives to text and speech as sources of learning, and lends itself to superficial methods of evaluation, (just to begin a list).
These problems can be solved only by putting in place a curriculum that respects the holistic, systemically integrated nature of knowledge, focused on an aim clear enough to guide the choice of instructional materials and methods, and simple enough to be understood by every teacher and learner.
