Who decides what subject matter can be in curriculum? Before I dive into the reading presented by Ben Levin, here is my guess as to how it’s decided. I would assume that each provincial government must delegate it’s own officials to work within the ministry of education. The Ministry would then Identify what subject areas are deemed to be the most critical for young learners to interact with. From there onward the ministry will form a team of people who they consider to be knowledgeable, diverse, and experienced enough within the realms of that subject area and teaching that they can work together on developing their best version of the curriculum. Many revisions later, an approval allows the curriculum to go out to the schools where principals, teachers and students alike make changes to their content to best fit what the curriculum asks.
After doing the reading, I learned many new things about how curriculum is developed. In fact other than the fact that each province can run it’s own curriculum, I knew very little about how the whole process works. It seems as though how “mold-able” each education curriculum is, is really up to the province. Since they can choose what credentials each person who takes the mantle of educational power, these credentials could be diverse from school committee to government worker or they could keep it strictly within their own workers to keep more control over it. For example within the article it states a person who is assigned within cabinet, may elect to add or remove something from the curriculum should they not see it fit to be there. This in essence to me is really total control, since this person could just then be passing on the beliefs of a political party onto the education system without a means of combating against it.
In such a case it would be then impossible to say the education is not political, because when you look all the way to the top of the pyramid to see who holds the power of decision making, you truly realize that the power is being monopolized. What really concerns me the most is what you do about this. If the Federal government seizes more control over curriculum I fear it may begin to lean more to one side politically than the other. Which is great for some people but won’t be for many others. Whereas if you spread the power out and try to involved people with relevant knowledge and diverse political and cultural backgrounds, you wouldn’t ever get anything done. If we moved the power of education to a separate body entirely who worked independently from the government I feel that it would still be run by people with varying political views that would sway they system. My final verdict is that no matter what we do politics will always come into play in educational policy development as long as people are involved.
I love how you made that connection with the curriculum and your own learning. I also love how you said education is a political act. Loved reading this!
Hey!
Great blog post! I completely agree with your ideas before the reading. I also didn’t realize how political the system was. Is it because politics run our country now? What do you think? I also agree that this is a system that is really hard to change or get out of. That the way the education system is set up will most likely never change the roles of how much power the government has.