Curriculum may be the fundamental framing of schooling, but the decisions around curriculum are part of a larger conversation that extends beyond education. While it seems that deciding what is on a curriculum should only be influenced by education and nothing more, the decision of what is on the curriculum is often influenced by many other considerations and is actually very political. Educators do have a role in deciding what is on curriculum, but this role is not as large as one would think because there are so many other people and organizations that also have a part in it, including the government. In the first reading, Ben Levin highlights the relationship between politics and the curriculum. He states that the politics of curriculum involves two kinds of discussion, “the first concerns the overall shape of school curricula. . . . [and] the second kind of debate is over the content of particular subjects” (Levin 14). This means the curriculum can not only determine what subjects are taught in schools, but also what is taught in those subjects and when that curriculum is heavily influenced by politics and people in power, it often means that students will be presented with a set of ideologies and qualities that society and the people in power deem important. So even though school is often expected to allow students to create their own opinions about things, the reality is that the curriculum sometimes makes that challenging.
Curriculum is a complicated thing. Curriculum exists not only in the explicit form of a written out document but also in the hidden form that involves expectations of students’ behaviour and ideologies. As I stated in the last paragraph, curriculum can have a heavy influence on what students are taught to think and believe, especially in a political sense. This is part of what makes curriculum complicated. A teacher also has a heavy influence on the interpretation of lessons and what is taught in a day based on their own interpretation of the curriculum document. Based on my personal experience, I know that all teachers that teach the same subject will not teach it in the same way. Different teachers will interpret things differently and a teacher’s interpretation of and decisions on the curriculum will influence what the students will learn and what they will not learn.
I thought that your blog post was very well written
I would have liked to hear more about your own experience and opinions.
I liked the point you made that school is expected to let students create their own opinions, but in reality this is not the case because of the political influence on curriculums.