Before Reading:
- How do you think that school curricula is developed?
From my point of view, school curricula all comes from one similar basis, and that is what our society expects its citizens to know, represent, and act like. In lots of ways, school curricula is a representation of our society, and the good and the bad of it included. School curricula represents a society and their biases, racial and gender preferences, beliefs and systems. When a curriculum is being developed, the main influencers will always be those that are higher up. What does the government want our children to learn about our society? What do they not want them to know? What kind of changes do they want to imprint onto the younger generations?
After Reading:
- How is school curricula developed and implemented?
After reading through the reading from this week, as well as digesting this week’s class discussion, I can definitely say that I now have a much clearer understanding of what the process of the creation of school curricula contains. When school systems and individual provinces are deciding what they want their children to learn, many “stakeholders” come into play in this decision. The one most important thing to note is that students – the pupils that will be hopefully benefiting from our educational systems – have little to no say in this process at all. The building of curricula comes down to the society and what they deem important for students to learn, or what they believe all citizens of this particular society must abide by.
- What new information or perspectives does this reading provide about the development and implementation of school curriculum?
Before reading this article I did not truly understand how much of a role politics really play in the development of our curriculum and how society views our school curricula. As in the videos we viewed in lecture this week as well, many leaders of our school board can carry their own personal views into our curricula just because they carry the power to do so, even if the public feels differently. Or, if one state has a lot more financial wealth than another and can afford to influence a curricula of an entire country just because they have purchased all the textbooks, this is political interference in our education system. I personally believe that education should be separated from our own and others personal political beliefs and show anti-oppressive characteristics, but unfortunately this may never happen.
- Is there anything that surprised or concerned you?
Besides learning a lot more about the political side of the education system this week, I did not find myself surprised at any of the information, just for the fact that our world is so much run by politics and money that why wouldn’t our schooling systems be apart of this as well? Although political influences in and around the world of education is not always a bad thing, it concerned me at how these power roles in education may be being abused from a political viewpoint, and influencing our children in the wrong ways.