Something that I think every student, whether that be in university, high school, or even middle school, can relate to is the anxiety that comes with test taking. There is so much pressure placed on students to ace all of their tests. I was a good student in high school, yet when tests came I had so much anxiety about messing up because the way that schools treat tests caused me to feel like I wouldn’t be a good student anymore if I didn’t do good on a test that required me to memorize words from a textbook. This stress brought on lots of overthinking and studying until the last possible minute, neither of which are beneficial to students. Another thing that comes along with test taking is the pressure that comes from other students. In high school, my friends and I were always comparing marks and test scores, mostly out of curiosity, and while we all usually had similar marks it still created a sense of competition not only between friend groups but between entire classes and grades. 

It has only been recently that I have begun to see teachers breaking away from the idea of “teacher-proofing” the curriculum. I’ve seen both in media and my own schooling how angry some parents, teachers, and even students would have gotten if a teacher tried to incorporate their own ideas into their teaching, even if their ideas were the right ones. Having the teacher remove themselves from teaching and only deliver content as it is in the curriculum affects both the morale of the students and the teacher. Many students need more interactive techniques involved in their schooling for them to better understand certain concepts and objectives, and teachers should be able to have some fun and creativity because otherwise why would they even want to teach anymore? If we followed the Tyler rationale by having teachers speak to the students strictly from textbooks and curriculums, we may as well have students teaching themselves (or as was mentioned in one of our lectures, replace teachers with robots); it makes teachers replaceable, which they obviously should not be. 

Some of the only benefits I can really see through the Tyler rationale are “that it is systematic and has considerable organizing power” (Smith 1996, 2000). While organizing and order of events aren’t necessarily the main focus of curriculum, they are important aspects of it that help students and teachers better understand the content and how certain concepts, objectives, and events within the curriculum are related to each other. A clearly organized curriculum would be able to help teachers organize their own teaching and figure out how they can incorporate the required information into something that fits in with their own pedagogies. 

 

Sources Referenced: 

Smith, M. K. (1996, 2000) ‘Curriculum theory and practice’ the encyclopaedia of informal

education, www.infed.org/biblio/b-curric.htm.