Three curricula all schools teach Response

Something that made me stop while I was reading this article was the examples of implicit curriculum the author used. Some of these examples were things I could relate to from my own experience in school but a few of them weren’t. This made me think about what implicit curriculum I was taught in school without even realizing it. The main differences between how I was taught and examples the article uses came when competitiveness was discussed. I believe I was taught competitiveness implicitly during school however there were some key differences between how I was taught and the examples the article uses. These differences make me think that I was taught a version of competitiveness that I find to be more beneficial. The article spoke about a grading system where the top 10% of students got a A. This is different from how I was taught where our grades were not attached to how others did. We were definitely still competitive, but it was not a type of competitiveness where we were implicitly taught that our success was predicated on someone else’s failure. The article also talked about students who had high enough academic achievement being allowed into “higher” stream classes. My experience in high school was that we were allowed to choose our own streams. This implicitly taught us to self-evaluate and to determine what was needed for the goals we wanted to achieve. I was glad that there were differences between how I was taught and the examples used in the article because it really exemplified to me how differences in how schools are set up can change what we are implicitly taught.

I also stopped when the concept of Null curriculum was introduced. It made me ask myself is it better for curriculum to be designed in a way where students have a general understanding of a lot of things or, in a way where students know a few things really well. Many of the examples of fields that aren’t taught in school are things that are briefly touched on in other classes (ex. Econ is touched on in social, communication in English law in social, etc.). So, I think that most educational systems currently prioritize general knowledge of a lot of things. I think this is the right way to do it especially in grade school where you want to expose students to lots of different fields, concepts and ideas. This is good because it lets them find things they may be interested in by trying lots of different things. How ever I do wonder if there might also be value in allowing students to have the feeling of being a “subject matter expert” in something. I think allowing students to know the difference between having general knowledge and specific knowledge is important because being able to know what you don’t know is a really important life skill. In some ways I think that that feeling of being a “subject matter expert” in something is part of the null curriculum unless teachers give their students specific chances to do this.