Critical Education Articles Placed in the Teacher Staff Lounge While I Was a Teacher, Part Twenty-Six: An Integrated Curriculum Required to Educate Children and Adolescents

When I was a French teacher at Ashern Central School, in Ashern, Manitoba, Canada, I started to place critiques, mainly (although not entirely) of the current school system. At first, I merely printed off the articles, but then I started to provide a summary of the article along with the article. I placed the summaries along with the articles in a binder (and, eventually, binders), and I placed the binder in the staff lounge.

As chair of the Equity and Justice Committee for Lakeshore Teachers’ Association of the Manitoba Teachers’ Society (MTS), I also sent the articles and summary to the Ning of the MTS (a ning is “an online platform for people and organizations to create custom social networks”).

As I pointed out in a previous post, it is necessary for the radical left to use every opportunity to question the legitimacy of existing institutions.

The attached article for the ESJ Ning is prefaced by the following:

Hello everyone,

Attached is another article sent to the ESJ Ning. It is prefaced by the following:

The authors [Barbara Hursh, Paul Haas and Michael Moore] of the following article, “An Interdisciplinary Model to Implement General Education,” argue that the separation of the disciplines characteristic of college assume that the student will be able, herself, to synthesize coherently the diverse college courses. However, they point out that  curriculum designers would be hard-pressed to justify the inclusion of any particular discipline as necessary for intellectual development.

Given this situation, the authors consider that the learning of particular disciplines fails to develop the cognitive abilities of students in an essential manner: cognitive development necessarily involves the synthesis of the disciplines and not just a smattering, here and there, of integration.

Interdisciplinary integration is vital for providing the broad point of view across which diverse specialists can communicate and appreciate each other’s point of view. It is also vital for appreciating the limitations of each discipline and for incorporating diverse modes of thought and inquiry when approaching a problem.

To remedy the one-sided development of students, the authors recommend a set of generic skills, grounded in the theories of Dewey, Piaget and Perry. In particular, they recommend developing the cognitive functions of recognizing and analyzing problems, understanding the structure of arguments, recognizing assumptions and formulating hypotheses and developing deductions from such hypotheses—without the restrictions characteristic of particular scientific disciplines.

By approaching the world from a generic set of skills common to the various scientific disciplines, not only does the student have a common set of tools to approach the world, but there is a greater probability that clashes between different disciplinary approaches may arise as the student looks at a situation from diverse angles. Such clashes or conflicts constitute occasions for cognitive development as the student is obliged to deal with divergent points of view.

Another advantage of the interdisciplinary approach is that the student, when faced with conclusions drawn from one discipline, may realize the limitations of such conclusions and understand their provisional nature when viewed from the perspective of the generic skills and from the point of view of other disciplines.

A further advantage of the interdisciplinary approach is that the student may gain an appreciation of the depth and breadth of a particular discipline when viewed from the perspective of the generic skills.

The approach requires the selection of a problem that elicits important concepts that can be used to analyze the problem from multiple points of view and the generic skills. The student can, subsequently, attempt to approach the problem from a more synthetic point of view by resolving conflicts between the different perspectives. The point is to gain a greater appreciation (clarification) of the nature of a problem from a variety of perspectives and to address the problem accordingly.

As Dewey pointed out, any human experience is never exclusively historical, mathematical, social, individual, psychological or any other “study.” The development of experience into a particular study (a discipline) should be enriched by a variety of perspectives while providing in-depth focus for particular purposes.

Not only college and university courses fail to provide for systematic integration of the disciplines; so too do courses in schools. The modern public school system, like colleges and universities, reinforces one-sidedness by not providing students the opportunity to synthesize, systematically, the disciplines. The modern school curriculum, in many ways, is miseducative or anti-educational.

A synthetic approach to learning respects more the experience of students—life is never exclusively experienced as one of the disciplines. It is, however, at the curriculum level that the problem needs to be addressed and resolved. The problem cannot be resolved at the pedagogical level. However, teachers can certainly recognize the problem and struggle for its recognition and for the resolution of the problem.

Do not children and adoescents deserve the opportunity to integrate their experiences? Schools, colleges and, in many cases universities, fail to provide an environment in which children, adolescents and young adults can integrate their experiences. Are they not, then, failing to educate?

Since only a minority attend university and obtain a degree, are those in schools not failing to educate children, adolescents and young adults? Is this just?