What Is Standard Education?

What is Standard Education?

A curriculum and syllabus differ in nature, the former being the overall educational content and target schemata to be taught while the latter is a mere list of topics within a subject area that an institution looks to cover.

The first assumption of a curriculum is that everyone ought to go through a standard and compulsory system of education, one which aims to impart subsets of skills and competencies and which embodies a certain set of values and goals, almost like a factory production line. The aim being to produce citizens with standard skills and abilities to feed into the work force and contribute to the economic welfare of the state.

You may ask yourself: What happens to geniuses and those with educational needs and challenges?

Well, they simply suffer, as a host of teachers, educationalists and experts diagnose and assess to exhaustion those subjects in endless sessions, making them feel even more marginalised and self aware. The curriculum`s vision is to limit differences, customise attitudes and tailor every student to its aims and expectations, rather than cultivate and nurture the variety of gifts and natural capacities of each pupil.

This pruning of our little flowers and their placement in one huge vase does away with the beautiful garden, which accomodates in a natural harmony all the types of flora that can coexist in a beautiful fragrant display of nature.

The alternative method is to gauge from an eary age the strengths and abilities of every child and nourishing every aspect in a constructive manner. Not only will this allow every pupil to be a strong individual but also the fulfillment engendered by such a system would mean a far more productive society. Briefly outlining the dimensions of this issue would serve to clarify the point being made.

We already know that the curriculum prioritises certain formats of learning over others, for example the visual element was the most common and universal one during my teen years, neglecting the kinesthetic and auditory aspects of learning. Thus wittingly or otherwise the curriculum structures information and ideas and imparts them to favour a particular type of learner.

The way assessment is carried out adversely affects many students, simply because under pressure and time constraints performance is greatly hindered. The prevailing attitude that surfaces when faced with underperformance is that there is something `wrong` with the pupil, when often times it is the curriculum that alienates.

Ofcourse it would take special minds to fathom the idea that a universal curriculum doesn`t exist, and geniuses to design it and those who have wrestled with special needs to come up with ways of implementing it.