Chapter 2

Curriculum — The Place Where Tangible Content Wrestles Intangible Process

It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education –
Albert Einstein

2.1 Introduction

In the first chapter, certain dimensions of the present crisis in educational outcomes were introduced. It was proposed that, instead of seeking forward progress from “tweaking” this or that element of the existing arrangements, a more comprehensive outcome might be possible by starting instead “back at the beginning” with repositioning or redefining certain fundamentals of the educational process.

One of those fundamentals concerns what constitutes, or ought to constitute, the “curriculum” in current K-12 arrangements. In this chapter, for the first time anywhere (so far as the authors aware), further implications flowing out of the elaboration in the previous chapter of what constitutes “thought material”, and the nature-science approach to its deeper analysis, are brought forward in the context of elaborating what constitutes human thought material.

The concept of “human thought material” (abbreviated “HTM” hereinafter) is advanced here as the true foundation, or root, of all forms of education. The deconstructed, delinearized history of the origins, development and appropriation of HTM by, and among, the members of human social collectives discloses the actual story of the development of education. By all available accounts, although many species, especially among the higher mammals, engage in processes that look like some manner of training the next generation in techniques for surviving outside the mother or the nest, only humans have done this more or less continually by relying at least in part on leaving behind for future generations, or having been left by previous generations, a record (or records) of some kind — orally-transmitted information, depictions of certain events, descriptions of certain practices, or some other content holding importance for those recording it. Recollecting this otherwise entirely pedestrian yet critically important fact helps clarify one particularly important aspect of how this has come about to one or another degree. Although all education and learning have their individual expression, the overwhelming weight of the evidence is that there is no education or learning that is or remains purely or entirely individual.

Conventionally, it is not HTM but rather

that are seen as standing at the root of “education.” Such a position, however, seems to stand somewhat at odds with the social element outlined in the preceding paragraph. On the one hand, education and learning appear “social” to the extent that masses of individuals are indeed processed by the education system. On the other hand, the emphasis is entirely on the individual and — especially — on raising measured outcomes of individuals to the level of the rest of their class. Note how the idea of acquiring an education as the result of some kind of competitive struggle hangs in the air, lurking just around the corner.

In fact, this “curriculum” element is set up quite consciously very much after the manner in which a horse-race is set up. The first evidence for that claim comes from the very origins of the word “curriculum” in English and in Latin (the source for the vast majority of English words ending in “-um”). The literal meaning of the Latin word is “a running, race, lap around the track, course”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “curriculum” first appears in English writing in 1633 to describe a course of study/studies at the university level as something with a starting-point and a finish-line: the origin of that above-mentioned unstated element of competition among individuals is thus discovered hovering just beneath the surface of the denotational meaning of the word “curriculum” itself.

As far as cross-cultural comparisons go, meanwhile, the very idea of “curriculum” itself turns out to be profoundly Eurocentric. This becomes clear after examining the foundations laid for Islamic education in the light of how, first, the Holy Roman Catholic Church and — later—secular authorities throughout western Europe and later throughout the Americas, came to view the entire question of the purposes as well as the content of curriculum.

As will be discussed below, the System tends to rely on authority and how it is deployed and maintained as the key to meeting expectations of parents and the various levels of the education system. Rather than either the internal authority of a pre-set curriculum or an externally-imposed Authority with a capital “A,” the authors of this book argue that HTM ought to be at the centre of any true or sustainable educational process. The authors suspect that one of the main reasons HTM is not at the centre of education is precisely the potentially subversive impact of its fundamental message on the system’s exercise of “authority” in either its curricular or administrative froms. That message is that anyone who wants to find something out for himself is fully capable of doing so without the prop of a pre-set curriculum or the intercession of anyone acting in a priest-like or policing role.

2.2 What is ‘Human Thought Material’?

The central objective of any form of education or training is to instruct, or condition, the human brain to process thoughts of a certain kind according to certain patterns. As is well known, the human brain is matter of a special kind: organic matter endowed with the capacity to think, i.e., to process thought.

Less considered, perhaps — or more problematic — is an adequate definition of what constitutes “thoughts” or thinking. For most people, the very intangibility of thoughts, or of the thinking process, militates immediately against considering either as any kind of “material.” Yet, our earliest human experiences with consciousness — taken in its most elemental sense of some awareness of a world, or phenomena, external to our own person — teach us that thoughts or thinking are definitely processes. Since the content of thought or thinking is always received from either some earlier or contemporaneous perception or memory, it follows that neither individual thoughts nor thinking as an activity is reducible to some instantaneous or passing stage.

The model proposed here — of thought or thinking as a process working upon some thought-material — minimizes or resolves all the latent contradictions that usually inhere in any attempt to distinguish a result from the process(es) that gave it rise. Most attractively (at least for this book’s purposes): it suggests the following broad definition covering every form of training or education (and taken directly from the central objective of education with which this section opened), as: the instruction or conditioning of humans in various possible uses of certain kinds of thought material.

2.3 Why This Starting Point?

What is of particular importance here is exactly where this definition does not position the starting-point of education or training. According to this definition, the starting-point of education or training is not with some authority that certifies individual gatekeepers of The System whom it has authorized to pour a pre-set syllabus down the throats of a subject-class of victims aka “students.” Conventionally, in other words, no definite body of thought-material, i.e., accumulated human social knowledge1, is taken as the starting-point.

When it comes to selecting appropriate curriculum materials and the design of a student-appropriate syllabus, using content, i.e., thought-material, as the starting-point rather than authority has an important instrumental feature. Positioning thought-material as the starting-point enables the rolling-out of a range of approaches to, and “best practices” for the design of, learner-centred acts of “finding out.” These are approaches and practices that address the actual strengths and weaknesses of individual learners immediately and directly. Taking content as the root (and then following some path to which the content points) also enables delivery of a broader and deeper learning experience than would be possible within existing conventional approaches.

In theory, by cooperating along these lines to sort out the best selection and arrangement of acts of “finding out”, any student-instructor team could readily carve out their own roles in and through the process of selecting the most suitable approach to mastering any particular learning objective. In practice, however, this happens only episodically in the public school systems of the United States and Canada, often ending badly for the teacher(s) or school principal who go down that road. This demonstrates how and to what degree authority-driven approaches to education fear content-driven approaches and use their political power to derail or crush all such initiatives. About the only public schools that nurture any further such experiments are populated mainly by children from severely impoverished social and economic backgrounds and policed by heavily-armed adjuncts of the local...