THE NEW CURRICULUM

by O. Jerome (Jed) Brown
April, 1995

An insidious aspect of the current efforts to restructure education is the intentional perversion of the traditional school curriculum. As the schools shift from a Disciplined Knowledge Paradigm to a Life-long Education Paradigm, the school curriculum, by definition, disappears. Curriculum is defined as a course, or set of courses. The word “course” in this case is defined as a number of lectures or other matter dealing with a subject. The operative word is “subject.” Given that the Life-long Education Paradigm is behavior-driven rather than subject-driven, there can be no “curriculum” in the true sense of the word.


With Outcome-based Education, as instrument of the Life-long Education Paradigm, the goal of the schooling process is no longer to produce knowledgeable people, but is to develop people who can fulfill what William Spady, OBE guru, has called “Complex Life Roles.” According to UNESCO documents and reinforced by contemporary national literature, these Complex Life Roles identify each personal as: an individual, a life-long learner, producer, family member, consumer and global citizen.
Therefore, the program, improperly called the curriculum, of the restructured school is, in effect, a set of behaviors that are consistent with the complex life roles.

These behaviors are being forced into our schools with great subterfuge and duplicity. There enter either camouflaged as added programs to correct some social ill, or obscured from view as the true substance of classes bearing old and familiar names. Yes, these behaviors are hidden; but ,they are there if one chooses to see them. There are the real substance of the sex education, HIV/Aids education, violence prevention programs and drug prevention programs. They are found as topics of creative writing assignments. They are hidden in the plot lines of the literature assignments. Yest, they are there in all the classes that appear to be knowledge-based; but are only leaky vessels containing nothing but a remnant of knowledge that is considered merely functional.

Thanks to the behavioral psychologists and the sociologists intent on crafting their “Utopian” world of the future, our schools are scrapping knowledge for the behaviors of the the Life-long Education Paradigm. Thanks to these demogogic social engineers, our schools now have self-esteem for the individual – what has euphemistically called Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) for the life-long learner – behaviors found in the SCANS Report (Dept of Labor), for the producer – group dependency and conflict resolution for the family member – environmentalism for the consumer – and multi-culturalism for the global citizen.

In destroying the curriculum, supplanting it with the behaviors and roles of the Life-long Education Paradigm, school restructuring deprives every child of an education. Our schools will no longer be schools. By moving from a curriculum-based institution to a behavior-based institution, the life-long learning model discards education in favor of behavioral therapy. Behavioral therapy is psychotherapy. As restructuring is completed, children may still get up and toddle off to the same building each morning, but that building will no longer the a school building – it will be a mental health clinic.