There are a few arenas we humans tamper with which we might be better off leaving alone. One is food production, well covered on this site. Another is education.

As I write, it’s the the first day of school. Front page in my local city paper is an article on a government plan to overhaul the provincial education curriculum. The stated goal is to move from an emphasis on facts to one on concepts. The Education Ministry posted a discussion paper that critiques the current curriculum for emphasizing ‘what (students) learn over how they learn, which is exactly the opposite of what modern education should strive to do.’

The false dichotomy between facts and concepts is among the reasons efforts to transform curriculum never finally get traction. In truth, after an initial read, I found this current effort fruitful if, potentially, perhaps inevitably, vulnerable to high idealism, zealous activism. It'll take a longer article to defend that characterization.

There are two key dimensions to this challenge of curriculum overhaul. One is the current delivery model. So long as an assembly line metaphor best captures our education system, significant change is unlikely. Flying in the face of technological innovation, our North American education system stubbornly remains a factory model born of the industrial revolution. When I advocate a return to sound educational principles, it isn’t to defend a tortuous monolith that most of us recall merely surviving.

The other dimension is the curriculum itself. I was encouraged by this paragraph from the article paraphrasing the report:

‘The group says the curriculum should be simple, elegant and deep. The early grades must continue to emphasize literacy and numeracy, the middle grades should encourage inquiries and project-based learning, and the senior grades should offer students learning opportunities that capture their interests and help them make the transition to life after graduation.’

What’s being advocated here is essentially a classical education based on the principles of the trivium, the foundation of a medieval liberal arts education. The trivium emphasizes a sequence of learning that includes grammar, logic and rhetoric. You’ll see in such a process that ‘facts’ and ‘concepts’ are not at odds but are intimately reliant on one another, as the above quote implies.

Grammar is the foundation, the facts, the structural rules that govern thought. Logic is the art of thinking, the relationships between the facts to put it crudely. Rhetoric is the art of communication, of expression, in contrast to its contemporary usage implying empty words (similar to how the word ‘myth’ now commonly means ‘untrue’).

A simple, possibly simplistic, example: I want to learn about politics. I start by learning the definitions and meanings of communism, democracy and the like (grammar). I then understand the relationships between them, historically and otherwise (logic) and can finally move to having and expressing a legitimate opinion (rhetoric).

An education that advocates ‘concepts’ over ‘facts’ essentially argues eliminating grammar in favour of logic. Combine this with our cultural trend towards unconstrained (I would argue, undisciplined) expression (rhetoric) and you have a cocktail for vacuous narcissism, which, in my judgement, the progressive edge of our culture too often embodies.

The good intention at the root of these efforts is to move away from rote learning and so the Ministry is adjusting the curriculum, reducing and altering learning objectives so that teachers have more freedom. This is shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Function follows form. Rote and linear learning is a natural product of the factory model and an expression of a dominant cultural mode that favours engineering over poetry.

There remains in promise an integrated pedagogy that would leverage these disparate modes in service of a more whole and wholesome expression. I’m just unsure if we’re ready to embrace it, and so am unconvinced that this effort will do more good than harm.