My Thoughts on the Three Curricula

One thing mentioned in Eisner's article that I found really thought provoking is the notion of rewarding students publicly such as by assigning those with higher grades to honors classes. From my personal experience, I went through a period where my classmates and I often "compared" with one another to demonstrate our superiority, and this kind of competitiveness was only out of pride (for self and family) without any intention to belittle anyone else. But the result is that students do judge each other, and some students who would be placed in honors classes tend to view the rest as inferior. In my opinion, this enabled students to foster attitudes of inequality that could follow them once they enter the real world. As Eisner stated, schools also teach not only what's written in the curriculum, but also the school culture, which itself could count as another curriculum.

Another concern raised by Eisner which made me stop and reflect was the misalignment between schools' promises to children and what students actually obtain through learning. He also inserted a passage from one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous works to illustrate that, but takes it further by using the prisoner as an analogy. On this subject, I agree with Eisner's argument that schools have neglected certain intellectual processes that could benefit students in favor of what they have been teaching out of habit. As an economics major, I also believe that the subject area could serve as a useful foundation for students to understand how the social system functions, but it is still seldom taught in classrooms even to this day.

As for the BC curriculum, I can see attempts to modify the conventional approaches to teaching, such as by incorporating visual representations and similar problem-solving processes in mathematics to help students become powerful and creative thinkers. From a personal perspective, a shift away from results-oriented approaches to teaching will do more good for the students down the road.