For a while, there were ongoing deliberations from the National Curriculum Development Centre in quest of altering the national secondary schools’ curriculum, whose progress has now been paused for technical reasons.
According to the ministry of education, it is accepted that the current curriculum is outdated and recent changes have only added content which has shown gross malfunctions in its objectives. This has ignited several discussions about what should be the driver for the moulding of the new national curriculum. And what exactly constitutes a purposeful and sustainable curriculum?
I always believe that any discussion that involves young people’s learning-needs has to hinge on the real frontline practitioners who are the teachers, and key stakeholders such as parents who actually have the best interests of their children. Not forgetting national and international key employers.
Unlike many other sectors, change in the ingredients and processes of education are inevitable; therefore, fiddling with content is largely a welcome ‘evil’.
The past decade has seen a tremendous explosion in knowledge, which some scholars argue could have been the ‘technology revolution’, or modern renaissance that has sparked rethinking content of pedagogy and ways of passing on this knowledge. We need our young generation to master concepts and relationships, and to have the skills to acquire and use the new knowledge, especially in sciences and modern mathematics.
Naturally, young people are expected to be vibrant, open-minded and ambitious. It is unsurprising that they often believe they want to make a difference in the world they live in despite lacking the ability or tools required to do so.
As our youth search for the means of achieving these ambitions on the one hand, the older folks eagerly hope that improvements in their communities can only come from the very youth that have been fed on what we could call a ‘decayed’ curriculum that realistically wouldn’t have added any more value to the society than it has already done in the past.
This expectation can effectively be led through a national curriculum that engages its students. We need a curriculum that ensures opportunities for children to participate in community life as young citizens and how to deal with common social forces and problems. This involves subjects or topics such as community studies or rural versus urban development, including practical tasks for youngsters to learn in action.
When I posed the question of what an effective curriculum should have to the public on the Twitter social platform, the common responses highlighted a recognition that a resolute curriculum should aim to promote literacy in English and some local languages, the ability for students to read widely, promote creative arts and active sports, and endorse humane value through religious education and collective worship.
The curriculum should ensure that students learn to solve problems independently. Additionally, the curriculum should incorporate gender issues of equality without the archaic stereotype subjects or topics; it should certify that girls ought to know more than they do about making a good home; that engineering and other science-based subjects favour and promote more females into the field.
We need to do things differently if we are to prepare young people for a world in which what is known to be true changes by the hour; a world in which access to information is at the touch of a keyboard. That is why we need to advocate a skills-based curriculum.
A sustainable curriculum would focus on communication, physical, interpersonal and intrapersonal skills and thinking and learning skills. Such a curriculum would, of course, develop skills through content, but the subject content of this curriculum and its organisation would not be decided by civil servants in Kyambogo or Embassy House.
It should be designed by teachers, working locally in their communities, to engage the interests and develop the abilities of their learners. Let our new curriculum promote safety and health of children at the top, challenge students to make a positive contribution and achieve self-sustenance.
Above all, there should be more independent learning. Moving away from the lecture-style of teaching requires students to be the doers and teachers to do more of the facilitation.
Simply regurgitating information on the exam paper is a thing of the past centuries and only prepares our young people to fail in the real world. Independent learning driven through the curriculum allows innovation and creativity that we need in our society today.
The real challenge is how and when to ensure that the newly designed curriculum is implemented in its specification. When the ministry reignites the release of the new curriculum without following it up with suitable training and support for schools, it will have simply set off teachers to blindly pass on information.
The author is a teacher working in the UK.