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For a very long time, in Alberta, curriculum development was a slow, careful, iterative process punctuated on occasion by fierce, although bounded, controversies over relatively arcane matters of pedagogy (anyone remember “Whole Language or Phonics?”). And at the end of the day, teachers had the latitude to shut the classroom door and exercise their professional judgment to do what made sense for students (the answer typically given by any elementary teacher to the question above would be “yes”).
To be sure, there were periodic attempts to launch broader and more ambitious curriculum initiatives, beginning, in the most recent iteration, with former minister Dave Hancock’s “Inspiring Education” and continuing through to the curriculum ultimately released in 2018 by former minister David Eggen, but the resulting design tended to fall within well established norms and shared expectations. Contrary to the mythology being spouted by the current government, the curriculum, as reflected in its constituent programs of study, was not partisan (although some might have differences about specific topics) and reflected a consensus that was informed by copious input from classroom teachers and education faculty and that was largely shared by ministers and governments of various political stripes. So how to account for the spectacular debacle that is the March 2021 Draft K–6 Curriculum released by Minister LaGrange? To answer this question, I think we need to return to first principles and consider where this latest draft fits or, rather, does not fit.
The tension that has dominated debates around curriculum in Alberta and internationally over decades has been situated along the progressive/essentialist continuum.
The progressive school emphasizes the importance of preparing students for an uncertain future by cultivating their critical and thinking skills. This is best achieved through problem solving, disciplined inquiry and active participation to foster creativity, recognizing the need to create differentiated opportunities to include students who might have divergent interests, abilities or ways of learning.
In contrast, the essentialist school emphasizes the importance of imparting basic knowledge and skills, with a curricular emphasis on literacy, numeracy, and the “facts” of science, history and geography. The approach to teaching and learning stresses the importance of direct instruction focused on getting “back to the basics” and the work of teachers is to ensure that students all achieve the same mandated competencies, typically through more intensive instruction.
The 2018 proposed curriculum, over a decade in development, deliberately struck a compromise position along the progressive/essentialist continuum. In math, for example, students would be expected to memorize number facts while still exploring alternative approaches to problem solving. And as long as the policy debate took place between these familiar, if caricatured alternatives, teachers were on familiar ground and could still avail themselves of the opportunity to close the classroom door and use the approaches that worked with the students they taught.
What is different about the March 2021 curriculum is that it appears to go well beyond essentialism to perennialism. This approach to curriculum, in its more recent iteration popularized by E.D. Hirsh in Cultural Literacy (1987), values inculcating into students through direct instruction the defining core knowledge of western and classical civilization. In this view, students are passive vessels and their cognitive development, personal interests and experiences are largely irrelevant to learning. Nor is it necessary to provide a scoped and sequenced order to the topics to be served up or some other contextual frame upon which to hang them; once students’ knowledge of the canon reaches a certain critical mass, perennialists assume that a deeper, critical understanding will naturally emerge, at least in those intellectually capable and predisposed to such an epiphany.
The perennialist flavour of the 2021 Draft K–6 Curriculum is most in evidence in the proposed, and much mocked, content for social studies. From this perspective, it is important that students eventually learn about Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire, so why not at Grade 2? But further analysis reveals that perennialist assumptions, objectives and approaches are shot through all subjects at all elementary grades in the draft, and we can expect more to come unless the government dramatically changes course as it develops programs of study for the upper grades.While the perennialist project is necessarily Eurocentric, colonial and Caucasian, embracing as it does a view of the centrality and superiority of western civilization, it is not necessarily right wing. In the United States and in Britain, where it enjoys a following among some on the left of the political spectrum, the attraction of perennialism is that it seeks to ensure that every student has access to the style and quality of education more typically delivered to the children of the elite attending private (or in the British context, “public”) schools. Those who seek to apply the model more generally in an effort to improve mobility across racial and class divides tend, however, to ignore the infrastructure and culture of privilege that supports and allows elite students to succeed in this manner of learning, despite the odds. And when the perennialist approach flops, its proponents are quick to blame failing students as being fundamentally incapable and their teachers as being inadequately prepared or diligent in their tutelage. Student failure is to be expected and taken as proof of rigour.
Of course, teachers may assume that this too will pass, hope to close the classroom door and then continue to teach in a manner that makes sense for their students. Bad assumption. Perennialism, in practice, is a full package that includes minutely detailed programs of study that focus on facts to be learned, frequent standardized testing of students, centralized direction of instruction and compulsory use of mandated resources, and ongoing recertification and evaluations for teachers, all in an effort to diminish professional judgment and limit teachers’ capacity to wander away from the core curriculum. I firmly believe that these other measures are just over the horizon.
As every day brings me closer to becoming one, I have a certain fondness for old dead white guys and their contributions. There is a place for my posse in a well-rounded curriculum, but in a diverse and increasingly global community, it is a place that must be shared. Furthermore, the content of the curriculum must be approached in a developmentally appropriate way that respects the lived experiences and contexts of students arriving at the classroom door in all their wonderful complexity. That balancing and adaptation requires engaged teachers, actively practicing their craft and exercising professional judgment as they make decisions about instruction, student engagement and assessment of learning.
There is scant room for that in this proposed curriculum and that is simply bonkers. ❚
