“For any subject taught in primary school, we might ask [is it] worth an adult’s ‘knowing, and whether having known it as a child makes the person a better adult.”

from The Process of Education by Jerome Bruner (1960)

Our school or education system is often inundated with all kinds of agendas. What needs to be taught in schools becomes a mess of often conflicting goals. There is an even more urgent need today for schools to be clear about what ought to be taught.

What would be the result if we were to seriously pursue what Jerome Bruner had proposed above to what is being taught in schools today? Would we still have the gargantuan-sized curriculum that we force students to go through each year? Would we still be teaching for discrete facts? More important perhaps, would we still be assessing for discrete facts?

If we want to respond positively to Jerome Bruner, schools would have to undergo a revolutionary change. Teachers would be teaching for enduring understanding rather than just teaching discrete facts. Teaching for enduring understanding means that the focus would be, to quote Wiggins and McTighe, “focus on larger concepts, principles, or processes”. The focus will be on big ideas rather than disparate bits of facts.

Big ideas that can will be useful to the students in their later years of life. Big ideas which would have real meaning for the students rather than just bits of information useful only for end-of-year school examinations. Big ideas that that students can use to apply in differing contexts within or even beyond their subjects.

We will do well to avoid the following 19th century, Industrial Revolution Age view of what education should be:

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

Mr. Gradgrind

From Charles Dickens’ Hard Times