Re:Homework for our next class (Wed. Oct. 14): Elliot Eisner on Three curricula all schools teach

    The first thing that stopped me while reading the article was the quote "One general goal of such an institution would be to enable children to become the mappers of their educational journey so that when they leave school they are in a position to pursue goals and interests that are important to them.", that is exactly my ideal philosophy of how education should be! As a soon-to-be educator, I want to give the initiative of learning to students as they will eventually become their own teacher in their lives. What an educator should be doing is to get them to be prepared when they start working in the real world. 

    Secondly, what made me think deeply is ironically on how the education system "prepares" our students. Rather than the ideal philosophy of mine, the students were rather trained/modified into how society wants them to become so that they can fit into the workforce like how society functions. As the author mentioned that "The school seeks to modify the child's behavior to comply with goals that the child had no hand in formulating and that might not have any intrinsic meaning.", I feel so torn about that statement. A part of me wants students to learn freely and be whoever they want to be, but the other part of me is afraid of the lack of real-life experience /prep they have if I don't give them enough prep for the real world. I think we should find the balance between the two, I don't want our future generation to become robots so that they think and act all alike, but I don't them to be so "unique" that they cannot fit into the real world. 

    One more point I want to mention is that we should stop using the rewarding system starting at such a young age as I think it's important for kids to know that some qualities like being kind, on-time, and polite, etc. should be a moral thing to do rather than an optional quality of someone. 

    I'm aligned with BC's curriculum in terms of the goals and rationale and it's also aligned with the author's vision. Thinking mathematically is more important to think about mathematics, thinking mathematically can be applied in other subjects and even in students' lives which is much more valuable in their lives and workplaces in the future!