The three curricula that all schools teach

 

 It was a pleasure reading this article. I agree with many things Eisner discussed. Usually we only pay attention on what explicitly schools teach young people because at the end students’ performances are assessed based on these explicit curricula (i.e. subjects taken). I personally never thought about what schools implicitly teach. Since children spent most of their childhood in schools, every element and aspect of school environment should be counted for shaping the behavior of young people. In fact these things implicitly taught might have even bigger and longer influence on a child life into adulthood compared to academic subjects. These implicit curricula usually involved in preparing and habituating the students to cope with lives after or outside of a school setting.

Equally important to what schools teach is what schools fail to teach. One thing out of many is the development of cognitive processes. In subjects like mathematics, one of the goals is to improve student critical and logical thinking abilities. However, not a lot of things explicitly taught in school reflect these objectives. There is no guidelines for implementation nor sections in a subject that specially dedicate towards the training of how students think. Teachers usually teach out of a habit and can often neglect things that are “outside” of the subject content. I think during teachers’ education, we should learn how to train students to think using the means from the subject area as well as the physiological and psychology factors behind it.    

Curriculum often means the subject explicitly taught in school. However, one might consider schooling as a package that comes with all the three curricula that Eisner pointed out. It is not possible to only learn the explicit curricula when a student is raised in a school environment. In my opinion, school board should address the implicit curriculum as well as the null curriculum which can be addressed as an objective or goal to achieve in teaching. The current BC curriculum in mathematics addresses some of the cognitive thinking skills in the big ideas sections. However, there is no apparent addressment on what Eisner considered as implicit curriculum.