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.
