Long ago, when I was in high school, the curriculum seemed to be based upon maintaining traditional norms (i.e. virtually the same classes as they were presenting to students since the 1920’s) mixed with some new additions (post WWII Euro-centric views). The old norms that had already fallen to the wayside included such subjects as Latin, and there were some changes in the core classes such as: less focus on the ‘Classic’s in English (meaning more prose and novels, less poetry), and a greater focus on math (since the 1958 National Defense Education Act). As a consequence there were classes in Calculus, but less Shakespeare.
These changes were based upon national opinions which were influenced by the cold war (i.e. more math and science, less focus on humanities). The notion that the country decided to upgrade and revamp aspects of what our public schools were teaching our students still seems more than reasonable to me now.
The thought comes to me that perhaps we should be thinking in a similar manner these days. There are many changes to the world since the end of the cold war…the increase in Globalism and the internet come to mind as some obvious changes. It is also notable that much of our education system is in real need of some reform or revision.
Years ago, the focus of public education was to literally help create factory workers. Since we are in some part of a transition towards an information economy, and that it is almost a statistical certainty that the company you are currently working for will not be the company you retire from, there are some obvious things that should be changed in school curricula.
Forty years ago there was a seemingly desperate need for US students to upgrade their technical skills (math and ‘hard’ sciences). While this may have become something which will never really change, there are some other foci which need some attention.
As we, individually, have become more and more connected in broader kinds of commerce (you can easily be eating foods grown in China and Chile, wear clothing from S.E. Asia, and drive a Toyota…), so too has out country become more and more linked (at the hip in some cases) in international commerce, and politics. I think that there is a need for most graduating high school students (and almost all college graduates) to have much more of an understanding of the basics in Micro and Macro Economics. There is an actual need for our citizens to have some exposure to languages which may help them in business in emerging markets. In this manner, it seems that the fall back position of supporting European language classes in high school (e.g. French and German) would seem more and more irrelevant. Spanish is a self evident need, as our country gains more and more Hispanic influence, and there is certainly a need for: Mandarin, Hindi (and Urdu…almost the same thing), Malay, Arabic, and any other number of Asian languages.
With the increasing value on entrepreneur-ism as a stimulant to our economy these simple additions would seem to be a benefit to any modern American student.
