Core Curriculum Analysis

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2.5. The ‘Skilbeck’ Document The recent initiative of a team, led by Dr. Skilbeck, resulted in a document called “Core Curriculum for Australian Schools” (23). This included the following statement: “We emphasize that the core curriculum cannot be reduced to the so-called ‘three R’s’ often termed ‘the basics’. Society requires more of its citizens by the way of common, universal understandings and skills than reading, writing and arithmetic. Moreover, effective participation in contemporary life, which is an entitlement and responsibility of all individuals, depends on a wide, complex and interrelated set of learnings and experiences, well beyond the popular view of the ‘basics’. Consequently we must avoid the tendency to reduce the core…show more content…
But a general education is not a subject in the curriculum, and it does not mean the superficial learning, of a lot of different things. Rather, it is a ‘state of mind’ - an interdisciplinary state of mind. Professor Mary Cohen (1) an American educator, pointing to the need for an interdisciplinary education states: “A general system approach to education I think of as a general system not so much as a body of doctrine as a way of looking at things, which permits perception of the world as a totality and fosters communication among specialized disciplines”. However, in the final event we are left with the situation of educational accountability: “Thus, if we are to encourage and develop creative and formative education by recognizing the essential nature of the duality of thought, we are placed into a situation where this can only occur when the educational milieu favours the development of a general interdisciplinary curriculum format in addition to or as complementary to the existing. specialised format!’…show more content…
The Harvard Professor Rosovsky agreed that there might indeed be a ‘common denominator’ or a ‘core of knowledge’ in education, which can only be discovered through cross-cultural or cross-disciplinary studies. The solution of a problem requires that one looks at it from many viewpoints, in order to grasp the essence of the problem and thus its solution. Such Supra-idea can be discovered when we accept the challenge of probing into various disciplines for clues. Piaget (18) called this diverse probing “Decentring” and DeBono (7) called it “Lateral Thinking”. Professor Cohen (1), an American educator, describes an education which uses various disciplines in inter-dependence with each other as being in a cross- pollinated state and only such approach can add up to ‘reality’. She explains that any concept or idea is the result of a reduction of various sources of knowledge into total statement, hypothesis or ‘article’. Learning is the method of processing information so that likenesses and associations can be recognized and integrated into some holistic and communicable
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