A BASIC EDUCATION CURRICULUM: A PROPOSAL
(Part 2.)

By Winfield Williams

Last week I began a discussion on a basic curriculum which would serve as a foundation for Universal Secondary Education. I began discussing Stage One as it appears in the diagram below. Unfortunately, the diagram did not appear in last article. I will now continue the discussion by looking at the other stages.

STAGES TWO and THREE
At these two stages, the children will build on what they have learnt at STAGE ONE. They will begin to be exposed in a more formal way to the subject matter of the curriculum. The teacher will begin to engage them those basic concepts that make up the disciplines of knowledge. For example they begin to see how the concept of sets work in Mathematics and the way the idea pervades the subject of Mathematics. In Language Arts, they begin to learn about how the different parts of the language work so that they can begin to manipulate them to express themselves adequately. The tenses and parts of speech are some of the important things which they will learn and use in the four language areas of listening, reading speaking and writing. The formal introduction to the other subject areas at this stage will have the same approach.

Some teachers claim that the basic concepts are too difficult for children to grasp at this stage. But there is evidence to suggest that the teachers themselves have not mastered the subject matter they teach. As a result, they are unable to present these basic concepts in a way that the children would understand and learn them. In fact, one can only teach a subject by organizing it into the basic concepts that make it up. And this goes for everything that is taught in school.

However, subjects are often presented, at all levels, as an aggregate of "facts" without relating them to the basic principles that underlie them and give them meaning. For example, children are told that kites are mostly flown at a certain time of the year and they observe this on their own. But this only becomes meaningful to them when the teacher explains why the wind is high at that time of year. This approach not only helps the children to learn more efficiently but it also encourages them make other relationships for themselves when the teachers is not around. Incidentally, this is how the children will establish the necessary connection between the Science and Technology subjects.

Basic Concepts Approach
It might be contended that these subjects are already on the curriculum of the Primary school. But it should be clear to all of us that our children have not learnt them well; or not at all. Further we can ask why children do so badly at the School Leaving examination with these same subjects that they have been learning for more than eight years.

If the approach being advocated for this basic curriculum is adopted, many of our teaching and learning problems will be avoided. But another crucial strategy in delivering has to be that of consciously relating all that our children learn at school to the world outside. After all, the subject matter content in the curriculum comes from our experiences with our social and physical environment. We merely organize and package it for learning in the school situation.

At this point, I want to make a comment on the omission of Foreign Language from the first two stages. While it sounds good say that children will be learning a foreign language at the earlier stages. There is no evidence to show that students really learn anything significant at this level. The argument that they learn a foreign language better at an early age applies only to the situation where they are immersed in a foreign language environment. We have no such environment in SVG schools. Further, if we teach Foreign languages formally in school children will not learn meaningfully if they do not have a grasp of how the English language works. And, by they way, we need to break out of the misguided approach of teaching English as if it were the mother tongue of our children. That approach takes too many things for granted with children who normally use an English-based dialect when they communicate.

Finally, I exhort parents and everybody else to begin to focus on the curriculum of our school system. This is the crux of any innovation intended to improve the way our children are educated.