Eisner on Three Curricula that all Schools Teach - Response

While reading Eisner’s discussion of the three curricula, one point that stood out to me was the idea that school prepares students for the kinds of jobs they will likely take on as adults, those which are often not stimulating or of any significant interest to the worker. I paused here because I felt a key point had been made which was then left uncovered for the rest of the chapter (justifiably so, as the focus is on the education system not society at large). In particular, I believe this touches on the larger issue that critiques of the school system and its “hidden” curricula do not lead us to many feasible solutions, as long as the general population’s material conditions remain poor. While we may feel that schools are wrongly churning out subservient workers, the real issue lies in this being a necessity as long as our societies are structured around needing workers who are complacent in being alienated from their production as they attempt to sustain themselves, given the current state of our economy and the ways in which we distribute goods or access to food, healthcare, and the like. 

Another point I found significant was Eisner’s comment on the lack of soft surfaces in schools for students. This made me stop and think back to my own time in grade school and I realized how accurate this statement was, beyond perhaps sitting on carpets in very early elementary years. Beyond Eisner’s suggestion that this is part of a curriculum that primes youth to one day unquestioningly work in highly sterile environments oriented only for maximum efficiency,  like offices or factories, I also found this realization quite appalling from a standpoint focused on wellbeing. Students spend so much of their life in the classroom, enough that the space should be designed specifically to be comfortable and safe, allowing their focus to be on learning and engaging. 

The current BC curriculum connects with Eisner’s ideas in that it attempts to outline parts of these previously undisclosed curricula by listing the core competencies students are meant to develop, beyond only learning subject-specific content. Skills like communication, creative and critical thinking, or social awareness, are now all explicitly listed as the general targets of the curriculum at large, which are meant to ensure students can be successful in their future discipline/industry or in social life/global societies in general. However, we could now further expand our conceptualization of ‘curriculum’ beyond the facts and skills being literally taught. We could begin to view how we structure the physical space students are in or how we structure their timetables and subject areas as another method of passing on “lessons” to students, as per Eisner’s ideas. For example, this could prompt productive conversations around how we set up physical classroom spaces to be less streamlined for maximum ‘efficiency’ or sterility and instead help students feel welcomed or open to learning and collaborating.