Purpose, Please?

Where is the purpose-driven curriculum? It’s an elusive concept that loading on more so-called common core standards and high-stakes tests will not make evident.

There’s a cartoon of a man coming home from work, saying to himself, “Well, there’s another day I didn’t use algebra.” In fact, most days most people don’t use algebra or another other form of higher mathematics. Some days we don’t even use basic arithmetic. And yet we have enshrined mathematics as sacrosanct. Why? Because it helps students learn how to think in another language, to transfer learned concepts from one context to another. Those are actual purposes for teaching advanced mathematics. Calculus, for the vast majority of people, is not a life skill; thinking is. Teaching thinking skills is a fundamental purpose of education.

The overwhelming emphasis on reading and mathematics skills, minutely detailed in standards and curricula and tested ad nauseam using high-stakes, life-altering exams, trivializes these subjects in the same way that curricular neglect denigrates and trivializes everything else, from the arts to civic education. The actual purposes of education are lost in a morass of trivia.

We spend an enormous amount of time and effort, paper and ink, to answer the question, How should we teach mathematics? The real question is, Why? Why should we teach mathematics, literature, the arts, civic education, and everything else? Why questions lead to purpose statements, which in turn should guide standards setting and curriculum development. Modern “reform” efforts don’t start here and so put the cart before the horse. It’s hardly any wonder that they don’t get anywhere.

What if we made Why? the starting point for every conversation about education—what we teach, how we evaluate students and teachers, and all the rest? If we can’t come up with an honest, important purpose, then maybe we should stop right there—before we muck around and make things worse instead of better.