Eisner’s Curriculum

I was reading Eisner’s article, and right at the beginning where he was explaining that curriculum is what we teach and that we teach compliance, I realized that this would be a point that would have made me stop and think, but that idea of teaching compliance had already been expressed many times in just two weeks of BEd that I didn’t even skip a beat. But then the article got to the competitiveness, and mentioned physical activities and games, and yeah, that’s some competitiveness, and I think I understand some of the negative impacts, but then Eisner went deeper into the classroom dynamics, and normal distribution of grades, and university admissions, and honours, and all that, and that made me stop. Coming from a country with a different school culture, that was almost shocking. The concept wasn’t unheard for me, but I honestly thought most of it was just Hollywood exaggerations to add to the plot and highlight the good guys vs the bad guys stereotype in high school drama movies and shows. Possibly coming from a country with many standardized tests, including National Standardized Admission Exams for universities, there was none of that extreme competitiveness Eisner mentioned. That was quite something.

Another contrast, and it’s a huge section, is the entire segment on the Null Curriculum. The things you don’t teach. I’m honestly not familiar with education during Eisner’s time, but my experience growing up, your entire school schedule was set, and even university was pretty much laid out. During my time as a student, art class was just for kids. I think my last art class was grade 5 or something. There was also no philosophy, or virtually any thing Eisner mention is missing. My experience volunteering in a high school in BC in 2026 was completely different. I saw that students have many options to choose from, together with a core mandatory course list. That seems way more in line with what Eisner thought was missing.

I think the BC curriculum approaches most of those issues with an open mind, and trying to solve the issues mentioned by Eisner. Maybe the different streams of mathematics could be taken as some sort of honours classes, but I guess that is a way to make some part of math mandatory and some more complex part of math optional. From what I noticed (but I’m not exactly sure how the BC curriculum states that) students opt into those streams. The teacher may suggest to a struggling student that they could take the workplace math stream, but it is ultimately decided by the student. I guess that is possibly healthier.