A topic I will keep returning to is the subject-centered curriculum. All schools organize their curriculum around subjects. As a means of organizing facts and procedures into a meaningful explanation, subjects appear on the surface to be a logical response. Of course, the other function subjects serve very well is the institutional goal of documenting student progress, which, in this case, amounts to attaching a credit to each subject. The source of the credit system was developed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The unit system, developed in 1906, measures the amount of time a student has studied a subject. For example, a total of 120 hours in a subject meeting four or five times a week for 40- 60 minutes each year earns the student one unit of high school credit.
While managerial main offices value the documentation ease of the credit system, the subject-centered curriculum fails to serve students or future employers well. The problem with a subject-centered curriculum is this particular organizational structure sets up a firewall against any form of interdisciplinary learning and relates poorly to the ill-structured problems and processes that control real-world organizations. Subjects never pose the critical real-world questions that are asked daily in the private sector: What do we know? “What will we do?” How do we do it?
The distinction between information and knowledge is missed in schools. Curriculum guides and textbook are organized into subjects, which treat the mountains of information they contain as if they were imparting knowledge. Information in transformed into knowledge when it is applied to a problem, a process, a plan, a strategy. The only application in the subject-centered curriculum is to pass a test, earn a credit, and eventually earn a diploma. In the world of institutional schooling earning subject matter credits for the memorization of information underlies the organization and delivery of the curriculum.
For facts and procedures to become meaningful in a real-world context, they must submit to a method of study and a disciplinary framework that systemizes cause-and-effect relationships where these floating-around facts and procedures take on a predictive quality. To put it another way, classroom instruction ought to focus on assisting students with seeing relationships rather memorizing discreet pieces of information. The distinction between information and knowledge is just that: the former asks students to file in their minds around names, dates, theories, concepts, and procedures; the latter asks students to see and establish relationships between those same names, dates, theories, concepts, and procedures. The primary pedagogical function that teachers serve is creating problems or dilemmas where those relationships come into play.
Alan C. Jones 