What I learned by reading “Understanding and Transforming Teaching”.

“ Understanding and Transforming Teaching” was written by J. Gimeno Sacristán and A. I Pérez Gomez. Below, what I learned by reading this text.

1. The school curriculum reflects the relationship between society and education as well as the relationship between theory and practice.
2. The curriculum changes as society changes its essential knowledge standards.
3. The curriculum also implies the elucidation of the resources we use when teaching, which also change with time.
4. The school curriculum is not static; it changes as society changes.
5. The curriculum is a historically conditioned project, its content is selected by the dominant social forces.
6. The curriculum has both a theoretical and a practical side.
7. The curriculum conditions the teacher’s training.
8. Schooling is a social construct.
9. Modern schooling dates from the industrial revolution: school was not always like this, school does not have to be this way.
10. What guides the composition of the curriculum is our social expectation for the next generation.
11. “Curriculum content” is a concept that is subject to interpretation.
12. So there is no consensus on what goes in and what comes out of the school curriculum.
13. “Content” is also a social construct.
14. The content of the curriculum changes over time.
15. In the end, the content ends up reflecting the values ​​of the school in a cultural context.
16. Because the curriculum responds to social demand, it is not possible to guide it with a specific philosophy or psychology or anything like this: the “essential things to be taught” are not easy to choose, it must take societal expectation into consideration.
17. “Content”, in the strict sense, is an academic summary (the Canudos war, for example) organized within a school discipline (history of Brazil).
18. It is important to remember that the content taught may not match the content learned.
19. Knowledge alone doesn’t build character: students need to have attitude, values, discipline and critical thinking.
20. This is done by learning the consequences of our actions.
21. In a broad sense, “content” is all that occupies school time, whether as part of the official curriculum or not (” hidden curriculum”).
22. In a broad sense, “content” is everything that occupies school time, whether as part of the official curriculum or not (” hidden curriculum”).
23. Teaching critical thinking is not like teaching math.
24. How to teach independence?
25. The child should learn to behave autonomously .
26. The adolescent should be aware of local beliefs and choose the one he or she thinks best for his / her personal development.
27. Because of the demand for critical and civic subjects, the school content can not be academicist, a “knowledge for sake of knowledge”, but a knowledge that builds the person and that can be used by the student in his daily life.
28. If teaching is a science, then it’s object of study is the student’s mind, but how do you measure a mind?
29. Training students for the labor market alone is mediocre and insufficient.
30. The availability of content outside of school also raises the need to review what is relevant as school content.
31. The hidden curriculum is also socially conditioned.
32. School content changes slower than society.
33. Revolutionary educational discourse is omnipresent, but the practice of teaching and organizing content the same way we did in the last century is also omnipresent.
34. Academic formation and human formation have the same importance in the formation of the complete individual: abolishing or underestimating academic formation in the name of the humanities is a dismantling of teaching, as much as abolishing humanities to build pure workforce.
35. Curriculum content selection criteria are generally not technical, nor scientific.
36. This is because the curriculum must respond to social cultural demand.
37. So if society is the source of the curriculum, it is clear that curriculum content can not be determined scientifically, as if it were possible to create a definitive curriculum, which would imply a society that does not change.
38. The proposal of the school is to form an individual through the curriculum, so the function of the school is to form the individual that society wants.
39. What kind of person does our society need?
40. History is relative and times change.
41. When values ​​change, the curriculum changes.
42. Better to have the means to find and judge an answer than to memorize answers.
43. The education of the dominant groups, the more intellectual education, is given in high school for a reason: the poor do not always enter high school.
44. The creation of the curriculum panders to social pressures indirectly, through the suggestions of the government, entrepreneurs, parents, specialists and writers of didactic material.
45. Although the school eventually reproduces the hegemonic culture, there are spaces of autonomy that teachers and staff can use to question such culture.
46. The traditional curriculum wants to naturalize events, while the critical curriculum wants the student to judge what he considers to be natural.
47. No school curriculum is impassive of change.
48. Revolutionizing teaching is not something that should be done by ignoring what the established culture thinks, just for the pleasure of starting from scratch.
49. Social movements, by changing values, operate changes in the curriculum.
50. “Education for all” is not merely a humanistic ideal but also a labor market requirement: the student must learn general skills in school so that he can choose what to specialize next.
51. This ideal is also a consequence of the demand for quality workforce.
52. This makes the positive sciences overrated, compared to humanities.
53. Reformists call this “rational education,” not that it makes a complete education.
54. Because positive sciences are overrated, some people think it’s a good idea to remove humanities from school curriculum completely.
55. In times of economic crisis or recession in the labor market, people use the circumstances to try and push for the removal of humanities.
56. This is where neoconservatives find a loophole to interfere with education.
57. Neoconservative critiques of the school have the interests of production as their starting point: for them, what matters is to create an employee, not a citizen.
58. If things go that way, the most valued disciplines will be those that prepare for the jobs that pay the most.
59. And that is why we study a lot of Portuguese language and mathematics.
60. The cultural source of the curriculum is divided into three elements: what is worth conserving from our culture, the needs of the present time and what kind of society we want to create.
61. Although early childhood education comes before primary education, it is not a requirement for primary education, since early childhood education was conceived after elementary, which has historically been the foundation of all other levels.
62. Early childhood education responds to a family demand: the working woman has to leave her children somewhere, so why not in a place where the tyke can study?
63. Although primary schooling is regarded as the basis of others, it was not the first to emerge: the first level of institutional education to emerge was the superior.
64. The university influence in the school is omnipresent: even the lessons in elementary look like college lessons.
65. There is no scientific method for building a school curriculum.
66. This is because the curriculum is not a pedagogy, it is not a teaching method (there are scientific methods of teaching content), but a list of what to teach, which needs to respond to society’s demand.
67. Teaching is more a question of general principles than of static methods.
68. The ages of compulsory education vary from country to country.
69. If education is compulsory, for example, from six to seventeen, we may sometimes force a gifted student to remain at a mediocre level because that is the level “appropriate” to his age.
70. All countries should have public education, since education is the right of all.
71. Education has homogenizing properties: if everyone has the same education, the most serious conflicts that could occur in a country are most easily avoided because citizens share a common set of beliefs and values.
72. Thus, public education is also a way of exercising power over citizens, a soft power, but still a power.
73. Public education makes the family less necessary.
74. Moreover, without public education, quality workforce becomes harder to find.
75. As the demand for quality workforce is high, not having qualification means having no job and having no qualified workforce in a territory means less private investment in that territory.
76. Moreover, without public education, where would children stay when parents are working?