Harms of the curriculum
This text is part of: "Problem of Schooling" by Piotr Wozniak (2017-2025)
Toxic curriculum
Compulsory curriculum is one of the most toxic aspects of modern schooling. It contributes to:
- hate of learning
- lowering of societal intelligence
- distrust of science
- conspiracy theories
- suppressing creativity
- unemployment
- depression
- addictions
- political indoctrination
- preservation of compulsory schooling
Curriculum habits
School impairs the ability to understand free learning (see: Well-schooled people do not understand free learning). The entire learning model proposed at school is wrong. As school paints itself as the only right way to learn, this leads to Glorification of schooling. School may seem necessary due to a mythical belief that the curriculum determines the mindset or shapes it to a significant degree.
The way a student thinks about learning can be totally redefined by the mere fact that the whole program of study at school is governed by the curriculum. Instead of thinking "what is useful for me", students start thinking "what a man should know". Instead of thinking about the importance of neurons, or the sources of carbon dioxide, she starts thinking in terms of "biology material" or a "chemistry course". She may wonder: "Was that particular block of knowledge covered at school? Do I need to be ashamed for not knowing that part of the curriculum? Perhaps I need to retake the entire course as a form of repentance?"
Compulsory curriculum
In free learning, we need no curriculum. The learn drive provides optimum guidance (see: Optimality of the learn drive). However, a curriculum might be a guide to learning for those with lesser understanding of education or their own goals. For example, it can help parents of a newly baked homeschooler seek inspirational sources.
Any good book can be used as a guiding skeleton for further explorations. However, in real life, the curriculum is often made compulsory, or it is imposed on students with coercive learning. Instead of the pleasure of learning typical of free learning, we may spark reactance or learned helplessness depending on the relative strength of the learn drive against the set of rewards and penalties imposed by school (see the picture).
Due to its mandatory and coercive nature, the curriculum has become one of the greatest scourges of education. The curriculum lays at the root of the Problem of schooling.
Once a school adopts a curriculum it often needs to control all steps of the progress in learning. Departure from the adopted line leads to gaps in knowledge and poor comprehension. Kids who get sick, easily fall back. Kids who show little interest, progressively build up outstanding knowledge that undermines the love of learning. "Perfectly" designed curriculum is like a house of cards that collapses with just a few missing components.
Creative straight jacket
Children have no patience for absurdities of adult life. They may wonder why we have many words to describe one concept. Why spelling differs from pronunciation. Why we have many languages. Why we have borders. Given free hand, children are ready to simplify the world, simplify life, and contribute to forming happier societies. But this effort is crushed in the bud. I was forbidden to practice handwriting with both hands. When one hand gets tired, the other gets employed. Only after decades of using a keyboard, the huge callus on my middle finger of the right hand flattened out. I was forbidden to exercise compassion by testing how the world feels for the blind. If a child chose to do all her calculations in the hexadecimal system, she might be on a path to change the way we see numbers. We should never prevent this from happening. We should not force a child to believe that the decimal system is superior. If Wolfram Alpha is fun, we should let the kid step to a new level of understanding math. Those longwinded calculations will never serve a higher purpose if the child's brain does not provide a stamp of approval.
If a child chooses to create his own language or a coding system, we should not stop it. Children invent games, languages, musical notations, political systems, secret codes, and more. They discover or create new worlds. This is why they love sandbox simulation games. This golden creativity is actively suppressed at school. A teacher will steal a child's time by demanding a "creative" task that does not match the child's interest and sparks no creative passion. Very often, the crime of suppressed activity begins with the need to rush with the curriculum.
Inhibited exploration
The basis of perfect education is the exposure of the brain to target environments. A child of an engineer exposed to a life in a cubicle is likely to develop efficient adaptations to become a programmer. Exposure to the knowledge of the web may provide all necessary ingredients to find an optimum fit in the on-line world. A surgeon may feel cumbersome in protective suits during the times of pandemic. His adaptation to new life may take just a few days. In those few days, he will perfect all procedural and cognitive skills needed to fit well into the new role. The brain is a perfectly adapting device. It learns best with a self-dosed incremental increase in complexity.
The power of exposure is largely ignored by the school system. Instead of exposing a child to a life in a pharmacy, the school will begin with the teaching of the alphabet and numbers in disregard of a child's needs. The basics will be followed years later with the memorization of drugs, their names, formulas, dosages, etc. In the process, the entire knowledge valuation network is set upside down and blunted. The love of learning and the love of life are extinguished. Metaphorically speaking, education is a bit like gold prospecting. Instead of searching for gold, the child starts from memorizing the components of a shovel. In addition to going against the learn drive, the theory of the shovel may turn out useless when the sieve appears more fit for the job years later.
Due to deficits in educational empathy, adults believe that a prospect of a pancake should make a child climb an Everest. Minor rewards do not substitute for the learn drive, which is based on a vast and complex knowledge valuation network.
Instead of riding a bike, the child is supposed to learn about the structure of muscles and the optimum sequence of their activation. That theory of bike riding is obviously preposterous to everyone. The idea of the curriculum is not. It has stayed rigid and unmovable for centuries.
Hate of learning
The early years at school are pestered with toxic memory problems that can last for life: "I am bad at memorizing", "I am bad at math", "I am dyslexic", "I never had a talent for languages", "I am lazy", "I am a procrastinator", etc. Instead of a massive army of enlightened and autonomous individuals, the factory system of education is churning out graduates that lack in self-esteem. That diffidence is entirely induced and unjustified. It slowly assumed the dimensions of a large-scale social tragedy.
When people say "I have no head for physics", or "I have no memory for history", we can always trace the origins of that claim to some toxic events at school. The origin of those lifelong pains or anxieties resides in the compulsory curriculum. We could even boldly claim that putting things in the curriculum adds to an overall dislike of the subject in a generation of students. Some students will become passionate, but most will be repelled. On average, placing things in the curriculum might be a net loss.
Harms of early instruction
One of the most harmful aspects of the curriculum is the fossilized idea of the early academic instruction.
It is propelled by parental greed for high achievement. It is based on a harmful myth that early instruction is beneficial for brain development. The opposite is true. All forms of stress in early instructions stunt the development by premature maturation and specialization of the brain architecture (see: Precocity paradox).
The obsession with doing things early comes from the idea of critical periods and the alleged importance of instruction for brain development. Instead, in early instruction, pleasure of learning is replaced with the assembly of asemantic building blocks of knowledge. This slows down learning and may lead to an early dislike of learning. There is a positive feedback loop between hard material, knowledge toxicity, dislike of learning, and the position of individual items in the curriculum (see: Tunnel vision of school letteracy).
Even though many experts advocate against early academic instruction, e.g. as pushed with common core standards, the problem is never fully measurable due to the old soup problem. When schools mix the bad with the good, the bad can lurk in hiding.
The blind alley of curricular evolution does not proceed to the point of destroying brains and societies. There is always the light in the tunnel. It begins with the resistance of children, followed up by resistance of open-minded parents, and ends with a change to strategies. When kids start hiding under the bed to avoid reading in the kindergarten, parents and educators realize that things have been pushed too far.
Unfortunately, those trajectory corrections tend to fall into long-term oscillations. We tighten the standards until kids break, so we loosen the requirements, only to return to the same optimization error in a decade or two. The only solution towards breaking that cycle is the end of the compulsory schooling. Instead, free learning and free education should rule.
Cognitive biases and ancient mythology make schools evolve towards their own demise.
Asemantic curriculum
Asemantic curriculum is the result of the forces governed by cognitive biases that affect our valuation of knowledge. However, as we all go through the torment of cramming at school, one may wonder why adults don't fix the problem in hindsight. Here, another cognitive bias takes over, distorted memories of childhood filtered by the adult-centric point of view (see: Educational empathy). We keep hearing that literacy and numeracy begin with "essential" knowledge that needs to be memorized. This includes the queen of toxic memories: the multiplication table. Once we are lucky to pass this stage and complete education, we usually forget the torment or consider it absolutely necessary. Hence the adult glorification of schooling experience.
The second problem in the curriculum design is the backward mapping of standards from adult levels. For example, preschool curriculum is tainted by backward design set to achieve high school standards. What makes matters worse is that the mapping is often made by "experts" that have no understanding of early education. The sloppy process of curriculum design was one of the inspirations for the Sudbury Valley School as explained by Dr Danny Greenberg himself.
The power of the adult-centric approach and backward mapping is explained with a Mountain climb metaphor of schooling.
See: Asemantic curriculum
Curriculum lag
Curriculum lag is the delay period by which the content of the curriculum trails behind the knowledge needed for the progress of mankind. The delay may span decades, and it worsens the negative impact of schooling on the adaptation of youth to the modern world.
If the curriculum is written by 40–55-year-olds, it is heavily biased for knowledge content carried by the curriculum from 20-50 years before. This phenomenon is recursive and produces a lag effect in which a curriculum in the year 2020 may still be polluted by knowledge that was only applicable a century ago. Many countries gave up compulsory teaching of cursive. It is still compulsory in Poland. Recently, I discovered that the capital F in cursive in Polish curriculum looks completely unfamiliar. I have no recall of learning that letter in my childhood. I have no recall of ever encountering this letter in my life. What is worse, I was not able to tell the letter. It looks like a cross between T and F. If anyone asked me, I would say the letter does not exist! If six decades of life of a seemingly knowledgeable PhD guy produces no memory of an interaction with the cursive capital F, why is it required from little children as compulsory knowledge?
The entire field of mathematics is evolving fast, for example, with new applications of machine learning. Yet the math curriculum today is not much different than the curriculum in the 1950s. Mathematical calculations on paper seem very important, yet few people employ them today. They should never be compulsory. When I tried to recall long division, I could not (20 seconds of trying). I did not forget. I practiced it for long hours as a child. However, in adult life, I probably never used the skill. I may be able to divide numbers in my mind: less precision, better speed, and much better applicability. Calculators are as ubiquitous as paper. Long division is just one of the dino skeletons that never seem to die in school textbooks. Just for fun, I tried to re-learn it and it was just about 2-3 minutes of this video. Sadly, I doubt I will ever use it. Unless just to show off or to prove my point.
Once we free schooling from the tyranny of the curriculum, we can hope to shed the ballast of the old and bring forth the importance of new solutions. There is always a risk of new trends ditching some old values. However, in the increasingly improved access to knowledge and the prospects of the semantic web, the old good solutions will not die. They will just undergo a healthy Darwinian process and can always be revived once they provide tangible advantage in specific contexts.
The lag has a powerful negative impact on mental health of the young generation. On one hand in increases the stress associated with the sensation of time waste at school, on the other it leaves graduates woefully unprepared for success in life.
Curriculum lag is bad for knowledge, and bad for mental health
See: Curriculum lag
Curriculum bloat
When we encounter a painful problem of societal ignorance, we instinctively think of including the subject in the curriculum. This habit of thinking of the curriculum as if it was a bottomless dump for useful knowledge belongs to 100 bad habits learned at school.
When we see racism or poor tolerance of LGBT people, we may think that adding some classes on tolerance or diversity will mitigate the problem. Apparently, a tolerant person cannot visualize a racist sitting in a class which explains that racism is immoral or criminal. This only amplifies the negative feelings and adds to the dislike of school, teachers, people who differ, and even those who differ in opinion. In the end, a racist in a tolerance class may become more racist.
When things go wrong in the economy or in society, politicians keep ranting "this subject should be compulsory at school"? It does not seem to matter that making things compulsory often leads to reactance and devaluation of the subject. When climate change is compulsory at school, it stops being interesting in real life. It gets the status of a boring "adult world drone".
The same refers to "sex education", "internet technologies", or "learning how to learn". Cramming national history or literature is one of the best ways to cure one from being patriotic (see: I stopped being patriotic). If schools started promoting spaced repetition, it would be a big toxic bomb for the concept. Leeches and toxic memories would be the only remnants of the idea once the smoke cleared. Pushing SuperMemo on kids is one of the most effective ways of making sure they will never appreciate the power of spaced repetition, let alone incremental reading (see: SuperMemo does not work for kids).
Political curriculum
In all political systems, curriculum is always used as a weapon that can shape young minds. This is most evident in totalitarian systems, where ideology must be inculcated early or face extinction in a clash with liberal thinking. The whole idea of compulsory schooling can also be seen as an ideology that has been engraved deep into modern cultures. When I insist that compulsory schooling must end, even the most enlightened minds raise opposition at first. It takes quite an effort to show a direct link between coercion, curriculum, pressure at school, stress, toxic memory, learned helplessness, and the loss of love of learning. It is hard to show that coercive schooling undermines societal intelligence. It is hard to show how school leads to depression, addictions, and unhappy lives. Soon, it will also be one of the key factors in driving unemployment and economic inequality.
See: School curriculum is inherently political.
Indoctrination pendulum
The curriculum has a powerful impact indeed, but it is not the same impact as intended (for a vivid example, see: I do not read books, and I do not read fiction).
I devoted a whole chapter to "indoctrination via curriculum" in Ban on homeschooling. I show how religions thrive under fire and how religious indoctrination and the atheist curriculum work to fossilize their respective proponents into hermitically closed opposing camps. Fundamentalists thrive in conditions of repression, and fade in conditions of freedom.
The main idea is that all forms of ideological indoctrination tend to backfire in the long term. They simply activate natural resistance implemented in the exploratory learning algorithm in the brain (see: Education counteracts evolution). It is that resistance to indoctrination that underlies the forces of ideological pendulum, and, on a larger scale, the pendulum of history.
These are all natural oscillations that occur in the cultural battle of the memes. There is some value to those oscillations, and there are teaching moments in those extreme contrasts. For example, we learned a lot when Trump followed Obama (see: Mystery of Donald Trump's brain). Now that Biden took the rein, he is undoing all radical changes made by the predecessor. In the process, he brings up ancient memories of the New Deal and its implications.
Localized oscillations have the same value and result in less turmoil and social distress. Passions improve learning, but fierce battles may be inhibitory and distortive. This is why homogenization of knowledge via a common core curriculum is harmful. A healthy society is a diverse society in which communication between individuals is nearly always inspirational.
Trans-generational harm
The bad habit of the reliance on the curriculum begins with the myth that the curriculum is necessary. When myths are well integrated with the thought system, they form habits. The wrong belief habituates reflexive behavior.
The reliance on the curriculum is a self-perpetuating habit. Children grown on the diet of the curriculum, become adults who claim with conviction: "children need direction in learning". As a result, well-guided adults deprive their own children of choices needed to develop autonomy and intelligence.
Science curriculum
Hate of math and hate of science are born at school. For many 5-year-olds, there is nothing more interesting than science and technology. They want to understand the world. But then they go to school.
It only takes a few months of classroom time for kids to be fed up with simple calculations as demanded by the curriculum. One kid may prefer to count fish in his tank. Another will obsessively count the candy to share with his siblings. Instead, at school, they are all force-fed with the same materials from a puerile textbook set. It gets worse when a kid got some true interest in science. Counting planets or ants may be infinitely more engaging. There is no better way to develop a good number sense than to get immersed in one's own research or in virtual reality where numbers abound. See: Videogames are better than teachers.
In addition to being boring, science curriculum has a fatal flaw of presenting science as a set of truths written in stone. This is why many conspiracy theorists mock science. They insist that if science claims to be omniscient and yet it keeps changing, it can never be trusted. That conspiracy mindset begins at school as reactance against the only truth that may seem shaky at places. Instead, we should just let kids explore all contradictions and weak spots of science.
Science is perpetually rife with disagreement about facts and models. The tension propels the change.
Take my pet meme I want all children to memorize for life: alarm clock is a brain destroyer! I do not recall ever learning a single thing about sleep physiology during my 26 long years of schooling. This is horrible news. This is even worse as I have a degree in biology! Once I asked a group of students of medicine about the role of sleep. They all unanimously claimed "rest"! Instead of being educated about the science of sleep, I was regularly penalized for treating sleep seriously. My being late for school was always part of my inseparable label of a "kid with behavioral problems". In my teens, I literally tried to explain to my teachers that a "well rested human being is a better member of society". I met no sympathy! Today, we literally make kids sick by waking them up early for school. Many behavioral problems begin in the early morning when a child battles his parents against forceful waking. What is worse, we tell kids that getting up early helps them prepare for adult life. In reality, we destroy sleep control systems that may lead to lifetime struggle with sleep disorders. See: School start time.
Now imagine a fictional scenario in which we develop a new curriculum that would finally give sleep due credit. Natural teen reactance would probably lead to a new epidemic of polyphasic sleep that might be as harmful as early school start. If adults tell you that you need many hours of healthy undisrupted sleep, it may stand in conflict with your late-night gaming plans. That's the first step to rebellion and calling adult claims stupid.
Curiosity is a great motor of scientific progress; however, scientific feuds are equally helpful. If we feed all kids with the same set of dry facts, we sow seeds of intellectual stagnation. Disagreements in science are the engine of progress.
Empathy problem
Adults struggle to empathize with young brains. It is no coincidence that early learning gravitates towards asemantic content. Letters of the alphabet, days of the week, names of months, multiplication table, etc. These are all asemantic concepts that get quickly filtered as hardest. This gives them the aura of primacy and primitiveness. They may be labelled as basic toolset. In reality, what a young brain needs is a rich semantic framework that establishes the need for, and the meaning of those primitive concepts. Only then learning may become semantic and produce desired results. A vast majority of adults, including good teachers, do not understand the need for semantic learning. This is the outcome of the conditioning by the Prussian system.
It is very easy for an adult to get a glimpse into a child's brain. Imagine a child who is to learn the names of the days of the week. This child has no scheduled events such us the Sunday mass, or Saturday soccer. For this child, there is less difference between Tuesday and Thursday than there is a difference between Ganymede and Calisto. To learn the names of the days is like attaching labels to vacuum. Entirely futile and asemantic. The adult may reason "these are vital terms the child will need in her life".
To remedy the deficit in educational empathy, the adult can imagine the year split into 36 ten-day periods with each period assigned a specific name: Primedec, Secdec, Winterdec, Febdec, etc. How about learning that sequence just for a test? Only 36 names (just to compensate for adult metacognitive superiority). All adults, with no exceptions, rejects such a proposition. This is exactly how a child feels. A bunch of names to learn with no content and no purpose! This is classic asemantic learning.
Student and teacher perspectives
Many teachers and students are painfully aware of the harms of the curriculum. However, the realization often comes after years of teaching practice or after dropping out from school.
A teacher who respects student autonomy explained:
A phrase I hear often in schools is "what do we want students to know?", as if putting it the curriculum is the same as putting it into people's brains. The thing is, once the students start believing that curriculum myth - and they eventually do - it becomes very hard (though not impossible) to wake anyone up. In no time, the myth becomes a reality. Students believe that knowledge can't come from anything but formal instruction, which may be true after a while because of 1) school using all their mental resources, and 2) students lose the skill of self-directed learning
A school dropout explained that after many years of bad learning at school, he could see the light only when the burden of coercion was lifted:
I remember thinking how ignorant I was of philosophy because I had never touched a philosophy book. Only when I started reading a little, did I notice "Hey, I've been thinking about those things, I just didn't know they were called philosophy". I also remember trying to make the decision on whether I should study about data structures or about operating systems. What I didn't consider was that learning about operating systems teaches you a great deal about data structures. This last example shows another bad habit: treating subjects as ends in themselves instead of having in mind some problem and basing decisions on that
Curriculum habits
There are more than 100 bad habits learned at school. Those habit overlap and live in synergy. Reliance on the curriculum is one of those bad habits. It can easily be confused with Glorification of schooling. The key difference is that glorification of school makes you say to your child, "Go to school. School is good for you". While the glorification of the curriculum makes you say "We need this subject in the curriculum" or to a child "you must learn it. it is important for you", as if the child had no idea what she wanted to do in her life and what is needed for her goals. Glorification of the curriculum overlaps with bad habits of imitation, reliance on assistance, reliance on experts, and the reliance on degrees. It leads to a belief that if you do not encounter a subject at school, you will forever remain ignorant of it.
Origins of curriculum
At the times of Martin Luther (1483-1546), education was a type of unschooling combined with impoverished learning environments. This type of unschooling was highly ineffective in delivering enlightened citizenry. The only efficient pathway to wisdom was an interaction with wise learned men. Those were few and far between, and most of their wisdom came from religious texts.
However, a new route started opening up: the availability of print. Schooling became an attractive proposition for shaping the collective minds of societies. This process would usually serve the monarch, or the clergy. It was only natural to conclude that learning to read was becoming an increasingly efficient pathway to wisdom. This thinking was justified until the twentieth century. With the advent of the radio, then TV, and now the web, the role of reading in early development was gradually diminishing, however, to this day, a run-of-the-mill education lives with a myth that pushing a 3–4-year-old to reading is conferring an early educational benefit. This claim has been disproved decisively. Even worse, videogames or YouTube are considered an anathema that suppresses reading (see: Gaming disorder). The opposite is true: the new media and the new learning tools are a learning treasure.
While the battle around the curriculum continues, while kids spend more and more time drilled in asemantic learning, vast learning opportunities of the new global electronic interconnected world are missed. Instead of exploring science, natural world, engineering, or philosophy, kids cram items from an asemantic curriculum. Instead of naturally absorbing foreign languages in videogames, students are forced to cram vocabulary, spelling, grammar, songs and poems. As a consequence, they learn to hate language learning.
Paradoxically, teachers and authoritarian parents may be the last in the queue to notice the problem. They seem to be preoccupied with a "wrong developmental pathway" for their children, and take drastic steps such as coercion, penalties, bribes, medication, therapy, or ban on access to electronic media (see: Homo tabletis). A tug of war ensues and blinds all parties: (1) the adults who want to push kids on the right track, and (2) the children who see the adult world as a source of oppression. Hence the drive towards addiction, videogames or drugs, which all share similar routes in association with the loss of freedom. Those battle worsen the generational rift and perpetuate myths such as teenagers are lazy, teenagers hate everything, etc. This is less of a problem in parenting based on open behavioral spaces. This type of open parenting provides a better feedback as to the child's needs. This in turn helps optimize the developmental trajectories.
The right strategy would be to let kids follow their healthy learn drive and choose learning sources that maximize learntropy. These days, when we look at unschooling, the old way of thinking leads to a horrifying conclusion: kids prefer to learn from YouTube which delays their reading progress. Even worse, they use speech synthesis and speech recognition to circumvent the need for reading. That contrast between high learntropy sources and asemantic schooling is spiraling towards a rapid increase in school hate. This will inevitably lead to the end of compulsory schooling (see: Compulsory schooling must end). The lid on the pot is kept in place by threats and indoctrination (e.g. "without school you will end up homeless").
Child's rights violation
Compulsory schooling is a violation of human rights. However, at the core of that violation is the compulsory curriculum. If kids could choose their own projects and develop in their own direction, reporting on their own progress would likely not be onerous. I bet many kids would even enjoy the time when someone would pay attention to their own achievements. Compulsory curriculum will always be a form of indoctrination, and a way to discourage learning. Even in sciences, the child should always be able to pose her own hypotheses and learn to falsify or seek evidence. Whichever area of human knowledge we choose, it is just a matter of time when there is a disagreement between the curriculum and a child's own interests. Those disagreements are a direct way to discourage further learning, and in the long run, possibly cause a dislike of selected fields.
For learning to bring good results, it must comply with the Fundamental Law of Learning. It must be guided by the learn drive. Otherwise, learning is inefficient and possibly counter-productive (i.e. the act of learning causes a net loss of knowledge via interference).
As learning determines a person's place in life, satisfaction, productivity and mental health, own learning is a basic human right.
See:
- Compulsory schooling must end
- Children’s Freedom: A Human Rights Perspective
- Education as a human right
- Declaration of Educational Emancipation
- School slavery will end soon
Further reading
The following texts expand in detail the discussed harms of the curriculum:
- Asemantic curriculum
- Curriculum lag
- History curriculum can shape nationalist attitudes
- Deficit in educational empathy determines the curriculum
- Curriculum is inherently political
- Papert's visionary call to ditch obsolete letteracy (1993)
- Mountain climb metaphor of schooling
- Education Reform