Draw a path from B.C. to Saskatchewan using a map of Alberta. Learn about BCE and CE before learning how to read a clock. Admire Jason Kenney’s grandpa as the most influential jazz musician in all of Canada-these are some of the most glaring problems that educators found in the Alberta government’s draft K-6 curriculum. But this proposed curriculum change does not just involve logical failures. It doesn’t give any opportunities for students to develop critical thinking skills, use their reasoning, or form their own opinion. To put it plainly, the Alberta government is proposing to teach something that will stop children from thinking.
The Alberta government is proposing to teach something that will stop children from thinking.
Two Ways of Learning
There are two ways you can teach in a curriculum: based on knowledge, or based on skills. Knowledge involves the memorization of facts and information. When you learn that water freezes at zero degrees, or that Christmas is on December 25, you are engaging in knowledge-based learning. While it’s important to remember facts and absorb information, this type of learning falls short on analysis and reasoning. Students are not instructed to ask why a fact is true, or understand how a fact came to be the way it is. Because students don’t think critically when they are memorizing dry facts, they cannot form an opinion and make informed, justified decisions.
The other, more constructive type of learning, is skill-based. This type of learning asks you to dig deeper into information. It instructs you to state and justify your opinion, use the information to solve problems, or draw conclusions from the information. When students develop learning skills, they interact with the information that they learn. They question and analyze the facts, coming to well-reasoned conclusions.
The New Curriculum’s Objectives
Now let’s look at the command terms from the new curriculum in English, Social Studies, Math and Science.
An overwhelming amount of the learning objectives want students to “identify”, “list”, “define”, or “label”. These command terms are all knowledge-based because they instruct students to point out a single fact, list out multiple facts, or apply facts in context. Only a few aspects of the curriculum ask students to think about what they are learning by “drawing conclusions”, “analyzing”, “arguing”, or “interpreting”. In other words, this curriculum is essentially asking: “Here’s some information, can you regurgitate it back?” K-6 is an essential time for students to develop critical thinking skills, and the new curriculum offers no opportunities to teach these skills at all.
An overwhelming amount of the learning objectives want students to “identify”, “list”, “define”, or “label”. Only a few aspects ask students to think about what they are learning.
Five Terrifying Words: “I Don’t Want to Think”
John Locke once said: “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. When we start teaching this curriculum, students will start saying they don’t want to think. This phrase should not be coming out of any student’s mouth, but it might just be what the new curriculum results in.
