For the sake of clarity, I’d like to restate the dominant philosophy of education today.  

The purpose of school is to transfer a broad and

rigorous curriculum into the minds of students.  

Many assumptions flow from this central premise.  It is assumed, for instance, that students will in fact be prepared for college or a career, if only they master the curriculum. As we shall see, that is a poor assumption.

Furthermore, because the task of transferring this curriculum is considered to be a chore — after all, who really wants to learn how to factor quadratic equations or memorize all the detailed chemical processes that occur in photosynthesis? — students must be made to learn.  This is why the whole range of external motivators — all the carrots and sticks, the grades and the detentions — must be used to compel students to learn.

This aspect of the Curriculum Transfer Model puts you, the teacher, in the middle of a systemic power struggle.  It shapes your role; you are now the content deliverer and the enforcer of the curriculum transfer process. Your relationship with your students becomes one in which you cannot easily trust them (and vice versa), and one in which you often find yourself in an adversarial position, particularly with your unsuccessful students.

Even if you have never said it aloud to your students, your position has probably been redefined by the Curriculum Transfer Model into this:  “My job is to make sure that my students learn all of this curriculum, whether they want to or not.” You may not subscribe to this bleak definition of teaching, but it is almost certainly the perception of many of your students.  Just ask them.

This diagram, adapted from Parker Palmer’s book “The Courage to Teach”, illuminates this model quite succinctly.  It shows a flow of information in one direction, from the curriculum being studied through the teacher to the students.

It's easy to see from this diagram why the school reform movement over the past few decades has been so relentlessly focused on defining and improving curricular standards and devising assessments to measure how well they have been transferred.  Over the past few years, reformers have also been increasingly focused on making teachers accountable for how well they transfer that curriculum, to the detriment of teacher morale.

And what of the students?  In this structure, the students are passive recipients of knowledge.  They are amateurs, instructed by an expert, and their job is to absorb as much of the curriculum as they can.    

Of course, in most classrooms, the teacher doesn’t stand in front of the class and lecture constantly throughout every period.  There are often activities in which the students are working on problem sets or discussing something they have read. Indeed, in many well-run classrooms, students are actively engaged in the learning process.  But even so, the purpose of the work is to get students to master the curriculum.

According to this model, if only the curriculum could be defined precisely enough and teachers could deliver it effectively enough, the process would become much more successful. In truth, this approach to education is, at its very core, doomed to fail.  

To begin with, humans don’t learn well by being told.  Teacher-directed activities, such as lectures, can be a good first step in introducing new ideas, but to truly learn anything, students must actively process those ideas.  They must be given a chance to struggle with the material, to make mistakes and learn from them, and, above all, to talk about it with each other.

More importantly, however, the students in the diagram above are passive.  This passivity precludes their developing essential character traits, such as self-directedness, responsibility, and the skill of collaboration. Even if the curriculum were transferred successfully into their minds — a big if — they still will not have the experiences necessary to acquire these fundamental traits.  In short, the Curriculum Transfer Model is a deeply flawed approach. It must be replaced.

How can you and your students get out of this trap?  By changing the foundation. We have to rethink the very purpose of school.  

We can get there from here.  But where do we start on such a voyage?  We start at the beginning, with our beliefs.