Saber Tooth Curriculum

Ok, I understand the message of the saber tooth story. However, I cannot help but feel that its lesson brings us nowhere closer to the truth. What are the fish grabbing, horse clubbing, sabretooth tiger scaring lessons that we still teach in schools today? Is the ability to perform basic arithmatic an obsolete with the invention of the calculator? Has spellcheck made it unnessary to teach spelling and punctuation. Are my social studies unimportant because my students can simply google anything that they woudl ever need to know about the War of 1812 or the Red Scare? It's a nice story, although it says in 10,000 words what could be just as clearly stated in a succinct 1,000. However, because it is a clever way of looking at the challenge of curriculum and it is written well, we can be lulled into thinking that the analogy it creates perfectly fits the parameters of our dilemma. I would say that it does not. If there are no more horses, then clubbing horses is an obsolete skill. The sabertooth proponent argued that there was still value in teaching the fundamentals of that skill to children. The problem with this is that there are few examples of things being taught in our schools today that are, to the same degree, out of date. It is ironic that the author creates a comparison between today and the time of early man, when things were much simpler. Neanderthals were preoccupied with one thing: survival. Their individual survival and the survival of their species was the only thing they needed to worry about. Our lives are slightly more compicated. When a man is staring down into the muddy water, looking at the fish that he must grab, there are only two stakeholders: him and the fish. Either he eats and the fish dies or he doesn't eat and the fish lives. Our schools today contend with a fare more complex set of stakeholders: students with ever increasing needs and problems, teachers, parents, administrators, taxpayers, school staff, etc. I would love to put my finger on a piece of curriculum, big and small, and declare it dead. The problem is that I doubt I could get everyone, or maybe anyone, to agree with me. We can and should modify what we teach to adapt to the 21st century. It is impractical and unrealistic to spur changes of the magnitude described in this reading.


simpler