.6 The Big Five

The results of all this are very few local alternatives. Everybody is too busy looking to the left and to the right to see what other schools are doing. All of a sudden you have been elected to the school board, you now get to decide the curriculum. Let's just say for purposes of example, that your opinion will now become the majority opinion of the board. You now have the right to determine whether we teach geometry or statistics. What would be the first thing you would do? You would look to see what they are doing in the city next door. You would look at what the colleges want and you would want to make sure that your curriculum sits in the center of where everybody else's curriculum is. You are not going to say, "Oh good, I now have the responsibility for the curriculum and I can start over and look at what is important and at what is real and what is needed and together we'll develop a curriculum for the 21st century." No, you are not going to do that because there are just too many things that don't fit together to make that viable. You have to worry about all these other forces out there and it is a very real worry and a very legitimate worry. It is a problem. Today we have a curriculum which I call the "Big Five." This "Big Five" curriculum is no surprise. You are not going to be surprised by this
curriculum because this is the curriculum that you've experienced. So when we look at this "Big Five", there should be no surprises and there aren't. The first subject is English. Now can you imagine a school not teaching English? No! Or Social Studies, or Math, or Science, or Language. Now these are in the approximate order of their "importance". English at the top and language at the bottom.
Language is the one that is a little bit flaccid. All the others are pretty solid. They are the Big Four but it is really the "Big Five" because language always gets talked about a lot. Language is usually there as a requirement for college admission one way or another. Nobody expects to become fluent in a language, you just take a few years and forget it. Americans never expect to learn a language, they just talk about how many years they have studied it. But we kind of work at that and study language as one of our "Big Five." Even though the "Big Five" are there and we kind of know what we are doing when we talk about them, we are still not confident enough about them to prescribe them as part of the national curriculum. It is very interesting that when President Bush called a National Education Conference in Charlottesville that the Charlottesville group came up with a new "Big Five." These are now the
"Big Five" that are stated as our national goals. I was very excited by the Charlottesville Conference to find out that for the first time in the history of our nation we were going to have national goals. It is great that we would even have national goals. What were these new national goals? English was one, but something new happened. Instead of social studies, we are going to have history and geography. So what happens? Social studies now becomes two of the "Big Five" rather than one. Social studies does not suit the perennialists very much. They say we need the rigor of history and geography and we now made sure that geography was one of the "Big Five" and history was one of the "Big Five" taken separately. Beyond that, we are back to the same old stuff again. We are back to math and science. So English, History/Geography, Math and Science, are now our national goals.

	What is included in the "Big Five" type of curriculum? (please give these in order of "importance")	Answer Here
	Mrs. Fisher is the superintendent of the Madison Public School System in West Virginia. She gets complaints all day long from the teachers in her system that not enough emphasis is placed on their respective areas (English, Math, Social Studies, Science, and Language). Most of the complaints that come to her however deal with foreign language. She notices that the number of letters asking for her to propose to the state that the children learn a language at a younger age increase almost daily. How should Mrs. Fisher use this information as well as the "Big Five" information in order to prioritize the complaints that come in?	Answer Here