Curriculum

(see also other keywords)

The word "curriculum" comes from the Latin verb currere - "to run", as in a race
Some say it reflects the Calvinistic desire to anticipate and control the process of learning
However, a bespoke approach would give individual learners more control over what they learn.
If teaching were to be tailored for individual needs, learning would become unpredictable.
Standards would be harder to maintain in an auto-didactic framework of learning.

Most universities validate new courses by proclaiming their intended learning outcomes.
This can be a useful technique as it helps teachers to reflect on what their students may learn.
But it is based on the presumption that we are able to manage or predict what can be learned.
This can inform curricula designed around what can be taught, managed, assessed and ranked.
At worst, this means privileging data and facts, rather than qualities of imagining and knowing.

If each learner received a bespoke service a common curriculum would be redundant
Whereas classical science looked for laws and benchmarks we will (also) look for exceptions.

We can invite each individual to envision how he/she/they would like to live.
Granting learners a 'licence to dream' might require them to trust one another's imagination.
The UK has been slow to think across and beyond the book-based disciplines that shape our pedagogies.

In the 20th century, hypertext 'ate the book' and spewed it out in ways that defied older notions of 'knowledge' or 'wisdom' (e.g. Wikipedia and Zoom).
Several centuries ago, handwriting was displaced by printing, then by technologies of sound and vision.
Scholasticism and the book-based culture dissolved into hypertext and evidence-based science.
The internet visionary Ted Nelson coined the term 'intertwingling', saying that:
- ...there are no subjects at all; there is only knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly. (Nelson, 1980).