A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position. ***

There are several reasonable arguments for a standardized national primary and secondary curriculum. In theory, such a system would prevent regional and class-based inequalities in the quality of state-funded education. It would provide a single standard upon which all of the nations students could be examined, revealing areas of the nation in need of greater funding, aid, or oversight. However, these benefits are outweighed by a host of problems. Overall, the concept of a standard national curriculum is most likely inadvisable for most nations. The first of these problems is that standardizing the curriculum is likely an insufficient measure against educational inequality. It would not equalize the quality of school facilities, studentteacher ratios, availability of tutoring programs, or even basic funding. In the (likely) event that standardization had little positive effect on educational inequality, advocates of the national curriculum who had ascribed to it a power to equalize learning would likely blame the outstanding problems on issues such as culture and lack of parental involvement. This would lead not to the rectification of the economic issues driving the inequality, but to an increase of the stigma and alterity that is itself a major factor in all such social injustices. Another significant issue is that a national curriculum would remove educational options for people with atypical interests and learning styles. Not every student holds university as the ultimate goal of her secondary education; the idea of all students studying the sa me national curriculum until they enter college implies a degree of monolithic concord of aspirations among students that they rarely display. As an example: a student whose dream is to start an interior renovations business would be infinitely better served by a specialized secondary-school curriculum, in which she could learn business-operation fundamentals such as accounting and basic finance while taking a large number of electives specific to her craft. Spending four years preparing for another four years of academia in which she takes no interest and which will not directly train her for her career will rightly seem pointless and discouraging to such a student, and the state should be willing to give her more genuinely helpful alternatives. Even if a nation using a national curriculum contains privately-funded, privately accredited institutions that provide such alternatives, these are likely to be financially out of reach for a number of worthy students, or otherwise they may be stigmatized as paths for academic failures. Other atypical students who would be poorly served by a national curriculum are those with learning disabilities. In the absence of regional flexibility and the ability to develop programs specific to the needs of particular districts, programs for people whose learning styles are different from those of their peers would need to be required to hold to a separate national standard analogous to the one used by the general student population. All differences between

the alternative program and the standard one would quickly become points of stigma and ridicule, rather than helpful accommodations. Although it could be argued that this takes place regardless of the scale of alternative educational programs, in no case other than that of a national curriculum would this ridicule be able to escalate to an inescapable, national level. These are only the problems inherent in the idea of a standard national curriculum. Moving beyond these, it becomes clear that in most countries, centralizing control of education in the federal government would likely turn the curriculum into a political tool, open to corruption; a pawn which politicians and legislators could use to win support for their own interest rather than to support the nations youth. The power over the education of the nation would be placed in the hands of those who have no credentials or experience upon which to base their decisions, and no incentive other than their own personal benefit to make those decisions well. This can be seen already on the local level in certain of the United States, where the strength of local religious and social beliefs threatens the quality of scientific and sexual education. Politicians who hope to secure the votes of those who hold these beliefs legislate in their favor. As a result, teaching creationism is often presented as a superior alternative to teaching evolution; abstinence is often presented as the only alternative to sex within marriage with the result that students emerge from secondary education ill-prepared for university both on an educational and on a social level. Because the dangers of a national curriculum are likely to cancel out any benefits it might provide, removing control of public education from local governments within a nation is unlikely to result in an improved academic performance of its students. Therefore, the idea that a nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college is an inadvisable one.