Syllabus: Where More Becomes the Enemy of Learning
Illustration by ChatGPT “The view that everything of importance can be thoughtfully learnt by the 12 th grade – notice that I didn’t say ‘ taught’ – is a delusion.” Well-known educator Grant Wiggins wrote that in 1989, long before Google brought knowledge to our fingertips. Today when Artificial Intelligence can give us almost any information and create information the way we want it, our education system still insists on filling the minds of our students with ‘knowledge’ and information. Ours is a very outdated education system. Let me start with Syllabus today. There is an overload of knowledge and information in our school curriculum. It is not just about the length of the syllabus: it is more about the crowding of concepts . Too many concepts bombard the students every day in school. On one and the same day, a grade 9 student encounters polynomials and their zeros in their math class, followed by equations of motion in physics, followed by solutions and colloids in chemistr...
