Our schools simply do not do enough to engender a gratifying
sense of independence that empowers young people, and tipping the scales towards
a more skill-centered curriculum can change that. A curriculum centered around
skill-development stands to make young people attach to their academic setting
much more vigorously. If on a daily basis, kids are mastering skills and
applying them to produce results, they will find the academic aspect of school
as engaging or fulfilling as the social, artistic, and athletic aspects
typically are.
Kids love to master skills, because skills allow them to do
things own their own. Now, if you work with kids ages 11-15, you know well that
little makes them feel better than independence, and skill mastery is a great
source of independence. When kids can do things on their own, they feel good
about themselves, they feel empowered. A happy and empowered kid is one who
will learn effectively and feel attached to his or her environment.
The shortcoming of a content-centered curriculum, as most
middle school core academic classes are, is that it bores kids and alienates
them from the potential value of subjects they are studying. Kids in this age
group are not very interested in information that is not applicable: they want
to know things so that they can do things with the information. A skill-centered
curriculum uses the content as a medium for teaching the skills. As a result,
kids interaction with the information is positive: it always leads to skill
utilization and independent production.
So if we limit our content delivery to what facilitates
skill development, and then spend our teaching time helpings kid master and
apply skills, we will have kids who love being at school.
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