What and How Much to Learn: Some Reflections of on the Call for Curriculum ‘Panacea’ in Our School System

Abstract

Education is considered an essential agent and vehicle of development. Educated societies and citizens are expected to lead quality life that they deserve to live. Today, qualified human capital has become the sole instrument of winning competitions in the global market. The knowledge, skills, and values gained through schooling days and years (though remains an initial entry point), play a considerable role to create a divide among the nations of the world and as means of development indicator. But no education system is complete in its own at any point in time, since education systems also produced both heroes and villains in human history. The truth, however, is that there is nothing that can be considered development without it. This being said, questions are in order: what and how much to learn to become what the society and the nation want their children would be. The principal purport of this discursive work is not to provide pure scholarly accounts, nor give answers to the current widely felt education system and curriculum questions in Ethiopia. In an attempt to explain why the public often insists on a curriculum to be an ‘answer for all educational problems’, the paper employs limited literary accounts and own observations to explain the limitations of curriculum insistence in Ethiopia. In doing so, I use some secondary sources to provide some ideas as to why such curriculum suppositions cannot always work and rather argue for the role of the society to supplement or complement school efforts. This limited work, therefore, is aimed at providing initial reflective ideas that could inspire a re-thinking of the ‘curriculum crusade’ held for some of the complex social ills in the country since recently. Key terms: education, curriculum, teachers, students, society, social ills and heals DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-25-02 Publication date: September 30 th 2022