“Students should prepare for adult life by studying subjects
that suit their talents, passions, and aspirations.”
-Grant Wiggins




The March edition of Educational Leadership is entirely devoted to what students need to take away from grade school. I was intrigued with the article A Diploma Worth Having. This article discusses the traditional curriculum of most high schools and how antiquated and off target it is. I agree. I’ve been in a good number of schools in the last couple of years as I move through my teacher ed. program and I am disheartened to see not only boring instruction but nearly dead asleep students as they struggle to stay in their chairs.

Wiggins makes a good point about how smart and high achieving students will deal well with any sort of instruction and will succeed in life regardless of what they are asked to suffer through. They can handle the ‘useless’ high level of detail about chemistry, math, literary prose, and other subject areas that do not come up in practical everyday life. What about our lower achieving students and the rest of the school population. My mother (a retired special education teacher of 30 years) always told me, “You have to do something with your life. Join the military, learn a trade, or go to college!” I’ve always kept this close to heart. College isn’t necessary, nor is it practical for every high school student. This isn’t to say that I’m against sending every one of my prospective students on to college, but I’d rather they be happy and eager to follow a successful path of their calling.

So, this begs the question:
How do we prepare our students for a life after high school, where they will be successful and inspired in their own personal way?

Wiggins proposes some key criterion he’d use for setting up a curriculum.

• Philosophy, including critical thinking and ethics
• Psychology, with special emphasis on mental health, child development, and family relations.
• Economics and business, with an emphasis on market forces, entrepreneurship, saving, borrowing and investing, and business start-ups.
• Woodworking or its equivalent; you should have to make something to graduate.
• Mathematics, focusing primarily on probability and statistics and math modeling.
• Language arts, with a major focus on oral proficiency) as well as the reading and writing of nonfiction).
• Multimedia, including game and web design.
• Science: human biology, anatomy, physiology (health-related content), and earth science (ecology).
• Civics, with an emphasis on civic action and how a bill really becomes law; lobbying.
• Modern U.S. and world history, taught backward chronologically from the most pressing current issues.

This core curriculum that Wiggins proposes isn’t an abolishment of the old core. His proposal adds new ones and tweaks old ones so they are more relevant for the world today. The advanced and highly detailed classes should still be offered for students who are interested in pursuing collegiate and post collegiate work in content areas; but let’s face it, not everyone needs to know trigonometry and how to find limiting reagents for reactions they’ll never see.

Coursework in these areas can still be rigorous and challenging, the only real difference is that students will be able to learn immediately relevant content and problem solving skills out of high school.
Who knows… They might even become interested!


“Learning is stealing and teaching is sharing”
This is my personal response to the article written by Grant Wiggins which posed in the March 2011 issue of Educational Leadership and should be taken as such. This response includes ideas as well as fully copied content from Grant Wiggins.

Wiggins, G. (2011). A Diploma Worth Having. Educational Leadership, 68(6), 28-33.