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army1987 comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why?
My original thinking was that the stuff that's being taught should be less controversial there; the political circumstances might make a big difference if you're teaching college students about Marxian political theory or Austrian economics or, say, genetic engineering, but primary- and secondary-school classes are supposed to be survey courses and their contents should be pretty much settled. That might not be a very good argument, though, considering the not-too-infrequent explosions in American political discourse over the likes of evolution or whatever's offensive in literature this week.
A better argument would likely be that teachers now don't do much to set the curriculum. Individual tenure to protect teacher discretion doesn't make much sense when teachers don't have much discretion.
Okay. I mostly had in mind professors teaching stuff like quantum field theory or complex analysis and primary/secondary school teachers teaching modern history -- but if you average across all that primary/secondary school teachers teach and all that professors teach you're probably right.
Well, where I am they can still choose which parts of the curriculum to spend 20 minutes on, and which parts to spend 3 weeks on. Is that different in the US?
That almost certainly varies by district; federal standards (such as they are; the federal education infrastructure doesn't have formal authority, but instead exerts indirect pressure through funding) focus on outcomes as measured by standardized tests while most state standards are based on individual skills (example). Where I went to school, though, the bulk of the curriculum was fixed at the project level by the school district. Individual teachers had little leeway in content though they had some in approach; students from different classes at the same grade level could usually talk with each other under the assumption that they'd be working on the same things, plus or minus a week or so. That was in the late Nineties; my understanding is that the trend since then has been towards greater standardization.
An education insider would probably be able to give a more comprehensive view of the system than I've got.
My mother is an elementary school principal in California, and according to her the state provides pacing schedules that regiment out what a teacher is supposed to be teaching on any given day, and how many minutes they are supposed to spend on any given lesson. How stringently this schedule gets enforced varies by school district, though. Middle and High schools are supposed to be less regimented, though she has no direct experience with them.