Nation Centred Curricula: Does It Matter?

[RonPrice]

My schooling is one of the many aspects of life I hardly mention in my memoirs. The curriculum in both Canadian and Australian schools was inherited from Great Britain, and consequently it was utterly untouched by progressive notions in education at least until the early 1960s when I graduated from high school. We, that is Canadians, took English grammar, complete with parsing and analysis; we were drilled in spelling and punctuation; we read English poetry and were tested in scansion; we read English fiction, novels, and short stories and analyzed the style. Each year we studied a Shakespearean play committing several passages to memory. If I had been a student in Australia, the story would have been the same.

I often wonder how much it matters that a curriculum be nation centred any more. Does anyone have any ideas on this subject?-Ron Price, Tasmania