Alberta’s proposed curriculum changes are about politics, not learning
Dinner-table conversation with Alberta’s five- and six-year-old children or grandchildren could become much more challenging if curriculum advisers, hand-picked by the Alberta government, are successful in having their recommended changes to the kindergarten-to-Grade 4 curriculum for fine arts and social studies accepted.
The drafts, obtained by CBC News, include lengthy lists of names, landmarks and events for young children to memorize.
Changes for K-4 include the suggestion that five- and six-year-olds in Grade 1 should be familiar with the artwork of Claude Monet, Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso and Edgar Degas.
While you’re preparing yourself for dinner conversations with your kids, make sure you have some knowledge of names, dates, places and influences of France’s “Belle Epoque” lest your Grade 1 offspring write you off as an unenlightened philistine.
You may have travelled to Paris or Santa Fe, New Mexico, and seen many of the original works of art mentioned in Alberta’s new curriculum, but it would be wise to bone up on the age of Impressionism and Post Impressionism lest you be left out of the conversation.
Make sure you can also discuss the overt spiritualism and sensuality of O’Keefe’s Taos paintings with your six-year-old.
You’ll be putting in some serious online time, because Alberta curriculum advisers are also recommending that seven- and eight-year-olds learn about feudalism, Chinese dynasties and Homer’s Odyssey in social studies classes.
Grade 2 students in the new world of Alberta’s primary-school curriculum may be asked to draw a map of ancient Greece and learn about Genghis Khan and explain the scale and importance of the Mongol Empire.
None of that wimpy new-age stuff found in B.C.’s curriculum about inquiry processes and skills to ask questions and communicate findings and decisions — just real essential knowledge.
The history of the Mongol Empire is no doubt much more helpful for kids still trying to figure out what and where this “Ottawa” place is and why it keeps coming up on CBC News broadcasts.
Students will also start learning about Christianity in Grade 2, and recommendations suggest that first graders should learn Bible and First Nations verses about creation as poetry, while fourth graders should learn that most non-white Albertans are Christians.
However, the Kindergarten to Grade 4 recommended curriculum for fine arts and social studies would eliminate all references to residential schools and “equity.”
The arts have not been set aside altogether. The draft documents include revisions to music programs. Students in Grade 6 will learn about the African American roots of jazz and blues, and Black artists such as Robert Johnson, Ray Charles, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong.
Grade 3 students will also be taught about jazz improvisation and John Coltrane’s Like Sonny.
That’s good and personally, I’m looking forward to Grade 3 music lessons, because having been a jazz musician for over 60 years, I still cannot confidently explain Coltrane’s chromatic-third relationships and multi-tonic changes with any confidence. Come to think of it, the application of Coltrane’s harmonic progressions still eludes many experienced jazz players. But no longer.
Beyond that, the inclusion of music by Premier Jason Kenney’s grandfather in the province’s draft K-6 music curriculum has hit a wrong note with some Albertans.
The draft lists Mart Kenney’s When I Get Back to Calgary as a definitive example of big band jazz for Grade 6 students, sparking accusations of bias in the curriculum’s development.
Move over Rob McConnell, Gil Evans and Maynard Ferguson, much less Ellington and Basie.
Curriculum experts familiar with the province’s process say the suggestions are a huge departure from where curriculum development was heading before the United Conservative Party was elected in 2019.
Generally speaking, Albertan parents and educators, from K through to post-grad, are climbing the walls and no wonder.
Parents and educators have protested that the new direction the Alberta Ministry of Education’s advisers are recommending is evidence of their ignorance about how and at what stages of development children think and learn.
The province plans to test the new curriculum in some classrooms in September. It will gather public feedback before rolling out the new plan to all Alberta schools for the 2022-23 school year.
Colin Aitchison, press secretary to Education Minister Adriana LaGrange, said the documents only represent advice to the minister and are not final, adding that curriculum writers are not obliged to include the advisers’ recommendations.
Stay tuned, though, because educators across the country already claim that these widely rejected back-to-the future curriculum ideas may be more about Kenney’s own Conservative worldview and his often-expressed disdain for public school teachers than any attempt to develop higher-level thinking skills as kids move through the grades.