National boards and commissions have always recommended a required curriculum for all students, the sort of thing that is common in most every other Western democracy and Japan, probably China too. In this country most local school authorities and the people themselves, to the extent they have involved themselves in these matters, have always resisted one K-12 school curriculum for the entire nation. Why? Why is it somehow important that what is to be learned in school be decided by the local school authorities, the school Board, the school superintendent, and in some instances the parents and teachers, and not by the nation? Is it freedom's last gasp before a steady, undiminishing onslaught of big government? In this case the battle lines are not the usual ones between Left and Right. The political Center is generally sympathetic to national norms but their voice of reason is usually not heard because the opposing voices coming from Left and Right are so much louder.
I think that the sharp disagreement over a national curriculum, and national standards as well, exists in our country, and not, say, in England, France, and Germany, because from the very beginning we have placed a much heavier burden on our schools than have these countries. The school in France is most of all meant to make children literate and to that end a single national curriculum could be and was readily adopted. Schools in this country, however, have always been meant, and probably more so today even than in the past, to do much more than simply teach literacy. We would have our schools make knowledgeable and well informed, but also good and caring adults of our children, and there is little agreement how all that, and probably more still, is best done. Indeed, there is much mistrust of the central authority when it comes to how our children may best learn the difference between right and wrong. And there is no less distrust of, no less disagreement with the national authority in regard to what subject matters ought to make up the curriculum. In this country schools have meant all sorts of things to all sorts of people, and to accept a national curriculum might mean for the local community the loss of the particularities of their school, that specialness, whatever those things were that make the school theirs, and theirs alone. A National curriculum along with national standards would bring with their intrusion into the local community a national set of norms and values, thereby even further diminishing the importance of the local community in the lives of its children. Even further because popular and national culture has already done so much in that regard.
