A speculative Essay on Secondary Curriculum: General Curriculum, Specialized Curriculum or Convergence within the Framework of “Soft Specialization”

پژوهش نامه مبانی تعلیم و تربیت

Article 2, Volume 1, Issue 1, September 2011   

Document Type: پژوهشی

DOI: 10.22067/fe.v1i1.8816

Author

mahmood mehrmohammadi^*

Abstract

The dual missions attached to secondary education makes this stage of education a particularly fuzzy stage. This fuzzy state has a direct impact on the curriculum of this level of schooling, since the curriculum is the main mean to the ends sought for any stage.
The secondary curriculum, therefore, has been subject to many different understandings and the result has been a variety of proposals put forth by experts and scholars to fulfill the ends deemed more relevant for this critical stage of education. The proposals, however, reach a conclusion by oversimplifying the nature of the problem or by overlooking the roots of the controversies that is the duality mentioned earlier.
The author suggests that the duality needs to be taken into consideration in a creative solution to the problem of secondary curriculum. The solution needs to stand in a middle ground that neither surrenders to the assumptions of general / uniform curriculum advocates, nor to the assumption of those who advocate the opposite, that is a specialized curriculum. Positively speaking, too, it should carry with it the defensible arguments residing in each. The author, thus, has coined the term “soft specialization” to illustrate how this middle ground can be achieved.
Keywords: general orientation, specialized orientation, soft specialization, tripartite curriculum, secondary education