Curriculum disengagement happens when there’s no relationship and relevancy between curriculum (subjects) undertaken by students and the futures for which the students aspire. In other words, curriculum disengagement is a disjointed experience between students’ subjects and their future desires. This points out a lack of coherence and the evident existence of a gap between what is taught at school and what students aspire to be in the near future. It is the dejection students experience during the presentation of a subject that is not related to their future plans.
When an irrelevant curricula (subjects) is presented, curriculum disengagement is automatically activated. An instance when a curricula is presented and there is a sense of pondering amongst students as to “How will I use this subject in the near future?”, that instance signifies the existence of curriculum disengagement. It would be naïve to deny the fact that South African students ask themselves this question almost every day. CAPS Curriculum, under which South Africa operates, completely disengages and isolate students. This is evident through high rates of progressed/condoned learners, dropouts, overaged learners within the system, Gr 9 as an exit point to TVET Colleges, etc.
Furthermore, examples of a disengaging and isolating curriculum system would be: Total disinterest in certain subjects, the undermining and total negligence of the subject upon realization of its insignificance in the lives of students, and academically disgruntled students that tend to display total withdrawal from the subject’s presentations. If not strictly forced to partake in the lesson, students would prefer to do “more relevant” work during the presentation of the subject they feel adamant they won’t need in the future. This dejection happens as a result of irrelevancy which depicts and exposes existing curriculum disengagement within the education system.
Due to the nature of curriculum design, disengagement within the curriculum is hard and costly to fix. That is why scholars have argued in the past that not all households have been able to afford an education geared to the individual learner (Personalized education), which resulted in education remaining a mass affair for the majority of countries, with standard curricula(disengaging curriculum), pedagogy, and assessments. This emphasizes how costly it is to revamp and transform the curriculum and this points out to the difficulties associated with a successful curriculum transformation.
Incessant failure to address this disengaging and isolating curriculum has resulted in official curriculum imposition where all students take “compulsory subjects/core subjects”. In addition to the “core subjects” students, in the same phase, are forced to take the same number of subjects irrespective of the stream in which they find themselves. This imposition, in oblivion, is used as a way to uniformly remedy the issues around curriculum disengagement. And that uniformity is failing to strike the balance and produce curriculum relevancy that is accommodative and recognizes learners` unique academic capabilities and future desires. This failure threatens and defeats the purpose of education envisaged within the CAPS document – a skilled workforce, the defeat of unemployment, self-reliant citizens contributing to nation-building, etc. One wonders as to how this infelicitous situation can be effectively remedied?
There’s one way to address and rid of this disengaging and isolating curriculum system – establish an open, accommodative curriculum system that refuses to group together learners of different future aspirations. Establish a curriculum that is against the rollout of imposed compulsory subjects for all learners in different streams of learning. Erect the curriculum system that will help, for instance, young aspiring Journalists in the public High School to take as their subjects; Multimedia Journalism, Photojournalism, Mass Communication, and Ethics, Broadcasting Journalism, News Reporting, Political Studies, etc.
Strictly introduce Fashion Product and Development , Fashion Drawing and Design, History and Theory of Design, etc as subjects in High School for students interested in Fashion and Design as a career path. For Cape Peninsula university of Technology to endorse these subjects under Fashion and Design course ensures relevancy and intact credibility (https://www.cput.ac.za/academic/faculties/informaticsdesign/departments/dept-applied-design/fashion#:~:text=Admission%20into%20Diploma%20in%20Fashion%20Design%3A&text=English%20Home%20Language%20or%20First,Please%20download%20portfolio%20requirements%20here). Curriculum disengagement can be remedied by an academic-revolutionary approach. This call for curriculum developers who ought to robustly embark on a total revamp of the curriculum system to root out the curriculum separateness within the education system.
It is for reasons such as these that, Simnandi Solutions (Pty) Ltd, a private education group developed a Personalized Education Curriculum System (PECS). PECS seeks to reverse the current curriculum irrelevancy into curriculum relevancy. The PECS is designed to save learners from the monstrous curriculum that forces them to undertake subjects they won’t need in the future. PECS is a transformative education curriculum system that, through its nature of design, will put an end to the whole confusion around curriculum debates. PECS will further sort out the pass requirement standards once and for all. PECS seeks to bring back the value and dignity of our education system. PECS ensures that learners taste a glimpse of the workplace experience while still at school. That’s what makes PECS unique and highly relevant to inspire the education community of our nation, South Africa, and the whole of Africa. And that is how we believe the education system can be fixed.
Know more about PECS: https://simnandisolutions.co.za/personalized-education/
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