A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position

I agree with the prompt’s recommendation for a standard educational curriculum. This is especially vital for nations who are below the worldwide literacy target; countries who aspire to engender and inculcate a national educational culture. Generally speaking, I believe a nation should require the majority of its students to study the same national curriculum, only making customizable options available for high-achieving students and for disabled students needing special accommodation.

A national curriculum ensures every student receives exposure to and an opportunity to learn the important and rudimentary courses necessary for success in college. It establishes a benchmark for all students while establishing a mode of communication between colleges and the preparatory schools aspiring to matriculate their students into those same colleges. For this, a national curriculum advisory board, consisting of a handful of carefully selected university, secondary, and primary school teachers should be established to facilitate discussions between all levels of education in the country. For example, a specific, and enforceable national curriculum was initiated in my native Nigeria in 2008, and it brought up the overall literacy rate from 50% to around 65% in 2019. Today, Nigeria export one of the highest numbers of graduate students to the United States and other Western countries—a phenomenon somewhat derogatorily known as the brain drain. However it is not only Western countries reaping the benefits. The business sectors in Nigeria are also experiencing a boom because of this educational focus.

It is important to note, however, that there will be a few extraordinary students who partly due to parental support, privileged academic resources, or remarkable personal drive, fare better than others and need to learn materials extra to the national curriculum. For them, it is necessary that schools be able to either petition the national curriculum committee for respite or automatically make use of built-in provisions in the curriculum, enabling them to teach their advanced students additional courses. This shouldn’t provide any challenge to the national mandate for better educational opportunities: the curriculum must be drafted to ensure that this obviously positive development is not squelched—provided the students can demonstrate the same minimum competency benchmark. While at the same time, there is another group of students who need special educational provisions because of various disabilities. It wouldn’t make sense to require them to meet the same annual benchmark. Instead, special educational schools should receive specialized teacher training, plus extra funding to aid them in providing for these children. The emphasis for them should be more on maintaining a yearly average progress, rather than meeting an inflexible national standard.

Moreover, there are schools that are small and function more like after-school tutorial sessions or evening cram schools than they do public schools. Notwithstanding the patent benefits these schools can provide their students when they are aware of and working out of the national curriculum, these types of schools should nonetheless be exempted from the national curriculum. They serve a very specific need in the community by enabling parents to effect their direction of their children’s education, satisfying their personal investment and concerns in their children’s development. These schools tend to be complementary anyway—they are not a replacement for the traditional primary and secondary schools. In fact, they enable more students to pass the annual secondary school competency tests, by helping those who have fallen behind get caught up. An important example of this phenomenon are the instructional schools of private “celebrity” teachers in South Korea. Because of the high population density of South Korea, college admission standards have gotten very stringent. Preparing for these college exams is a major source of stress for high school students in Korea, and traditional schools do not help them meet these elusive standards. Recently there has been a burgeoning of private evening and online school teachers who captivate their students with ingenuous explanations of trigonometry, statistics, and calculus concepts. Their students love their classes and enthusiastically comment on how much more they learn in the cram schools than in their traditional schools. Due to inculcating personal engagement in their own educational progress, these schools make a real life-long impact in their students’ lives. These types of schools must not be challenged by a national curriculum but rather incorporated alongside it.

Education is one of a very limited set of superpowers humans have, in that it promises them that by their own application they can better their lives and those of their loved ones. To this end, a national educational curriculum is a wonderful thing: It establishes a benchmark and a yearly progression that aspires young people to recognize their own growth. However, by continuous communication between the various educational levels in a country, it must be frequently updated and must be free of archaic restrictions on individual agency. It should leave enough room for instruction for high-achieving, disabled, and non-traditional students. With these caveats, a national curriculum will aid national progress.