At this point in my life, school has been the main thing I have been doing, including elementary school, secondary school, and post-secondary. At this point, I will need to spend another 15 years before I have more time spent as not a student vs as a student. It is impressive and shows how ingrained school is to me and many others, so much so that I feel weird when I have work during winter, spring and summer break. Due to how stuck I am with school, I have also realized how schools tend to ingrain specific ideologies from students.
Of these ideas, the idea of a competitive world. I spent a lot of my time with people around me asking me what I got on my exams and having my grades compared to one another. To not be too embarrassed, I tried hard to maintain a specific grade point so I did not look like an utter fool. While this has helped me get into post-secondary with ease, I also need to realize that I also trained students in a more negative way than we believe. I have a couple of friends who went into Sauder School of Business, and very quickly, by the end of the second semester, I heard them complaining about how you can't trust your classmates and how most of them are snakes. Due to how competitive everyone is in Sauder, many tend to backstab or ruin their classmates' marks so they can look better in the eyes of employers.
With the change in the curriculum in BC, we are slowly allowing the students to learn more than just content to be competitive in post-secondary. Teachers should now focus on the soft skill that leads to understanding the content rather than teaching the content that leads to developing soft skills. This shift makes students more rounded to think for themselves, be better at communicating and also know how to learn something new best.
You have made so many interesting personal connections with the idea of the implicit curriculum from this article! What a sad thing, to hear about your friends' experiences of hyper competitiveness at Sauder -- that is exactly what we should NOT be fostering at a university. Thanks for your thoughtful reflections.
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