One of the challenges that curriculum developers face is that the world is changing. How does one design a curriculum that is appropriate relevant to the past, present, and future? When aspects of the world that relate to education are changing only slowly, then it is easy to justify an educational system that is strongly backward looking. When aspects of the world that relate to education are changing quite rapidly, then careful thought has to be given about how to prepare students to cope with the rapidly changing future in which they will live.

People have been aware of this challenge for a very long time. Here are two quotations from Plato (Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world; 424/423 BC–348/347 BC.)

“You know that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken....Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

“It is our duty to select the best and most dependable theory that human intelligence can supply, and use it as a raft to ride the seas of life.”

In 1939 H. R. W. Benjamin (1893–1969), writing under the pseudonym J. Abner Peddiwell, published an article titled The Saber Tooth Curriculum. See http://nerds.unl.edu/pages/preser/sec/articles/sabertooth.html. In this parody on our educational system, a caveman gets the idea that children should be taught useful skills. Soon a formal curriculum is developed, designed to fit the needs of the times. Children are taught “fish-grabbing” (the barehanded catching of fish), “horse-clubbing” (clubbing the type of small horse used for meat), and “tiger-scaring” (using fire to scare away the saber-toothed tiger). Over time, this curriculum becomes more and more out of date.

In 1987 I wrote my own parody about our out of date educational curriculum and named Chesslandia. See http://iae-pedia.org/Chesslandia. This is one of my most favorite articles.

Here is the first part of that story:

Chesslandia was aptly named. In Chesslandia, almost everybody played chess. A child's earliest toys were chess pieces, chessboards, and figurines of famous chess masters. Children's bedtime tales focused on historical chess games and on great chess-playing folk heroes. Many of the children's television adventure programs were woven around a theme of chess strategy. Most adults watched chess matches on evening and weekend television. …

The reason was simple. Citizens of Chesslandia had to cope with the deadly CHESS MONSTER! The CHESS MONSTER, usually just called the CM, was large, strong, and fast. It had a voracious appetite for citizens of Chesslandia, although it could survive on a mixed diet of vegetation and small animals.

The CM was a wild animal in every respect but one. It was born with an ability to play chess and an innate desire to play the game. A CM's highest form of pleasure was to defeat a citizen of Chesslandia at a game of chess, and then to eat the defeated victim. Sometimes a CM would spare a defeated victim if the game was well played, perhaps savoring a future match.

In Chesslandia, young children were always accompanied by adults when they went outside. One could never tell when a CM might appear. The adult carried several portable chess boards. (While CMs usually traveled alone, sometimes a group traveled together. Citizens who were adept at playing several simultaneous chess games had a better chance of survival.)

Formal education for adulthood survival in Chesslandia began in the first grade. Indeed, in kindergarten children learned to draw pictures of chess boards and chess pieces. Many children learned how each piece moves even before entering kindergarten. Nursery rhyme songs and children's games helped this memorization process.…

The story ends with the development of portable chess-playing computerized machines that were better chess players than all but the very best of adults.

Each era has its own Monsters. Now, and in the futures’ of our current children, there are monsters such as sustainability, over population, global warming, rapidly changing technology (including computer and information science), diseases such as Ebola, war, changing employment patterns, and global economic “unrest.” I don’t know about you, but I imagine that many students have trouble focusing on learning to factor quadratic expressions in a math class when they and many people they love and care about are trying to deal with such Monsters.