Is curriculum broken?

How many Coursera program have you registered but never completed? What's the problem with that?

??c bài ti?ng Vi?t ? ?ay

(This article is part #1 of "Unlearn" - a series about Professional Learning & Development in the Future of Work by Curieous)

I've recently had a fun debate with an advisor about the future of learning. He believes the future of learning will still centered around curriculum. And I ... have not made up my mind about that yet. So I am putting forth here my argument. Perhaps we should rethink this legacy.

1. What is a curriculum??

There are many nuances to the understanding of curriculum. For the context of this paper, curriculum is defined as a fixed course of study with instructional content, resources and processes for evaluating or testing the attainment of the educational content. It is often tightly standardized, and almost always defined with relation to schooling or similar settings.??

2. Observation:?

Modern education is centered around curriculum. From our K12 system, to higher education, to massive online open courses on Coursera, LinkedIn learning and the alikes, to startup accelerators, to employee training programs of most corporations. Every learning program has to have a curriculum close to the definition above. Somehow we accept curriculum as a default model to learning without ever questioning its merit.

3. Big question:

Is standardized curriculum still an effective approach for us to learn in our contemporary context??

If yes, why do we see such a big disconnect between education and its application to our real life, real work environment??

If yes, why do companies globally spend $370 billion dollars a year to train their employees, yet only 12 percent of employees can apply new skills learned in L&D programs to their jobs?

Also, nowadays people can get access to world class curriculum from top universities for free or super low cost via Coursera or the similar MOOCs (massively open online courses) platforms. But why is the learning completion rate, as has been widely reported, just 3 to 6 percent??

And by the way, why does Elon Musk create Ad Astra -? a super exclusive school, where his children and a select few study without any curriculum? Is he crazy, or does he see the way to reach “toward the stars” that we are yet to see?

4. Historical context:

Curriculum was first coined in 1576 in Western Europe, closely linked with the intention of the churches to bring greater order to education. Provided with the context of religion in the 1500s where the churches held enormous power, and literacy rate was about 14%, bringing greater order to education was a great solution to widespread literacy in the centuries after and enabled the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.?

In the 2010s our global literacy rate was 85% thanks to standardized curriculum for the masses. It has (almost) accomplished its job of eradicating illiteracy for the whole world. Now everyone knows how to read and write!??

5. Industry 4.0 and the Future of Work:

Today we are living in the 4th industrial revolution with hyper change in technology, industries, and societal patterns. Smart automation is rapidly and massively replacing the repeatable manual tasks. Knowledge workers are no longer required to perform procedural work, with a standardized set of skills that can be judged through standardized tests on paper!

The skills of the future change rapidly! More than a half of the top 10 workskills of 2025 are new, compared to 2020, leading to 50% of the workforce needing reskilling. Critical thinking and problem-solving top the list. But newly emerging skills are self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility. These are all cutting-edge sophisticated human skills!?

Learning is easy and straightforward if there is a close well-defined link between applied action and results. There is a close link if the setting for learning is the same as the one faced when a learner applies his or her learning into solving a problem.?

Unfortunately, learning is hard because the environment for application, making decisions, or solving problems is often unique, complex, and very different from the learning environment most people acquire their knowledge and skills.?

Beyond eradicating illiteracy - a goal that has been accomplished in many nations, we need to deconstruct and rethink curriculum and its role in education, especially in professional learning & development.

What do you think? Should the future of learning be centered around curriculum?

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Part 2 (coming soon)