“A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.”
Below is a sample GRE Issue Task essay I wrote for reference to those preparing for GRE Analytical Writing Assessments and want an illustration of how an Issue Task is written.
Prompt: “A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.”
There has been a lot of discussion for years on reforming the school education system in many countries especially India. Many education policymakers propose that all the students of a nation should study the same national curriculum until they enter college. Even though they cite many benefits but there are also a lot of downsides to this policy like it will lead to lack of creativity in students, imposed ideologies, and loss of teacher and student autonomy.
The first downside of this policy is that it will not be promoting creativity in students. Since all the students will be following the same curriculum their focus would be more on academic excellence and less on creative thinking. This will also promote rote learning more which the present generation believes is one of the root causes of lack of creativity, especially among the Indian students. Even though this policy may be practical because it is a prescribed curriculum for all schools, so theoretically schools cover the same subjects and devote a similar amount of time to each subject but for any country to develop their research and development sector creativity in the young population is a valuable asset.
The second downside of this policy is that it will give politicians a way to impose their ideologies and may even lead to manipulation of historical facts. Since the national curriculum will be decided by an education committee on behalf of the students it may be misused by the ruling party to push their ideologies in the minds of the young generation and for that, they may even try to distort history. Even though implementation of this policy might be less expensive and tedious for the education boards but filling the minds of the young with propaganda may prove to be very lethal and Germany under Hitler’s regime is a very good example of it.
Another downside of this policy is that it will lead to the loss of teacher and student autonomy. Due to a fixed national curriculum students will not be able to take up courses that they are interested in and instead will have to invest their time and energy in something that they are not interested in. Even teachers who might want to experiment with their way of teaching by going off curriculum will not be able to do so. They also might want to teach off curriculum subjects but due to a fixed national curriculum, they will be forced to teach subjects that are part of the curriculum only. However, this issue can be solved by making the curriculum a little more flexible but still the other downsides of this policy cannot be ignored.
In sum, we can say that a national curriculum even though has a few benefits, has a lot of prominent downsides that make it inadvisable to implement in my opinion. Therefore I completely disagree with the implementation of a policy that will require all the students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college.
So, guys, this is my answer please let me know down in the responses what are your opinions and what more could I have added?
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