ABSTRACT
What should these young people study in school? My first response is to offer that it probably does not matter very much what answer you and I decide to offer. Schools are going to do as they will. And that, likely, is to continue what they have been doing right along. I hold out the distinct possibility that schooling for the less-than-successful students is not going to change fundamentally. Despite all the promising talk, you and I may very well recognize schools 10 years from now. This possibility, that schools will not change a great deal, is one reason for my emphasis on teaching students to go get what they need and not wait to be saved by an improved school environment. The same goes for us as well. Certainly we need to create hopes for schools and work toward realizing them. But we must also learn to take maximum advantage of the positive possibilities within the current reality. And anyway, the current reality, with all its limitations, is from moment to moment all we ever have to deal with in any case. So that is the first point, that the following discussion of curriculum may be, as they say, academic. What underachieving, poor, socially disadvantaged, and develop-mentally blocked kids encounter in school now may just be what they will continue to encounter. And if that is so, these kids had better learn how to deal with the present circumstance.
