The Integrated Curriculum

An integrated curriculum is one where several related disciplines provide the basis for the topics that students are asked to study. The broad context of a multi-subject study program is more easily recognized as affecting the students’ lives than the relatively narrow context inherent in the unidisciplinary course of study. Teachers and curriculum consultants can formulate fundamental problems for investigation by small groups of students that impinge upon political life, government, social problems, questions of human values, history, and problems of the sciences, as well as how questions of human health and survival are related. Such questions should be linked directly to the lives of the students, but they can also reveal the nationwide, regional or worldwide scope of the topics studied. Given an environment where students can see how this knowledge functions in the real world, there is a relatively high probability that they will be genuinely involved in, and curious about, these topics of study. That kind of curiosity and involvement may not be typical of students before the age of 11 or 12 years. Secondary schools are the appropriate level where various academic disciplines fused to form broad intellectual domains can be most effective.