A curriculum can only fit so many things, so everything that’s included means something else can’t be. Think of it this way: Would you rather spend 100 hours learning basic programming and 100 hours learning moral philosophy, or 100 hours learning geography trivia and 100 hours learning Shakespeare? And would you rather live in a world where everyone else knew basic programming and moral philosophy, or a world where everyone else knew geography trivia and Shakespeare?
Cost/benefit analysis works best if you’re broad in what counts as a cost and what counts as a benefit. Eg if students find learning Shakespeare enjoyable, that would count as a benefit. My subjective experience, though, was that school literature courses didn’t line up with what I actually wanted to read, so they weren’t particularly enjoyable, and they were a lot less informative than an equal number of hours of nonfiction blogposts would have been.
A curriculum can only fit so many things, so everything that’s included means something else can’t be. Think of it this way: Would you rather spend 100 hours learning basic programming and 100 hours learning moral philosophy, or 100 hours learning geography trivia and 100 hours learning Shakespeare? And would you rather live in a world where everyone else knew basic programming and moral philosophy, or a world where everyone else knew geography trivia and Shakespeare?
Cost/benefit analysis works best if you’re broad in what counts as a cost and what counts as a benefit. Eg if students find learning Shakespeare enjoyable, that would count as a benefit. My subjective experience, though, was that school literature courses didn’t line up with what I actually wanted to read, so they weren’t particularly enjoyable, and they were a lot less informative than an equal number of hours of nonfiction blogposts would have been.