How much can a kid learn in a year?

How do the people who put school curriculums together know when kids should learn things and what absolutely has to be included?

How much discretion do individual schools have in deciding what their kids will learn?

I know that really little kids progress through stages that do not allow them to learn things “before their time,” but how do we know that we aren’t holding older kids back from their true potential? Is the curriculum largely a political decision or is there a lot of science behind this?when

The problem is that not everyone learns at the same rate. Yes, occassionally, you’ll have a seven year old learning calculus, or some such, but you’ll also occasionally have a 30-year old who can’t add or subtract. No matter what level you teach at, you’ll end up with some students who are being held back, and some who can’t keep up. It’s then a question of how many of each you want. For instance, you might put the best 5% of the students into special honors classes, and the worst 5% into special LD classes, and teach the other 90% in the same classroom. If you don’t have enough teachers trained in working with LD students, or you don’t have enough trained for honors students (and it does take different training), then the school district is pretty much forced to accomodate some of those students in the regular classes. In a perfect world, each student would be allowed to progress at his or her own level, but that’s very difficult to implement.

Some of it is just common sense, too. The reason the majority of seven year olds aren’t in Calculus or Differential Equations is that their brains are simply not wired to think abstractly at that point in their lives. I’m a Psychology major, so bear with me, but I’m taking a class right now called Adolescent Psychology, and one of the topics we discuss is something called Piaget’s Stages of Cognition.

There are four of them
1)Sensorimotor
2)Preoperational
3)Concrete Operational
4)Formal Operational

Until the concrete operational stage, a child’s strength is more in the tangible than in abstract representations. Rather than force them to learn in a way they’re not prepared for, we teach them things that prepare them to learn later. And this is just one guiding principle that educators use when putting together curriculum for schools…

Ideally, curriculum is designed based on knowledge of both the learner and the subject or task. Instructional designers (I am one) attempt to determine what the learners know already, what skills or knowledge they need to be able to learn the subject at hand, etc. Then the subject is analyzed to determine logical segments, units, etc.

As for what is taught, that’s largely a matter of tradition and society’s perception of what an “educated” person needs to know. Generally speaking, the curriculum of public schools is determined by requirements from local, state and national education authorities (i.e., school boards, state Departments of Education, and the US DOE). There are a lot of politics involved in these decisions but there is also solid research on how students learn. (Sometimes the politicians don’t listen to it.) It’s possible a child of any age could be held from their potential by this, but the nature of mass education makes it inevitable that some students will be ready to move on before others will. A good teacher knows this and helps students work to their potential.