This is my first attempt at writing a fairly coherent essay. I will be glad if you can point out the mistakes and i will try to rectify, Thanks!
The issue, ”A nation should require all its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college rather than allow schools in different parts of the nation to determine which academic courses to offer”, is a debatable one due to the reason mentioned below.
The overall development of any nation depends on its younger generation. Students can contribute to the development of their country only when they have an uninterrupted way of thinking. A country needs to have intelligent students working on all its areas of development including science. Having a rigid curriculum that caters to a small section of the students is definitely disastrous to any nation’s development.
Students have their own preferences when it comes to learning. They develop their own area of interest over a considerable learning period and may opt to venture into them. They must be given the right to pursue their dreams and aspiration. A curriculum that is biased towards a few students is bound to cause frustration among such aspiring students.
I do agree that having a single curriculum will help educationalists to assess the grades of students much more easily but at what cost: The students may not have a wide learning capability. They may develop deterrence to learning which is supposed to be pleasurable. Consequentially, the nation’s development may be at stake.
Different students have different learning abilities and the curriculum must be flexible enough to cater to their needs. For example, a student in a rural area is generally more passive in his/her learning than a student in a city. The curriculum must be tailored to serve rural students without compromising the standard of urban students. There is also another section of students who are intellectually challenged and may find a highly demanding curriculum to be too intimidating.
A curriculum set by a small group of scholars in the country will inevitably fail to cater to different sections of students there by, hindering the overall development of the country. Due to the above mentioned reasons, I strongly feel that it is not in the best interest of students to have a single curriculum in all the schools of a nation.