Blog Prompts 9 - Should students be given the autonomy to develop their own curriculum?

Imagine a school where students decide what they want to learn, and when. Where students pursue their own interest. Where students learn essential life skills voluntarily. That is the kind of school a school can be if students were given the freedom to develop their own curriculum.

Firstly, being given the power to create their own curriculum, the students would feel more 'free' and this would thus be beneficial to their rate of learning. For example, a student under the impression that he is 'forced' to study a particular subject would perform infinitely worse than a student that feels that he is studying the exact same subject. It is that extra element of the feeling of freedom that brings in that special dimension to learning. This would allow the students who develop their own curriculum to learn much better than those who have their curriculum developed by others.

On the other hand, some people believe that students are not matured enough to decide things such their own curriculum for themselves. However, I believe that if we never let students decide important thing for themselves, then they may never mature. Only through handling great responsibilities does one be come more mature and thus more independent.

On whether we should implement this is Hwa Chong, I feel that we should 'test drive' this experiment among a few students in Hwa Chong first before deciding whether to inreoduce it to the entire school as a whole or just scrape the project altogether.