Should This Be Taught? An Ethical and Political Evaluation of Curriculum

ApplyingApplying the V3 model to curriculum, difficulty, and educational consequence

Most curriculum debates ask whether a topic can be taught. The question is almost always answerable, since nearly anything can be taught by somebody to somebody. The more consequential question is whether it should be taught, to whom, by what means, and at whose cost. Inclusion, omission, sequencing, framing, assessment, and automation are all decisions about attention, time, identity, and future participation. Each one carries an ethical and political judgement, whether or not the institution that makes it acknowledges that judgement. This article sets out how such decisions can be evaluated, using the V3 model that this site uses for software and that now extends to curriculum.

1. From "Can It Be Taught?" to "Should It Be?" FoundationalKnowledge that endures for decades — core principles

ChangingChanging the question changes the evidence that counts. "Can this be taught?" is answered by checking feasibility: whether staff exist, whether materials can be written, whether the timetable has room. "Should it be taught?" requires a further set of questions. Why should it be taught? Who should learn it? Who should decide? How should it be framed? At whose cost is it taught, and what follows if it is omitted?

The second set of questions cannot be answered by feasibility alone. It requires an account of what the topic develops, for whom, and with what consequences, and it requires that account to be written down where it can be challenged. A curriculum that cannot state its reasons has not made a decision. It has inherited one.the hidden curriculum: values taught by silence

2. The Curriculum as Operational Ontology FoundationalKnowledge that endures for decades — core principles

AA curriculum classifies. It separates foundational from optional knowledge, legitimate from illegitimate questions, prerequisites from destinations, central from peripheral voices, theory from application, and assessable from unassessed activity. In that sense it functions as an operational ontology of a discipline: it says what the field contains and which forms of participation count as competent. The companion page on ontologies and frames sets out the general pattern of such classifications, and the curriculum is one of the most consequential instances of it.the map is not the territory but it shapes the walkers

Discipline
  ├── contains legitimate topics
  ├── defines prerequisite relations
  ├── recognises authorised methods
  ├── identifies acceptable evidence
  └── specifies forms of competent participation

A curriculum is therefore an account of what a field is, converted into a sequence of permitted and required learning activities. It does not simply describe the discipline. It helps reproduce it, because the people who pass through the curriculum become the next generation of practitioners who maintain the field's boundaries.

3. Five Curricular Decisions Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

EveryEvery curriculum is the product of five distinct decisions, and each can be evaluated separately:

• Inclusion. Should the topic appear at all?
• Position. Is it foundational, specialist, optional, or peripheral?
• Framing. Which questions, histories, examples, and voices define it?
• Pedagogy. Will it be taught through instruction, inquiry, construction, debate, simulation, practice, or participation?
• Assessment. What must learners recall, explain, apply, create, question, critique, or refuse?

A topic can be included and still be framed so narrowly that its ethical and political dimensions disappear. Inclusion alone therefore tells us little. The framing and the assessment usually determine what learners actually take away.

4. The V3 Evaluation Structure Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

TheThe V3 model is the classic V model with a third stroke. The classic V pairs each decision on the descending stroke with a check on the ascending stroke: requirements with acceptance testing, system design with system testing, architecture with integration testing, and module design with unit testing. The third stroke, "the Third V: Values", adds the same discipline to ethical decisions. At each level of the descent there is a values question, and on the ascent there is a corresponding values check. Examples on the site's page include "should we build this at all? whose interests, whose risks?" paired with a societal impact review, and "what data do we refuse to collect?" paired with privacy and accessibility audits. The principle behind the whole model is that a concern raised without a paired check evaporates. The standards work behind the model makes the same point, treating ethical concerns as requirements to be elicited and traced through design[1].

Applied to curriculum, the same structure gives a decision pathway. A proposed topic is first given a values question at each level of decision, and each question is paired with a check that the decision must pass before it is adopted:

                  V3 EVALUATION
                        │
        ┌───────────────┼───────────────┐
        │               │               │
  Classic V:       Classic V:      Values stroke:
  learning         assessment      values questions
  purpose          design          at each level
        │               │               │
        └───────────────┼───────────────┘
                        ▼
              Curricular judgement
                        │
      ┌─────────────────┼─────────────────┐
      ▼                 ▼                 ▼
   Include           Modify             Exclude
      │                 │                 │
      ▼                 ▼                 ▼
required/optional   reframe, scaffold,   retain reasons,
assessed/unassessed resequence, qualify  dissent and review

Three points govern how this structure is used. First, the V3 model does not produce an automatic topic score, and a numerical total would hide exactly the judgements that need to be visible. Second, each pairing is a check that has to be run, not a sentence in a policy document. Third, the judgement is a human one, recorded with its reasons. The values questions at the top of the stroke, such as whether a topic should exist and who has the authority to decide, are answered in a room by people who can be held to their answers. The model's job is to make sure that conversation happens before the course is validated, not after the first cohort has finished it.the V is not a timeline but a map of accountability

For each decision, the record should retain the evidence used, the stakeholders consulted, the purposes claimed, the likely benefits and possible harms, the distribution of costs, the alternatives considered, the uncertainty involved, the dissenting views, and the conditions under which the decision should be reviewed.

5. Ethical Dimensions of a Curricular Judgement Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

TheThe values questions can be grouped into five dimensions. Each one applies at every level from topic to module to assessment.

Educational value. What capability should the topic develop? Is that capability durable, or is it a temporarily fashionable skill? Will the learning transfer to other contexts? Is the proposed difficulty integral to the learning, and could the same outcome be reached more accessibly?

Epistemic quality. Is the topic supported by credible evidence? Is uncertainty represented faithfully, with competing interpretations visible? Is current practice being presented as enduring knowledge? Can learners inspect where a claim comes from?

Learner agency. Can learners question the framing? Are meaningful choices available? Can learners contest the institutional models that describe them? Does the curriculum support metacognition, or does it require compliance?

Justice and inclusion. Who is advantaged by assumed prerequisites? Whose knowledge is treated as canonical? Which learners bear the greatest cost? Are the barriers intrinsic to the subject, or designed into the course? Are harmful historical categories reproduced without critique? Paulo Freire's account of education as a practice that can either reproduce or challenge the structures of domination it operates within remains a useful lens for these questions[2].

Social and professional consequence. What practices might learners enact after studying this? Who might be affected by them? Does the curriculum address misuse? Are ethics integrated throughout the programme, or isolated in one detachable unit that can be skipped? The professional codes discussed on the professional ethics page place these obligations on individuals, but a curriculum determines whether individuals are prepared to meet them.

A separate question concerns institutional power. Who selected the topic? Which accreditation, market, political, or employer pressures shaped it? Are those pressures visible in the documentation? Can the curriculum be revised as evidence changes? An evaluation that does not ask these questions is evaluating the curriculum's stated purposes, not the forces that actually produced it.

The distinction the site draws between procedural and personal ethics applies here as well. A committee can confirm that a curriculum meets a defined standard, but that confirmation answers a narrower question than whether the curriculum is right. The two kinds of ethics page makes this point for research approval, and it carries over to curriculum approval: validation is a necessary step, and it does not discharge the judgement that the people designing the curriculum have to make.compliance is not consent

6. The Ethics of Omission Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

NotNot teaching a topic is also an intervention. Omitting accessibility, security, environmental effects, labour conditions, model uncertainty, data provenance, the social consequences of classification, professional accountability, historical controversy, or the power embedded in technical infrastructure is not a neutral act. Learners who never encounter these topics will not know that they exist, and graduates who do not know them will not be able to weigh them when they make decisions.silence is not neutrality

The principle is therefore: curriculum ethics concerns both potentially harmful content and the harms created when consequential knowledge is absent. A course that avoids a difficult subject to protect learners from discomfort may be transferring the discomfort, and the cost of its omission, to people who were never in the room.

7. Curriculum as the Allocation of Difficulty Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

AA curriculum decides which difficulties learners must meet. It decides which contradictions must be confronted, which uncertainties can be avoided, which failures count against progression, which errors receive feedback, which learners receive additional time or support, which difficulties tools remove, and which are kept as educationally significant. Curriculum design is partly the ethical allocation of difficulty.

Two distinctions follow. The first is between difficulty that is necessary for conceptual development and difficulty produced by poor or exclusionary design. The second is between struggle that is chosen and supported as inquiry, and struggle that is imposed and then retrospectively described as character building. Productive failure research supports the first distinction: learners who first attempt complex problems before receiving instruction can outperform those given instruction first on measures of conceptual understanding and transfer, but only when the design makes the struggle purposeful and the instruction follows it[3]. Difficulty of that kind is an education decision, and it must be justified as one.productive failure must be designed, not just endured

The same research also shows that difficulty is not automatically valuable. A difficulty that does not lead to a more adequate model of the subject has not earned its place in the curriculum, however demanding it feels to those who meet it.

8. AI and Curricular Judgement Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

GenerativeGenerative AI can remove or relocate several visible forms of difficulty: syntax production, drafting, summarisation, initial research, routine coding, error explanation, and translation between representational forms. Those removals change the curriculum whether or not anyone decided to make them. Each activity that AI can now perform needs a curricular judgement about whether it is procedural friction that can be delegated, an authentic professional tool-use skill, necessary practice, essential to forming a mental model, required for independent verification, or legitimately delegated only after understanding has been established.

The site's work on the AI short-circuit describes the central risk. Immediate performance and durable learning can move in opposite directions under the same manipulation: a shortcut that raises the homework score can lower the exam result weeks later, because the effortful step was skipped. A curriculum that cannot tell these two outcomes apart will reward the first and penalise the second, and it will not notice that it is doing so.the friction is the learning skip it, lose the gain

The question a curriculum has to answer is therefore specific: which transformations must learners still perform if they are to inspect, challenge, verify, and take responsibility for AI-assisted outputs? Whatever those transformations are, the curriculum has to protect them, and the assessment has to measure them.

9. The Curriculum Decision Record Applied / MethodologicalKnowledge with a 5–10 year half-life — stable practice

SignificantSignificant curricular decisions should be recorded in a versioned form that can be inspected later. The record should state the topic, its proposed status, its purpose, the V3 evaluation, the evidence, the stakeholders, the expected learning, the prerequisite knowledge, the productive contradictions the design intends, the scaffolding available, the foreseeable harms, the accessibility implications, the ethical and political concerns, the alternatives considered, the assessment consequences, the reasons for the decision, the dissenting views, a review date, and the evidence that would trigger reconsideration.a versioned file is not a decision record

This record plays the same role for an institution that a learning log plays for a learner. A learning log asks why a learner altered their model. A curriculum decision record asks why the institution altered the learner's environment. Both constrain the retrospective story that people tell about their own decisions, and both make it possible to challenge that story later.

The record also makes a practical point about rubrics and blocked structures. The interleaving page argues that administratively convenient blocked curricula and narrow rubrics can reproduce the same missing skill at different institutional levels. A decision record forces that connection into view, because it asks what the assessment rewards and whether that matches the learning the course claims to produce. The rubrics page develops the assessment side of the same problem.

10. The Argument in Brief FoundationalKnowledge that endures for decades — core principles

CurriculumCurriculum design exercises power over attention, time, identity, legitimacy, difficulty, and future participation. A decision to include, exclude, require, frame, sequence, assess, or automate a topic is therefore a decision that must be evaluated educationally, politically, and ethically. The V3 model supplies a structure for that evaluation: a values question at each level of decision, paired with a check that the decision has to pass, and a recorded judgement that can be reviewed when the evidence changes. The model does not decide the outcome. It makes the reasons visible, and it makes the choice contestable.

Related Topics

• The V Model — with a Third V for Values — the source of the V3 model applied on this page.
• AI Ethics — the wider ethical principles behind the values questions.
• Professional Ethics — the professional obligations a curriculum has to prepare learners for.
• Two Kinds of Ethics — why procedural approval does not settle the ethical judgement.
• Avoiding the AI Short-Circuit — the durable-learning evidence behind section 8.
• Interleaving Against the Timetable — blocked curricula and narrow rubrics as a structural problem.
• Rubrics in HE — the assessment side of curriculum decisions.

References

1. IEEE (2021). IEEE 7000-2021: Standard Model Process for Addressing Ethical Concerns during System Design. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9536679/
2. P. Freire (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Herder and Herder.
3. M. Kapur (2008). Productive failure. Cognition and Instruction, 26(3), 379–424.