O16: Structural Turns in the School Curriculum to Meet the Requirements of Detecting and Developing Specific Talents

In the macro education plan for Iran (2010-2025), twelve years of schooling has been characterized as “General” education. Such a characterization is prone to certain misconceptions. General education does not equal “Uniform,” or standardized, education and should refrain from identifying as such. Yet it is misinterpreted that there is a relationship between offering a General type of education and policy makers’ lack of concern about specialized education; such education is the mission or the territory of higher education. But, of course, the General education system should act in a fashion that detects and nurtures different aptitudes effectively. Otherwise, specialized education at the higher education level will face an efficiency crisis, since such individualized attention has been delayed for too long. In order to prevent such a catastrophic state of affairs in the education system, it is imperative that a Uniform education in the schooling years be discouraged. The type of education that does not take into account the spectrum of interests and abilities is, ultimately, anti-educational. In this presentation, the idea of “soft specialization” is proposed and resulting implications for structuring the school curricula is discussed. From this perspective, and for aptitude detection and development to occur in the schooling years devoted to General education, three major components should be incorporated in the curricula for all stages of schooling: “prescriptive,” “semi- prescriptive,” and “non-prescriptive” elements.