A topic that often comes up in online discussion groups among Mormons is the teaching manuals. As most of us know, these are written by a committee called the Curriculum Committee (under the oversight of the Correlation Committee). [3] “Correlation” was a byproduct of decades-long efforts to standardize materials, culminating in the 1960s, a huge effort to amass all leadership, budgets, publications, and teaching materials under one hierarchical, priesthood-overseen umbrella rather than separate auxilliary heads as it had been in the past. (See footnote 3 for a much more thorough explanation of the history.) This was to quash rogue teaching that might occur when these things were being done under separate oversight. As with anything where uniformity is the goal, blandness and groupthink is often the result (whereas rogue teaching, inequity, and folklore is often the result of the other approach). Because teachers in the church are average church members using these manuals to the best of their ability, lesson quality varies greatly. Additionally, everyone who has held a teaching calling (and that’s most active members) has an opinion on the materials they are provided and how effective they are.
You can listen to a podcast describing the curriculum process here. Just reading the overview of it on that same page is very interesting. You can read the transcript of an interview with Dan Peterson about his time on the Curriculum Writing committee here.
On a different discussion thread, several people mentioned that they had been asked to participate in an online survey about curriculum, so there does seem to be a desire to improve. The process to gather feedback sounded robust and included reviewing actual supplementary materials like videos and handouts. On the downside, if participants did not currently hold a calling (not restricted to teaching callings), they were quickly weeded out of the survey process without an explanation why. It’s unclear why their feedback would not be gathered, as there are many reasons someone might not currently hold a calling – recently moved, ward split, etc. – that don’t denote that they aren’t actively engaged with the curriculum. Survey methodology could simply separate feedback based on a variety of demographics.
Be that as it may, as you can imagine, very few people are gushing about the high quality of our teaching manuals in these online discussions (else why discuss them?). Generally speaking, the complaints fall into a few buckets:
- Lack of accuracy / white-washing. This is a bigger concern in the Gospel Doctrine manuals where some of the “traditional” information may now be known to be misleading or “optimistic” in its portrayal of facts, although a few Primary and youth speakers also noted misleading stories and examples in the teaching materials.
- Topics chosen are not Christ-centered. This is particularly of concern for teaching the Primary children and the youth who may be less familiar with the parables and stories of Jesus. Our kids seem to be pretty Biblically illiterate beyond some proof-texted memorization.
- Lessons are too repetitive. Particularly the new youth curriculum which focuses on a topic each month, and then that same topic is used for both the 2nd and 3rd hour. Gospel Doctrine is of course repetitive because we rotate the same 4 books of scripture every 4 years. The RS/PH curriculum that focuses on one of the modern day prophet’s teachings for a full year is another one with a lot of repetition, depending on which year. For example, Pres. Hunter was in office less than the year we spent using his material as lesson fodder. (However, that one was a pretty good one, IMO).
- Boring / not thought provoking / all milk and no meat. While it’s true that our lessons shouldn’t be a bear-baiting of controversial topics that have no real bearing on how to live a more Christian life in the coming week, when you are repeating the same materials as often as we are, offering some fresh perspective or interesting content is helpful. This is one place where the limits of correlation really shows (by contrast to manuals from earlier days).
Some previous curricula were written by individual church historians and scholars (for some great examples, see this top 10 list); I’m partial to the O.C. Tanner manuals. The current crop of writers seem to be a dull lot. Maybe that’s because they are each individually unthinking dullards, but more likely the curricula is suffering from a widely known phenomenon: death by committee, the stifling effect bureaucracy has on the creative process. An individual author may create something interesting, fresh and thought-provoking, but a committee of authors will create mindless pablum that is inoffensive and innocuous, fit only to line bird cages [1]. This phenomenon is well known in business.
Now, before we get too far down this path, let me clarify that I’m sure plenty of the teachers and students are also unthinking dullards who would ruin even the best teaching manuals with their insipid and uninspired comments. Granted. And truth be told, a great teacher can make something out of even the most threadbare material. For example, I could listen to President Uchtdorf read a page out of the phone book, but that’s probably 90% the cool accent. I digress. But first, regardless the quality of teachers and students, let’s start with great materials. All boats rise with the tide, and the curriculum is the tide.
A few very interesting comments came up when individuals asked leaders about the terrible curriculum. There seems to be a blame-the-victim approach:
I wrote to the curriculum committee once and asked why, on the Sunday before Christmas, we were discussing missionary work. Someone wrote back and said there was nothing preventing me from discussing Christmas in my family.
I’m relieved to know that the Correlation Committee decided not to prevent people from discussing Christmas in their families. Whew!
A few months ago my daughter expressed concern to her stake president that her five children were not learning about Christ in church meetings. His response: ‘Don’t expect your children to learn about Christ in church. You will need to teach them in the home.’
Good one. Of course, that makes me wonder why then do we go to church? Why is teaching about Jesus AT CHURCH a subversive idea? Another observation from a different commenter:
I was so embarrassed when we visited an evangelical church and the children came out of their children’s class telling me about the story of the loaves and fishes and they didn’t remember ever hearing it before!
Now, I’m sure we could excuse this by saying that we have the FULLNESS of the gospel to teach, whereas all they have is Jesus. But let’s get the priorities straight here. Our kids don’t have the foundations yet; they are still just kids. The more we teach about Jesus, the better. If our kids are illiterate about Jesus, no wonder everyone says we aren’t Christians. Another Primary President noted that she is baffled that the curriculum was focused on tithing and modesty–for pre-pubescent children–while those same children were mostly unfamiliar with the stories of Jesus. Our priorities seem a little off track.
So how do we make change? Well, the surveys should be a way to improve the materials. Another suggestion:
If you want the curriculum to change, you’ve got to have a different group of people writing it. We can’t expect these folks to all of a sudden come up with historically accurate, deeply considered material. Didn’t the Savior say something about new wine in old wine skins? I don’t understand why the Brethren won’t change this model. It’s obviously not working. I’d love to see some honest to goodness Mormon theologians and historians come together to write new lessons.
This sounds fantastic to me. In the attached podcast, the introductory note lays out the nine steps in the curriculum process and boasts that the materials are reviewed by hundreds of people before they are distributed. Hundreds! Well, I’m not some country bumpkin, impressed by the number of editors. Sometimes more is less, and this is one of those times. In addition to the creativity-strangling aspect of committees, there’s a psychological phenomenon known as bystander effect as well as a few other related psychological effects.
The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological phenomenon in which individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim when other people are present.
This is why when 38 people overheard a woman screaming while being murdered in 1964 New York, nobody called the police (you can read about the murder of Kitty Genovese here) [4]. They all thought someone else would do it, or they were only partly attentive to what was happening. In the case of curriculum, the “victims” are the people who use the materials either as instructors or students: the recipients of the materials (as opposed to Kitty G., the recipient of murder). So in editing a document, if 100 people review it, the majority of them will assume it must be OK as it is because if not, somebody else would fix it. There’s another term for this:
“Social loafing” basically means when people tend to spend less effort to achieve a goal when they’re working in a group.
The greater the number of people who are involved with something the less any individual will feel responsible for the outcome. As a leader in business, it was certainly my experience that the more people who were asked to “sign off” on a document, the fewer who actually read it. I would often ask my peers if they had read such-and-such a document, and if we had all been asked to read it, most of them had not or had “skimmed it,” which usually means they read about the first paragraph and looked at any tables or charts, and then signed off. The clever ones might memorize a key phrase to demonstrate knowledge of the document to a superior if requested. If there was ever a problem, people would quickly point out that the document was X pages long, so maybe they had missed that one part. Yeah, right.
For those who have seen or read Julius Caesar, this is also the powerful idea behind all of them plunging a dagger into Caesar: no one person can be held accountable for the outcome. They all share the blame and the credit, so effectively nobody is accountable. In editing, it’s more likely that nobody will plunge the dagger, though, because evaluators are aware they are being watched:
Evaluation apprehension theory predicts that when we work in the presence of others, our concern over what they will think can enhance or impair our performance. We see the effects of evaluation apprehension in brainstorming sessions.
In other words, nobody wants to be “that guy.” Everyone wants to move that paper along and sign it off and get it off their desk so they can get back to their other stuff. People don’t want to be the one cog that doesn’t move the paper through the machine. They don’t want to be the bottleneck. They don’t want others to see them as “different” or “outside group norms.” This can affect the quality of their feedback as well. While it may be “safer” to bring up a typo or a grammatical change, it might be “risky” to point out larger issues like the content or topics chosen or to point out that the traditional view of the material is not accurate or needs to be updated. Cultural norms prevail.
Social facilitation, or the audience effect, is the tendency for people to perform differently when in the presence of others than when alone. Compared to their performance when alone, when in the presence of others, they tend to perform better on simple or well-rehearsed tasks and worse on complex or new ones.
So the higher the number of reviewers, the worse the finished product. Nobody wants to be creative or point out a flaw others accepted or express a contrary opinion because that can cause backlash toward them or put them under scrutiny. In our highly authoritarian church culture, this is especially difficult for average people to do; if they have titles or credentials to back them up, they may feel more confident in dissenting, but most of our curriculum committee consists of average people who have taught seminary or other secondary education roles [2]. Teaching and writing curriculum are not the same thing, and neither require any theological degrees or background in our church. Reviewers have the majority weight of the other reviewers to consider, as well as how their intervention will be perceived by others, peers in the process, as well as superiors.
Audience inhibition might explain why people are reluctant to intervene in response to a potential emergency. People become concerned about other people negatively appraising their altruistic behaviour.
Nobody wants to be pinpointed as the one who disagreed with everyone else. Standing alone is different when you are working with one other person than when you are working with 99 who are all fine with the status quo (but in reality probably haven’t even read the thing completely or may not have the skills or background to identify errors).
So, back to the curriculum. Let’s get your thoughts.
- Do you think the curriculum is getting better or worse over time? Defend your answer in the comments.
- How can we continually improve the curriculum to bring people closer to Christ? What’s lacking today, if anything, in your opinion. What would you do differently?
- Is the curriculum development process a positive or negative in your view?
Discuss.
[1] I think I’m channeling Mark Twain.
[2] Again, based on those in online discussion forums who know people on the committee.
[3] From Ardis’ comment in discussion thread: The Correlation Committee is, for instance, a different entity from the Curriculum Committee: One writes the lessons; the other oversees them, and all other phases of Church output, for adherence to standards. Both committees go back decades longer than the 1960s, under one name or another: Correlation goes back at least to the 19teens; Curriculum, under the names of the Reading Committee and the Publications Committee and others, goes back at least to the 1930s. Just this week I’ve been reading the reports of the Publication Committee on a dozen or more manuals from the 1940s and 1950s, supposedly the heyday of those independently written, mythically perfect manuals … and the level of picky detail (“page X, line Y: Change ‘John shows us Jesus saying …’ to ‘Jesus said …’ so as not to imply that John made up the saying for literary effect.”) show micromanagement by committee as much as any manual today is.
[4] Or according to this article, fewer than 38, and maybe someone did call the police, and who really knows, but it makes a good story to illustrate a point (and gave rise to the idea of the indifferent New Yorker who ignores crimes and minds his or her own business, leaving imperiled neighbors to die).