JONAED

This paper submits that one of the products of education is the ability and disposition to solve problems – personal and societal and that education is meant to bring about emancipation and transformation, and when it fails, it becomes an agent of mental confusion and slavery. Content, in the form of curriculum and, or instruction must be so tailored to show evidence of emancipation and transformation. Therefore, the premise of this paper suggests that the foremost important insight necessary for the appropriate design of curriculum, instruction and certification that is relevant to our continent, is that content is, in the final analysis, nothing more and nothing less than a system or mode of thinking. There is no learning of the content without the thinking process explicitly engaged. To learn content separate from thinking is as good that students never learned at all within the discipline that defines and creates the content. It is to deny students the opportunity to become self-directed, motivated learners. Therefore, if we want to develop curriculum, schemes/units for learning in general, they should be expressed in terms of the thinking one must do to succeed in that learning. Furthermore, it is apparent that the only way to learn any discipline is to learn to think critically within that discipline. It enables students to master systems, become more self-insightful, analyze and assess ideas more effectively, and achieve control over their learning, their values, and their lives. Conclusively, the paper suggests in strong terms the importance of curriculum and instructional designers seeing content as a system of thinking, the mode of thinking that emancipates and transforms the learner, and should explicitly come alive in curriculum and instructional design.