A nation should require all of its students to study the same national curriculum until they enter college Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position

Students are all different --- each with their own goals, ambitions, and talents. As such, educational approaches that are suitable for one student may not be suitable for another. In this essay, I will argue that if the goal of the state is to create the most well-prepared cohort for its educated workforce, then to mandate a standardized, national curriculum for all students to study until they enter college would be strictly suboptimal for two main reasons. I will also present two counterarguments against my advocacy and demonstrate why these counterarguments are invalid.

First, mandating a standardized, national curriculum draws away valuable time that students could have otherwise been using towards developing specialized skills for their intended careers. Consider a student who dreams of becoming an investigative journalist and using her pen and notebook to keep those in power in check. There is no compelling reason for the state to mandate her to take mechanical physics and electricity & magnetism physics, which are two often-required courses in standardized curricula. Such courses will have little to no impact on her becoming a better journalist. At bottom, each student has the same 24 hours per day, but it should be clear that an aspiring physicist should spend her daily 24 hours differently than an aspiring investigative journalist. An hour spent checking a standardized box is an hour not spent honing her investigative journalism skills. From an optimization perspective, our aspiring investigative journalist could have become much better prepared for her future career by taking additional coursework in public speaking, expository writing, and logic. Society would have gained one better-prepared investigative journalist, compared to an investigative journalist who had the first 12 years of her education partitioned away by the whims of the state's compulsory national education.

Furthermore, when our investigative journalist is compelled to take advanced physics along with the rest of her cohort, she may lack the motivation to invest in her physics studies, as, in her mind, her performance and knowledge retention from these courses are simply to check a bureaucratic box, and not towards her own self-actualization. As she compares herself to her physicist classmates, especially after exams or grade releases, she may begin to question her natural, general intelligence, and capacity to contribute towards society. This result would be especially lamentable, given that this advanced physics course was irrelevant towards her dreams. In general, a standardized curriculum has the potential to be devastating on the morale of students who do not exactly fit the profile of the curriculums' intended audience. Specifically, within a sufficiently large population, there will almost certainly be students who are not only polymaths, but also sedulous in all of their studies --- students who would excel in most, if not all, courses packaged in a national curriculum. But what about the other 90% of the student population? What about the other 90% of students who are more focused in their attention and the time they are willing to invest in their studies? What about the students who grew up, for a variety of reasons, with a fear of mathematics, and genuinely found their passion in a different field that is not even tangentially-related to mathematics? Why subject them to more than a decade of time wasted for the sole purpose of ticking a bureaucratic checkbox?

Of course, advocates of a national curriculum may argue that a functioning democracy requires generally-educated voters, which necessitates a standardized national curriculum. I completely agree with the first logical link. Mandating students to take a set sequence of courses -- say, on civics or government -- to build a politically-educated student body is certainly a wise decision. However, there is a strict difference between mandating students take, perhaps, 1-2 common courses during their high school years, and mandating that students study the same national curriculum for 12 years until they enter college. Indeed, requesting that students take 1-2 common courses on civics and government is, in fact, squarely within the scope of my advocacy: courses on civics and government are necessary for any profession, because, in any democratic society, at optima, workers are citizens first.

Moreover, advocates of a national curriculum until students enter college may rebut that students can still pursue their interests and specialize in college, through their chosen majors. However, such advocates overlook the reality that, assuming the absence of graduate studies, each student only has around 12 years of primary education and 4 years of undergraduate college eduation, for a total of 16 years of education. Again, a year spent studying subjects not relevant to a specialization is one lost year that could have been spent on becoming more adept at ones' specialization. From this perspective, time is a limited resource, and it would be in the state's best interest to maximize students' readiness for their future careers.

In sum, if the goal of the state is to create the most well-prepared workforce for all necessary vocations of a society, instead of stymying individuality and imposing a standardized curriculum, it should empower each individual student to take the sets of courses and experience the sets of experiences that best set up each individual student for success in their chosen specialized vocation. This is, by definition, the most optimal allocatio of resources. Doing so also maintains the morale of the incoming workforce, a factor that policymakers would be unwise to ignore.