There are myriad "overarching aims" for education. My current list has 26, all of them laudable and defensible. But no institution can function effectively with that many aims, especially when functional measures of performance need a reasonably precise focus.
Which is why I'm trying to change the paradigm, first, by fixing on an overarching aim that's (a) politically neutral, and (b) fundamental to the realization of ALL legitimate aims. That overarching aim---enhancing student sense-making ability.
This aim could, of course, suffer from the same problems as the 25 or 30 other aims educators routinely toss around---a level of vagueness which allows everyone to think that whatever he or she has always taught or is currently teaching enhances student sense-making ability.
Which is true. OF COURSE a grasp of a discipline, no matter what it is, enhances one's sense-making ability!
But, I maintain, if you "start from SCRATCH" to construct a strategy for enhancing sense-making ability, you don't end up by reconstructing the familiar disciplines. You end up where I've been insisting for decades you end up, by pulling out from the stream of consciousness whatever it is you're trying to make more sense of, then (1) locating it spatially, (2)assigning it time dimensions, (3) identifying the participating actors or objects, (4) describing the action, and (5) attributing cause for the action, with the assumed systemic relationships of these five determining the specific content of each in whatever it is that's being thought about.
I don't throw out the disciplines, just turn them into instruments for helping kids surface, elaborate, refine and apply to ever-more-complex phenomena the above built-in, hard-wired approach to sense making.
The myriad disciplines' conceptual frameworks and vocabularies are useful and powerful, but introducing students to the "master" conceptual framework of which the disciplines' conceptual frameworks and vocabularies are sub-sets makes possible a whole new level of intellectual performance, primarily because encompassing EVERYTHING kids know in a single conceptual structure makes it all accessible for the exploration of possible relationships, freed from arbitrary disciplinary boundaries.
Standards? Of course. Measures of accountability? Of course. But standards and measure keyed not to school subjects but to sense-making ability.
Marion