Crisis as Curriculum? The Politics of Shifting Responsibility onto Children
In this blog, Sreehari Ravindranath, Director of Research and Impact at Dream a Dream, India, elucidates how the frequent creation of new curricula in response to crises, while often important, risks shifting responsibility to teachers and learners, while protecting the institutional architectures and inequalities that contributed to generating the problem.
Each new crisis appears to generate a familiar response in education policy: a new curriculum for children.
Across global contexts, climate change has been translated into climate literacy, social fragmentation into social and emotional learning, and technological disruption into digital skills and future readiness. These responses are often framed as evidence of adaptability. Education systems are seen as responsive and capable of preparing young people for an increasingly complex world.
However, beneath this framing lies a deeper and more troubling pattern. When societies confront a crisis, they rarely begin by interrogating the institutional arrangements, governance structures, and political economies that produced it, as they should. Instead, they expand the scope of what children are required to learn. Responsibility for navigating crises is displaced downward, toward those with the least structural agency, while the system itself remains largely unchanged.
This does not suggest that curricular responses are unnecessary. In many contexts, they play an important role in making emerging challenges visible in education systems. However, they often become the primary strategy rather than a complementary one. In doing so, they risk reframing structural crises as gaps in individual capabilities rather than as outcomes of institutional design. None of the crises currently shaping our world emerged because children lack competencies. They are the cumulative result of political choices, economic priorities, governance failures, and epistemic hierarchies that determine whose knowledge counts and whose interests are served (Reimers & Chung, 2016). Therefore, treating crises primarily as curricular challenges risks mislocating responsibility while protecting the institutional architectures that generated the problem.
This observation resonates strongly with insights from NORRAG’s Policy Insights The Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus at 10.Over the past decade, nexus approaches have emphasized that complex and protracted crises cannot be addressed through isolated interventions that focus solely on immediate needs while neglecting the systems and social conditions that sustain vulnerabilities. However, responses to crises in education often continue to privilege curricular solutions aimed at changing individual learners rather than addressing the institutional, governance, and relational conditions that shape educational experiences. In doing so, education systems risk reproducing the fragmentation that nexus approaches seek to overcome.
In practice, this pattern is increasingly visible in the Global South. In several state-led education reforms in India, for instance, social and emotional learning has been introduced as a standalone curriculum, positioned alongside other subjects. While this signals an important recognition of well-being within policy discourse, it has rarely been accompanied by corresponding changes in system conditions. Assessment regimes, administrative expectations, and pedagogical structures largely remain unchanged. Consequently, social and emotional learning is often treated as an additional subject to be delivered rather than as a systemic condition shaping relationships, teaching practices, and institutional culture. The system acknowledges well-being yet contains it within the familiar logic of the curriculum.
This dynamic extends beyond the single domain. Teachers are frequently expected to integrate new priorities, such as well-being, climate awareness, peacebuilding, and digital competence, into already dense instructional schedules, often without meaningful adjustments to their workload or professional support. What is framed as innovation at the policy level is experienced as an intensification at the classroom level. Thus, the burden of reform is redistributed to those operating closest to students, while the structures shaping their work remain unchanged.
The consequences are particularly visible in contexts affected by conflict, displacement, climate disruption, and persistent inequality. Education systems in such contexts are increasingly expected to contribute not only to learning outcomes but also to resilience, social cohesion, recovery, and peace. However, these ambitions cannot be achieved through the curriculum alone. They require investments in institutions, relationships, community trust, and broader ecosystems that support children and educators. A nexus perspective reminds us that sustainable change emerges when humanitarian, development, and peace objectives are addressed together rather than through separate interventions.
The limitations of curriculum-led reform are particularly evident in the assessment domain. In many systems, the introduction of new curricular priorities is accompanied by increasing pressure to measure their “impact.” In the case of social and emotional learning, this often translates into demands to quantify outcomes, not primarily to deepen the understanding of children’s experiences. The priority isto satisfy institutional imperatives such as demonstrating effectiveness to funders or validating policy investments. Assessment has become a mechanism of accountability rather than a tool for learning. In this process, a curriculum intended to broaden the purpose of education is constrained by the very logics it sought to challenge.
Systems thinking provides a useful lens for understanding the persistence of this pattern. Meadows (2008) identified curriculum as a relatively low-leverage intervention within complex systems. While changes in content can influence behavior, they rarely alter the deeper rules, incentives, and paradigms that shape the outcomes of a system. More recent systems-change frameworks similarly emphasize that durable transformation requires attention not only to policies and practices but also to relationships, power dynamics, resource flows, and underlying mental models (Kania, Kramer, & Senge, 2018). When crises are addressed primarily through the curriculum, institutions can signal responsiveness while avoiding the more politically and organisationally demanding work of structural change.
This dynamic is reinforced by the political economy of the reforms. Structural transformation often entails redistributing power, reconfiguring accountability, and challenging entrenched, institutional interests. These shifts carry political and organizational risks that curriculum reform does not. Governments can demonstrate action through visible curricular changes without undertaking complex alterations to governance systems. Donors and funding agencies can show measurable impact through programmatic interventions tied to the curriculum. In this sense, the curriculum becomes a convenient site of action: tangible, scalable, and measurable. However, this convenience often comes at the cost of deeper transformation.
If education systems are to respond meaningfully to contemporary crises, attention must shift from the curriculum to the broader conditions that shape learning.
The first step is to reconsider the purpose of the system. When education systems remain anchored in narrow metrics of success, new curricular priorities are absorbed into existing logics without altering the underlying goals. Expanding the purpose to include well-being, collective thriving, ecological responsibility, social cohesion, and democratic participation requires not only new content but also new ways of organizing systems and defining success (Schleicher, 2018).
Second, governance structures must be reconsidered. Systems organized primarily around compliance and hierarchical control can limit the participation and collective agency required for meaningful educational transformation. More participatory approaches that involve teachers, communities, and local actors in decision-making can create conditions for more contextually grounded and sustainable change (International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021).
Third, assessment and accountability systems must be reimagined. As long as educational success is defined by narrow, standardized indicators, the scope of teaching and learning remains constrained. Reorienting assessments toward multidimensional, contextually grounded approaches is essential for enabling meaningful change (OECD, 2020).
Fourth, the professional conditions of teachers must be strengthened. Teachers require not only individual expertise but also collaborative environments and professional autonomy to respond to complex challenges (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). Without addressing these conditions, new curricular expectations will continue to accumulate without being translated into meaningful transformation.
Fifth, resource flows and funding strategies must be aligned with long-term changes. Short-term, project-based approaches often prioritize visible outputs, such as curricula, while underinvesting in institutional capacity, relational work, and system learning. This is particularly important in nexus contexts, where sustainable outcomes depend on aligning humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding investments rather than treating them as separate agendas.
Finally, systems must confront the power and epistemic hierarchies. Decisions regarding education are shaped by whose knowledge is legitimized and whose voices are included in policymaking. Without addressing these dynamics, even well-intentioned reforms risk reproducing existing inequalities (UNESCO 2021). This challenge sits at the heart of many contemporary debates within the HDP Nexus, where questions of participation, ownership, and locally grounded knowledge continue to shape efforts toward sustainable peace and development in the region.
These insights have deeper implications. It is insufficient to critique “the system” as if it were an external entity. Systems are constituted by the decisions, assumptions, and practices of policymakers, donors, educators, researchers, and international actors. When responsibility is displaced onto children, it reflects the choices made by adults and institutions. If we argue that the system must change, we must recognize that we are part of the system.
Reframing the crisis in this way does not diminish the agency of young people, many of whom are already responding to global challenges in ways that systems have not. Rather, it challenges the structural tendency to substitute children’s learning with institutional responsibility. If crises indeed contain lessons, those lessons must begin with the systems that shape education itself.
Children do not need another curriculum to compensate for crises they did not create; education systems need the courage to transform themselves. For those working across humanitarian, development, and peacebuilding sectors, this means moving beyond responses that treat crises primarily as learning deficits to be addressed through additional competencies. It requires recognizing that education systems themselves are sites of transformation, where governance, relationships, accountability, and power must be reimagined alongside learning. Only then can education contribute not only to adaptation but also to the longer-term goals of resilience, equity, social cohesion, and sustainable peace.
References
Hargreaves, A., & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. Teachers College Press.
Kania, J., Kramer, M., and Senge, P. (2018). The Water of Systems Change. FSG.
Meadows, D. H. (2008). Thinking in Systems: A Primer. Chelsea Green Publishing.
OECD. (2020). Beyond Academic Learning: First Results from the Survey of Social and Emotional Skills. OECD Publishing.
Reimers, F. M., & Chung, C. K. (Eds.). (2016). Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-First Century: Educational Goals, Policies, and Curricula from Six Nations. Harvard Education Press.
Schleicher, A. (2018). World Class: How to Build a 21st-Century School System. OECD Publishing.
UNESCO. (2021). Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education. UNESCO.
Author Bio
Sreehari Ravindranath is a Global Majority researcher and systems-change practitioner working at the intersection of education, wellbeing, and equity. As the Director of Research and Impact at Dream a Dream (India), he leads initiatives that build evidence for social-emotional well-being and shift mindsets on the purpose of education toward thriving. He co-leads research–practice–Policy Collaborations (RPCs) with state governments to strengthen teacher agency, reform learning environments, and embed well-being into systemic priorities. His work focuses on how education systems can move beyond programmatic reform toward conditions that enable children, educators and communities to thrive.
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