This trend is being sold as inevitable. It deserves more skepticism than it is getting.
We are told constantly that student engagement is the gateway to everything else. More engagement means deeper learning. More engagement means better retention. More engagement means students actually show up and participate. The logic seems airtight, and schools across the country are restructuring their curricula around it.
But the engagement-first movement is being presented as far more transformative than the evidence actually supports. It is a correction to a real problem that has metastasized into an overcorrection.
The real problem is genuine. Disconnected, passive classrooms do exist. Students sitting through monotonous lectures on topics they see no connection to are not thriving. That much is obvious and worth addressing. But the solution now being pushed in many curriculum conversations treats engagement as though it were synonymous with learning itself.
It is not.
We can engage students in activities, projects, and discussions that feel stimulating but teach very little. We can also bore students while they absorb significant material. Neither scenario is ideal, but they are not equally problematic.
The engagement-first framework obscures this distinction. It suggests that if we make curriculum exciting enough, the learning will follow naturally. This assumes that interest and understanding are the same thing. They are not.
Consider what happens when curriculum design prioritizes engagement above rigor. Teachers are incentivized to select topics and activities that generate enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is measurable. A student excited about a project is visibly engaged. A student wrestling quietly with a difficult concept is not. The former gets rewarded in engagement metrics. The latter becomes invisible.
This creates a perverse incentive structure. Over time, curricula may become increasingly oriented toward what excites rather than what matters. The two can overlap, but they do not have to.
There is also something paternalistic about the engagement obsession. It assumes students cannot be asked to do difficult, sometimes unpleasant intellectual work. It suggests that every lesson must be fun, relevant, and immediately interesting. But learning often requires the opposite. It requires delayed gratification, tolerance for confusion, and engagement with material that does not immediately spark joy.
Some of the most valuable intellectual work is not engaging in real time. Reading a dense philosophical text is not engaging. Practicing scales on an instrument is not engaging. Solving problem sets in calculus is not engaging. Yet these are the kinds of activities through which people develop serious competence.
The engagement-first movement has also become entangled with other curriculum trends that deserve separate scrutiny. When we conflate engagement with relevance and relevance with curricular content, we start selecting what to teach based on what connects to students' immediate lives. This is not wrong in itself, but it can crowd out knowledge and skills that matter precisely because they are not immediately relevant.
A better approach would acknowledge that engagement matters without treating it as the primary goal. Students should understand why they are learning something. Instruction should be clear and purposeful. Classrooms should not be mind-numbingly boring. But curriculum design should remain fundamentally oriented toward what is worth knowing and what students need to master.
The evidence from various curriculum discussions suggests that real learning often involves some frustration. It involves encountering ideas that challenge existing assumptions. It involves work that is not always pleasant.
This is not an argument for joyless education. It is an argument for refusing the false choice between engagement and rigor. We can design curricula that are both intellectually serious and well-taught. The engagement-first movement has made it harder to hold both of these values in mind simultaneously.
That deserves to be questioned.