A Post About Stuff. And Learning.

One of the biggest challenges I face as a curriculum director is people's notions of what curriculum should be.  It's also one of my biggest frustrations, especially with all my nutty ideas about curriculum, teaching, and learning.
A lot of people think of curriculum as the stuff we teach kids and the order in which we teach the stuff - what a pronoun is, the causes of World War I, what the parts of a leaf are, what nationalism is, the names of the fifty states and their capitals, how to solve quadratic equations...stuff like that. And this is the notion that I constantly fight - that the important stuff of curriculum is those little bits of content stuff.
But it's not.  The important stuff is not that they know this stuff; it's what they can do with the stuff once they know about it. And what stuff should students know?  To me, the most important stuff that students should learn in order to do something with the stuff is the stuff that will help them learn how to learn and how to be learners.  Students shouldn't know all the stuff, no matter how much teachers love their stuff.  Teachers should use the right, carefully selected stuff to teach students to think on their own, so students can use any content stuff that's thrown their way to solve larger, relevant problems.  
Now, this is all stuff that we've known (and I've blogged about) for years - that the content stuff should be used as a vehicle to get students to do the stuff of learning.  It's the learning stuff they'll need after they leave our schools, not the content stuff (half of which they forget 6 months after they graduate, anyway.  Guess most of the stuff we teach isn't that useful, huh?). 
My question now is this:  Why the heck are we still focused on the content stuff rather than the real learning stuff?  Why are we still fighting over stupid stuff like where we should teach stuff, like counting money or listing all of the bones of the skeleton?  Why aren't we fighting over what's the best stuff to for students to do in classrooms to help kids learn rather than what stuff teachers need to teach at students?
I guess I'm just frustrated that the content stuff is still the main focus for curriculum for a lot of people.  School should be more about what stuff we teach.  It should be about how we are shaping our teaching to help shape learners....and that, to me, is the most important curriculum stuff.
But I guess it's my job to work with everyone to help fix this stuff, huh?