The daily train trip between my small hometown and the university city where I used to work has always provided me with lots of unexpected opportunities to receive feedback about students' perceptions of their education. In all those years I have overheard them talking about their studies, teachers, lectures, peers, but also about parties and village gossip. One conversation among three students of a beauty course in one of the community colleges struck me because of the sensible things they were saying about their curriculum. One of the girls was trying to read a chapter in a book about health for their assignment of that week. The book was meant for care and wellness courses, which was their course, taught by a young physician who – as they grumbled – “was not even handsome.” Apart from the appearance of their teacher, which might have been some compensation, their main complaint was that they did not have a clue about the use of this kind of knowledge for their future practice as beauticians.

The girls' complaint is very similar to the situation students in discipline-organized and teacher-centered academic curricula find themselves in. These kinds of curricula have many problems; among them are lack of horizontal and vertical integration of the subjects taught, an absence of apparent practical relevance to the students' perception of their future profession, a constant overload with too many courses, and an emphasis on the principles and practices of the separate academic disciplines instead of the practices of their future profession.