Curriculum Studies in Relation to the Social Context of Education

Curriculum studies employs the social context of education to understand the tensions between the social sciences and the psychological, measurement sciences. Heretofore, in the earliest beginnings of the curriculum field, scientific management and psychological sciences predominated curriculum with a behavioral approach that categorized and structured hierarchies of student ability and aptitude, generated from a worldview that elevated measurement and testing as the ultimate determinant. Yet from the time George Herbert Mead's work influenced John Dewey, the recognition that students did not live in social vacuums, and therefore research on the child, society, and its institutions to illuminate societal issues and their impact on student academic work, existed in relative obscurity in educational research and was in a constant struggle for legitimacy.

The social context of education, ...