Life Adjustment Curriculum

Life adjustment curriculum emphasized the role of the secondary school in preparing students not for further formal schooling, but for successful engagement in the life activities of adult society. A rejection of the theory of mental discipline and a critique of academic formalism informed the rational for life adjustment curriculum. The proposals of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education influenced the idea and practice of life adjustment curriculum. In some ways, life adjustment curriculum represented the culmination of several decades of progressive education theory and practice. Life adjustment education, however, was not a monolithic curriculum reform and is best understood in one respect as one man's career-long idea and in another respect as a diffuse, ill-defined, largely symbolic, and short-lived reform initiative.

In the ...