Secondary School Curriculum

The secondary school curriculum was a definitive priority in the emergence and development of the field of curriculum studies in the United States. From the opening decades of the 20th century into the 1970s, the task of generating a viable theory of secondary education for a democratic society occupied a central place in the work of curriculum scholars. Since the 1970s, the curriculum field largely has abandoned interest in the secondary school curriculum per se for the pursuit of a conception of theorizing that often defines curriculum all-inclusively, as the course of one's life experience. Subsequently, discourse about and policy making directed toward the secondary school curriculum became dominated by academic traditionalists, policy entrepreneurs, and politicians. In what follows, a synopsis of the history of ...