1. What Period of Life Does Schooling Primarily Contemplate as Its End?

This first question was meant to address the relationship of compulsory education to the workplace. At the time of the 26th Yearbook, there was as yet no federal law regulating the employment of children, and the compulsory education age-range varied from state to state. Conditions were such that approximately half the children in the United States were not in school by the time they reached the age of 16. Writers of the yearbook debated whether or not curricula should be designed to prepare students for work or to provide real experiences that were significant in their own right and not just as preparation for work and adult living.

The vast changes in contemporary life since the 1920s demand that this question be looked at anew. Children are in school longer than they were then; jobs come in and out of existence more quickly and require skills that cannot reasonably be taught in 8 or 12 years of school. Community colleges, proprietary schools, and union-sponsored trade schools routinely enroll students in their [Page 954]30s and 40s. Universities sponsor programs for adults in lifelong learning institutes that primarily promote learning in the humanities for adults of any age. If one includes all the educational organizations offering curricula, the answer must be that schooling does not, these days, contemplate any period of life as its end.

In the early 1800s, Free School Societies in New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other cities established schools for the children of working people in basic literacy and arithmetic. The tax-supported common school movement, as it grew through the 19th century continued to aim at producing a literate and civil workforce. This aim continued to be central to public schooling into the 1920s and on into the present day. Many important voices throughout the 20th century decried this narrow utilitarian view of public education, but by and large, Americans were content with their schools as long as young people were prepared for good jobs and behaved with a modicum of civility. Yet the popularity of the contemporary adult education programs in the humanities throughout the United States challenges us to think about this question in a very different light. Is there an age, one might ask, at which education in the humanities is not of paramount importance?

Elliot Eisner highlights two characteristics of humanistic studies that support an understanding of this question. The humanities, he says, shed light on what it means to be a human being and sharpen one's ability to make good judgments. Eisner shows how insight into patterns of human feeling flow out of appreciation of and work in art, music, and dance; how studies of literature and drama enhance one's sense of self and awareness of others; and how studies of history and even of science from the perspective of its historical development enable us to realize the underlying distinction between nature and culture. In addition to work like Eisner's, there is a growing body of research in neurobiology and anthropology that shows deep connections between education in the arts and emotional and cognitive development.

It is clear, then, that schooling that aims narrowly at job preparation and a modicum of civility is not adequate to the needs of our time. Humanities education, as broadly conceived by the authors of the recently published 107th Yearbook of the NSSE, should be a prominent focus of all school curricula. When schooling works effectively to achieve humanities education, there is no period of life at which it should end. Whether such a notion of schooling should be supported by taxes is a matter for voters to decide.

2. How Can the Curriculum Prepare for Effective Participation in Adult Life?

The prevalent assumption in public discourse on education in the United States is that preschool is preparation for kindergarten, kindergarten is preparation for first grade, elementary school is preparation for high school, high school is preparation for college, and college is preparation for a job. Also, at each stage, the work of the student is understood as a preparation for a test. The assumption has always been problematic in the field of curriculum studies.

One way to get beneath the surface of this problem is to consider the basic principles of pragmatism as enunciated by Charles Sanders Peirce that the meaning of things is to be found in their consequences. Peirce held that it is impossible for humans to have ideas about things unless they can conceive of the sensible effects of those things. If Peirce was correct, curricula are best understood in terms of their effects, their practical results. On this view, to consider curricula solely in terms of preparing for adult life would be to distort their meaning. On the other hand, to consider curricula only in terms of the present moment is to rob it of its complexity. Curricula resonate with effects; some intended, some anticipated, some hoped for, some neglected, some unnoticed. The resonance of a curriculumthat is, its intended and unintended effectsrequires careful attention from curriculum designers.

A dramatic example of this comes from outside the United States. On March 24, 1980, the entire country of Nicaragua became one large school. Nicaragua had just successfully driven out the dictator, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, and the Sandanistas understood their first task to be to making the people of Nicaragua literate. Students from high schools and colleges in and around Managua, the capitol city, were recruited to become brigadistas, or literacy volunteers. They were trained to become teachers of reading, writing, and basic mathematics, and from March until [Page 955]September they went into the countryside to teach. In 1979, a census had revealed that over 50% of Nicaraguans were illiterate, and in rural areas, the rate was 75%.

The approach that the brigadistas took was designed to establish dialogue with illiterate Nicaraguans. Photographs were shown and served as the basis for dialogue about specific political and economic problems that they faced. These photographs were set in a reading primer, and each photograph, along with discussion questions, was the basis of dialogue about the specific situation that this or that group of Nicaraguans faced. In the primer, each photograph and discussion was followed by a lesson in constructing sentences related to the discussion. The mathematics book was titled Mathematics and Economic Reconstruction: One Single Operation. The instruction was dialogical, deliberately political, and revolutionary following the work of Paulo Freire. Learning was practiced as a shared responsibility among learners and teachers.

The resonance of this curriculum was impressive. From March to September of 1980, 406,000 illiterate Nicaraguans were taught basic reading and writing skills by this massive army of young people. The testimony of many of the young people who participated in this campaign demonstrated a growth in awareness on their part of the social and political situation in the country, and the illiteracy rate was reduced from 30% to 6% in the cities and from 75% to 21% in rural areas. The meaning of this curriculum was situated in its cultural and social context. There are many other examples, but any curriculum with such resonance prepares learners for effective participation in adult life.

The Nicaraguan Literacy Campaign did not focus on preparation for adult life. Rather, it engaged young people and adults in a shared venture in literacy and democracy. The experiment demonstrates the possibility of creating resonant curriculum that is both preparation for and participation in adult life.

3. Are Curriculum-Makers of the Schools Obliged to Formulate a Point of View Concerning the Merits or Deficiencies of American Civilization?

To understand this question, it is helpful to consider two important terms: cultural hegemony and reification. Cultural hegemony refers to a process whereby the dominant view of a culture renders alternative views of the culture irrelevant or meaningless. Reification refers to the process of rendering abstractions into fixed physical objects. Normally, curriculum designs, as syntheses of culture, unquestioningly reflect the hegemonic point of view. By not explicitly formulating their point of view, these designers reify their curricula. The hegemonic view of curriculum design at the time of the 26th Yearbook was the technical rationalism exemplified by the work of Henry Harap, the most widely used curriculum technician of the period. The yearbook describes several exceptions to this such as the curricula of the Lincoln School at the Teachers College of Columbia University and the Francis Parker School in Chicago, yet the work of Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, David Snedden, and Henry Harap dominated the field.

Some of the editors of the yearbook decried this conservative dominance of the 1920s and advocated that curriculum workers involve textbook publishers in a process that would engage the public in developing a more critical stance towards society. Harold Rugg went further, and published a 14-volume textbook series in social studies grounded on these principles. In the 1930s, George Counts raised a critical question in Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order? and Carter Woodson condemned the Manichaean division of U.S. culture between Whites and Blacks in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, demanding a curriculum that credited Black Americans with the significant contributions they had made to U.S. life.

A significant curriculum project based on a well-formulated point of view about the merits and deficiencies of U.S. culture is to be found in the Progressive Education Association's Eight Year Study. The study advocated participation of individual schools, teachers, and students in the development of the curriculum as a method of evaluation of the surrounding society and culture.

Curriculum theorists such as Michael Apple and Landon Beyer have, since the 1980s, offered a more radical critique of society that decries the hegemony of unbridled capitalism in the culture and in the curriculum of the schools. The work of Patricia Holland and Noreen Garman is grounded in trusting the human imagination in both traditional and [Page 956]critical curriculum practice and serves as a useful complement to these theorists.

Curriculum workers ordinarily develop curriculum without articulating a point of view about the merits and deficiencies of U.S. culture. When such a point of view is well articulated and deeply held, curriculum becomes far more dynamic, interactive, and meaningful.

4. Should the School Be Regarded as a Conscious Agency for Social Improvement?

One way to approach this question is to examine the text that has served as a paradigm for curriculum development since the late 1940sthat is, the Tyler Rationale. Ralph Tyler published Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction in 1949 while he was a professor at the University of Chicago. It can be argued that this slim volume has been the most significant text in the field of curriculum ever since.

Tyler held that in order to develop a proper curriculum four questions need to be answered: (1) What are the school's educational purposes? (2) What educational experiences will likely attain these purposes? (3) How can the educational experiences be properly organized? (4) How can the curriculum be evaluated? Curriculum theorists such as George Posner and Landon Beyer have pointed out that the Tyler Rationale reduces the first question about educational purposes to a procedural and technical matter, whereas they view the question of educational purposes as definitive. In stating this, Posner, Beyer, and others hold that curriculum designers, before they proceed with their design, must determine whose interests are to be served by the curriculum. In this way, these critical theorists stake their claim that curriculum should be regarded as a conscious agency for social improvement.

George Counts in the 1930s and 1940s and Theodore Brameld in the 1950s and 1960s promoted similar views dedicated to the idea that the school must be an agent of social change, forming a school of thought called social reconstructionism. Criticism of these views center on two questions: Can schools be instruments of social change? And ought schools be instruments of social change?

Whether or not it is possible for schools to be instruments of social change is a question that has puzzled educators and social thinkers for years. After all, adults are responsible for social change, and children get socialized into the adult world, not the other way around. Brameld's response to this question was that the curriculum should be owned and controlled by teachers, parents, and students, and no one else. His confidence in the wisdom and power of the common person was unbounded, and some say utopian.

Whether or not the schools ought to be instruments of social change is another matter. Historically, schools were created to pass on the culture to the next generation and have served a conservative function in the culture, which begs the question of what is to be conserved in a fundamentally democratic society. The answer of many contemporary curriculum thinkers such as George Wood, Deborah Meier, Theodore Sizer, and the authors of Facing History and Ourselves is clear. Surely it is not the function of the U.S. schools to conserve authoritarianism and mindless conformity. Rather, it seems clear that schools ought to conserve the common sense of Thomas Paine, the courage of George Washington, the sense of justice of Martin Luther King, the temperateness of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural address, and the persistence of Susan B. Anthony. A curriculum that conserves these elements would also be a curriculum that serves as an instrument of social change.

5. How Shall the Content of the Curriculum Be Conceived and Stated?

In their irreplaceable book Curriculum Books: The First Hundred Years, William Schubert and his colleagues discuss the construction of the 26th Yearbook and the struggle of the editorial board to arrive at a consensus statement about the content of the curriculum in the United States. Schubert and his colleagues provide a useful framework for understanding why such a consensus was not achieved, and how one might look coherently at this question. Schubert said that there were three distinct visions of curriculum content among the members of the editorial board: (1) the intellectual traditionalists, such as William Bagley; (2) the social behaviorists, such as Franklin Bobbitt; and (3) the experientialists, such as William Heard Kilpatrick. It is fitting to [Page 957]look at the yearbook in this way, for it was not intended to be a set of principles to be blindly followed, but as Harold Rugg said in the introduction to the second part of the yearbook, The Foundations of Curriculum Making, the common statement was to be a “bone of contention to be chewed upon, and not a platform to stand upon” (p. 8).

Intellectual traditionalists, who followed what was called a subject-organized curriculum, viewed the curriculum as a set of separate subjects derived from the cultural past. These professionals were not pedants. They were alert to the dangers of attempting to cover too much material and insisting upon rote memorization of facts. They stressed, for example, in the teaching of botany in a manner that demonstrated how botanists work. They understood that separate subjects could be correlated so that students would be provided opportunities to grasp connections among the subjects they studied. There is little evidence that their ideas about memorization or the correlation of subjects were put into immediate practice. However, in the 1930s, the Eight Year Study experimented with correlating subjects with a broad fields approach to curriculum grounded in problem solving. Similarly, in the 1960s, the social science curriculum Man: A Course of Study blended the biological and social sciences into one curriculum, and J. Lloyd Trump experimented with flexible modular scheduling, an approach to innovative block scheduling for the purpose of interdisciplinary studies, an approach that continues to this day. A contemporary approach to curriculum integration may be found in the work of James Beane.

The experientialists, who were called child centered, viewed curriculum from the point of view of the students' experience of school. These thinkers followed John Dewey's idea that all education begins with the experience and the interests of the child and attempted to build curriculum as a process of guiding students in the reconstruction of their experience towards responsible participation in adult and democratic life. The debate between the intellectual traditionalists and the experiential-ists has been renewed in each decade since the 1920s, most recently in a public conversation on the Internet between the historian Diane Ravitch and the progressive educator Debbie Meier. An attempt to heal this gap was introduced in the 1960s by Arthur King and John Brownell in which they conceived the curriculum as a community of discourse among and between the disciplines of knowledge. Professional scientists, mathematicians, artists, musicians, linguists, and writers participated in this community of discourse along with administrators, teachers, parents, and students. All participants, they said, can learn and contribute in their own way to the ongoing inquiry and discourse.

The social behaviorists viewed curriculum primarily as an instrument of administration and a technique for the control of student learning. They tended to draw their ideas of curriculum content from surveys about the content of adult life at work, at home, and in leisure time. Based on these surveys, social behaviorists built sets of goals and objectives, or more recently standards and benchmarks, for the curriculum. This view conceived curriculum work primarily as a technical process that was less concerned with school subjects or student experience than it was with measurable outcomes. Of the three visions, the social behaviorist view has dominated curriculum practice over the years, especially in the recent period of the standards movement. The challenge for curriculum studies today is to keep the other two visions in play so the field can maintain itself, as Rugg described, a bone of contention to be chewed upon.

6. What is the Place and Function of Subject Matter in the Educative Process?

There are, in general, three functions of subject matter in the process of education, which, working together, serve the interests both of individual students and the society. First, subject matter provides children and youth with a store of common knowledge and wisdom. Common knowledge includes the geographic, historical, civic, and literary understandings that provide young persons with a sense of identification with a civilizational past and a cultural presenta sense of citizenship in one's nation and the global community.

Second, subject matter provides a depth of understanding of oneself in the world, a depth of understanding of what it means to be a human person within the story of the universe, the story of [Page 958]life, the story of human history, human knowledge, and the symbols that enable this story to keep moving forward. The physical and life sciences provide this depth of understanding, along with the symbol systems of mathematics, language arts, and the languages of other peoples.

Third, subject matter stimulates the imagination, the inquiring consciousness, and the critical mind that enables students to imagine the real possibilities in the present moment, to critically examine the civilizational past and the cultural present, to make music, to dance, and engage in the arts. Music, art, and physical education are the primary subjects that deal with imaginal learning, and yet the imagination feeds the other two areas of the curriculum as well, and all three of these areas are fundamentally and dynamically connected.

Curriculum theorists all hold the importance of subject matter in the curriculum. There are, however, many disagreements within the field of curriculum studies about the role and function of subject matter. For example, Philip Phenix described the role of subject matter in curriculum emphasizing the integration of the subjects into the whole person and with an openness to ultimate meaning. Other curriculum inquirers foreground one or another of the three functions.

With regard to the first function of subject matter, E. D. Hirsch puts it in the foreground, as the core of common knowledge. Hirsch holds that the critical thinking implicit in the third role of subject matter requires basic understandings of the facts contained in those subjects.

Maria Montessori also foregrounds the first function of subject matter by emphasizing the story of the universe, the story of life, and the needs of humans for food, clothing, shelter, security, transportation, and spirituality as the basis of the education of children from age six to age nine. This, she said, would provide children with a sense of their role in the ongoing story of life.

The second function, depth of understanding of self in the world was a basic aim of the curriculum reform movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jerome Bruner taught that children can participate in the community of inquirers that make up school subjects, and as they grow in age, they should follow a spiral curriculum that draws them deeper and deeper into the inquiry. Joseph Schwab, whose work is echoed in many respects by the work of Theodore Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools, held that it is preferable to know a few subjects in depth than many subjects superficially. Schwab understood the teacher as the bridge between the formal curriculum and the curriculum as students engage with it. Using the arts of the eclectic, teachers choose from the fund of their knowledge of subject matter and their knowledge of the practice of teaching to apply subject matter to the concrete situation of the classroom.

A useful place to go to understand the foregrounding of imagination and critical intelligence is the Discipline Based Arts Education program (DBAE) sponsored by the J. Paul Getty Foundation, which integrates the visual, musical and performing arts through studio and performance work as well as a study of history, aesthetics, and criticism. This approach to subject matter is to be found also in the work of Elliot Eisner, Maxine Greene, and William Pinar.

7. What Portion of Education Should Be Classified as “General” and What Portion as “Specialized” or “Vocational” or Purely “Optional”?

Benedict de Spinoza was a lens grinder, a craftsman, an artist, and one of the greatest European philosophers of the 17th century. It is that ideal synthesis of a good solid trade and a highly intellectual education that is sought in answering this question. Rarely does formal education achieve such integration, for the relationship between general education and vocational education has never reached a settled understanding in the United States. Traditional and progressive curriculum thinkers, though they disagree on its nature, tend to consider a good general education as an adequate preparation for work in the world, or for further professional or vocational studies. In 1917, a deep divide between general and vocational education was struck by the Smith-Hughes Act, which set vocational education and general education on entirely different tracks.

Charles Prosser, one of the foremost advocates of Smith-Hughes, believed, along with Edward Thorndike, that all learning was specific and segregated from other learning. Transfer of training, in their view, did not exist. In vocational education, therefore, Prosser advocated a curriculum in which [Page 959]the activities of students mimicked the activities of workers in specific fields as closely as possible. Smith-Hughes established vocational and technical education districts to be separate from regular school districts, virtually separating vocational and general education in the United States. In some ways the junior college became an extension of this system of schooling. Smith-Hughes mandated that if a student received federal funds for vocational education, 50% of his or her class time would be devoted directly to the training he or she needed for the job. The other 50% would be devoted to support courses and general education.

W. W. Charters said that the curricula for vocational education should be developed through functional or job analysis. Such analysis included personality profiles for specific trades. Carpenters, for instance, according to Charters, did not need to be as accurate or as rapid as machinists, but carpentry required more neatness than machinists' work. All the activities of workers in fields as varied as potters and poultry workers were to be analyzed, and these activities were to be the basis for implementing Smith-Hughes.

The curriculum reform movement of the 1950s and 1960s generally ignored dealing with this separation. In the 1980s, the cognitive psychologist Lauren Resnick claimed that paying attention to the differences between school learning and learning in the workplace could support the development of a curriculum that reflects the complexity of contemporary life. School learning, she said, focuses on individual work and individual achievement, whereas learning in the workplace demands shared understandings and communications to achieve shared purposes. School work, she said, emphasizes pure thought, whereas workplaces are structured by the requirements of manipulating the available tools and symbols necessary to accomplish concrete tasks. Resnick, noting that schools to help students become competent out-of-school learners, advised that the building of curricula that pay attention to the kinds of thinking required outside school could simultaneously serve the interests of general and vocational education.

Resnick became a member of the board of the Secretary of Labor's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS), which in 1991, published a report that did not address the structural issues of vocational education, but did look seriously at the conceptual divide between vocational and general education curricula. SCANS developed a conception of a general education that would better prepare students for the workforce. SCANS, however, maintained the method of Job Analysis initiated by Charters, and from the perspective of curriculum traditionalists, treated general education as little more than instrumental of vocational education. From the standpoint of progressives, SCANS gives over too much of the curriculum to the values and direction of the business community. The question of the relationship between general and vocational education remains, in practice, unanswered.

8. Is the Curriculum to Be Made in Advance?

The question of whether the curriculum should be made in advance has played a central role in the field of curriculum studies. It also seems to be a preoccupation of teachers in schools. School administrators, however, tend to think the question is settled: Of course, the curriculum is to be made in advance, how else could instruction be delivered? The separation of curriculum from teaching that is instantiated in that kind of thinking and in the practices of school district offices, state legislatures, and the U.S. Office of Education must be addressed to answer this question.

Between the census of 1890 and the census of 1910 the majority of the U.S. population moved from the countryside to the city. During that period, ferment about what was to be taught in schools heightened. Immigration, industrialization, and urbanization were bound to influence questions of what students in elementary and secondary schools need to know and how that knowledge would influence them in adult life. In sum, the question of Herbert Spencer, “What knowledge is of most worth?” reformulated in 1993 by Michael Apple as “Whose knowledge is of most worth?” had to be answered.

The National Education Association (NEA) played a major role in effecting an answer to Spencer's question. In 1876, the NEA, largely under the influence of William Torrey Harris, prepared the report, “A Course of Study from Primary School to University,” and in 1893, the NEA sponsored The Committee of Ten, which was given the [Page 960]task of establishing a secondary school curriculum. Both of these efforts focused primarily on the subject areas that students would need for adult life, or for college or university.

In 1918, Franklin Bobbitt published The Curriculum, the first book totally dedicated to the making of a school curriculum. He and his associate W. W. Charters, for all practical purposes, created the field of curriculum development as an activity of technical design. Their principles were taken from the field of industrial management as developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and prescribed a process of activity analysis for the development of educational objectives, and activities. Thus, the curriculum developer, in a process separated in time and place from the classroom, would design educational objectives and activities based on the observed activities of competent adults in science, industry, family life, and labor. The teacher's task then was to apply the curriculum through instruction.

Progressive educators during the growing industrial period disagreed with both the NEA's subject matter emphasis and the technical-rational approach of Bobbitt and Charters. Harold Rugg and Anne Schumacher rejected both for their relative inattention to the individual child. John Dewey rejected them for their inattention to what he would call the educational situationthat is the meeting in a moment or range of moments between a prepared and inquiring teacher and a classroom of children, each with his or her own personal history and experience. Dewey's work demonstrated that the dispute between the progressives and the others was about authority. The academic traditionalists and the technical rationalists both believed in the authority of the distant expert, whereas Dewey thought authority in the classroom resided in the student's natural need to reconstruct his or her experience in an actual situation with an actual knowledgeable, inquiring, responsible adult called a teacher.

Currently, there are traditionalists, such as Diane Ravitch, and followers of Mortimer Adler's Paideia Proposal or E. D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge who uphold the belief in a preplanned subject matter-based curriculum. Others, such as Grant Wiggins, Roger and David Johnson, Robert Marzano, and the U.S. Office of Education more closely follow the line of thought begun by Bobbitt and Charters. Progressives such as Deborah Meier, Michael Apple, Elliot Eisner, and Parker Palmer have inherited the progressive view, emphasizing the notion of situated learning.

In the new century, the technical approach of Marzano and others dominates curriculum practice. Some districts have closed down their curriculum departments, but maintain strong commitments to the development and selection of standardized tests that are aligned with national, state, and local standards. Thus, curriculum development is, in practice, largely a matter of selecting textbooks that support improvement in standardized test scores. This practice creates tensions between teachers and school administrators, for it is clear that, in practice, the knowledge of the experts behind the standards, the tests, and the textbooks is held to be of greater worth than the practical insights of teachers in actual educational situations.

9. To What Extent is the Organization of the Subject Matter a Matter of Pupil-Thinking and Construction of, or Planning by, the Professional Curriculum Maker as a Result of Experimentation?

Recent debates about U.S. education have tended to exaggerate the differences among the three visions of curriculum described in the answer to question five. Diane Ravitch and E. D. Hirsch, for example, portray a stark divide between progressives such as John Dewey and perennialists such as William Bagley. Similarly, some progressives treat social efficiency curricularists as if they did not care about general education. Though there were deep differences among these persons' visions of curriculum, it must be remembered that Dewey and Boyd Bode affirmed the value of traditional subject matter, Bagley honored the experiences of children as inherent to the educative process, and Franklin Bobbitt, particularly later in life, was committed to general and humanistic education.

When one examines the 26th Yearbook, therefore, one finds a general commitment among the editors to an ongoing process of comprehensive curriculum study on the part of curriculum committees. These committees would include subject matter specialists, teachers, and other specialists who would be willing and able to pay careful [Page 961]attention to the experiences of students as they work their way through the curriculum. In that sense, the editors advocated experimentation, or what later became known as action research or more currently, site-based staff development.

The recent winner-take-all debates about the public school have not served the curriculum field well, and the result has been the reduction of curriculum to a business-efficiency model that focuses almost entirely on technical matters and the development of standardized tests in the name of science. If the curriculum field were to reestablish the dialectic among the three visions of curriculum described in the yearbook, the place of the teacher in the process of curriculum making would be enlarged, the participation of university faculty and subject area specialists would become essential, and the notion of science utilized in the federal legislation No Child Left Behind would expand to include history, the humanities, ethnographic research, and philosophical analysis.

The conversation required to restore and renew curriculum practice would accept the reality of opposed principles, opposed ideas, and opposed practices as normal. Then, through experimentation and conversation, curriculum committees could compare principles, practices, and results not merely to show one to be better than another, but to find the benefits and deficits of each and all. Trust in the experience, the good will, and the intelligence of all those engaged in the work has the potential to realize the notion of Harold Rugg that opposing curriculum ideas provide opportunity for discourse and discussion. What is at stake here is the very idea that curriculum is always grounded in the kinds of choices educators make as they attempt to answer the unanswerable question: “What knowledge is of most worth?”

10. From the Point of View of the Educator, When Has “Learning” Taken Place?

Question 10 asks about assessment and evaluation, terms about which there is some lack of clarity. Assessment generally is taken to mean the process of obtaining, interpreting, and documenting information about student learning. So assessment includes pretesting, posttesting, observing student behavior, interviewing teachers and students, and reviewing teachers' assignments and student work including exhibitions, portfolios, presentations, tests, and written work, sometimes with the guidance of a scoring rubric. Evaluation, on the other hand, is making the judgment about what students have learned based upon the evidence gathered in the assessment process.

Assessment and evaluation take place on two levels: evaluation of what students have learned and the evaluation of the curriculum and instruction that has guided their learning. The way one goes about evaluating students or curriculum depends upon the purpose of the evaluation and the use to which the information and the judgment shall be put. In 1967, Michael Scriven made an important distinction between formative and sum-mative evaluation. The purpose of formative evaluation is to improve current practices and processes in classrooms and schools. The purpose of summative evaluation is to make judgments about the worth of the results of those practices and processes in order to improve student learning and the curriculum for the future.

Scriven made another significant contribution, which has been elaborated by Robert Stake through what they have called goal-free or responsive evaluation. In this approach, the evaluator does not attend to the goals and purposes of the curriculum, but uses qualitative methods such as close observations, in-depth interviews, and grounded theory in order to discern the kinds of learning that occur quite apart from the intentions of the curriculum makers.

Elliot Eisner has described a form of evaluation called educational connoisseurship. This practice is not unlike Scriven's goal-free evaluation and has many similarities with Joseph Schwab's arts of the eclectic. The educational connoisseur observes the student, the classroom, or the curriculum as a drama critic might observe a play. Noting the context of the object being evaluated, the connoisseur draws upon all the elements in the setting and in the wider world, and makes a holistic judgment of their worth.

Judgments about whether learning has taken place, then, are never definitive. Rather, they are inferences based on data that have been gathered in a variety of ways from a variety of sources for the purpose of improving curricula and student learning. For this reason, using scores on standardized [Page 962]tests to judge the knowledge of a student or the worth of a curriculum must be complemented with multiple sources of data including data from student work on assignments and the professional judgment of classroom teachers so that these pieces of information can be used to improve student learning and curricula.

11. To What Extent Should Traits Be Learned in Their “Natural” Setting?

This question is best understood in the context of the curriculum movement called social efficiency. A trait is a habitual way of relating to one's world and to other persons. It is what some educators today call a disposition. David Snedden and his student Charles Prosser held that a person's character is a sum total of his or her traits. On this basis, Franklin Bobbitt and W. W. Charters developed the method of activity or job analysis, which observed and analyzed the behavior of adults and developed curricula that would as closely as possible have students mimic those behaviors in school. Philip Jackson has called this approach to curriculum mimetic teaching. Mimetic teaching has manifested itself over the years in various curricula such as vocational education, education for democracy, life-adjustment education, and character education.

The belief that a person's character is the sum total of his or her traits is peculiarly behaviorist in origin and contrasts with the traditionalists' understanding of character as intellectual and spiritual, as well as the progressives' understanding of character as active, dynamic, and inquiring. Mimetic curricula, then, are very useful, but when used to the exclusion of traditional and progressive curricula they are inadequate to the task of preparing the young to live in an increasingly complex world. Moreover, the tendency of social efficiency educators to exclude some studies, such as Latin or philosophy or literature from the curriculum on the grounds that they are not efficient or useful is short-sighted.

There are at least three alternative approaches to curriculum for character education that differ from and may complement the learning of traits from their natural setting. The first of these is generally called character education such as The Children's Morality Code published in 1917 by William Hutchins. This approach provided rules for conduct for children aimed at developing habits of self-control, good hygiene, good workmanship, truth telling, and teamwork. Prominent in this approach is the contemporary program Character Counts, which is based on what are called six pillars of character: trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship.

The second approach focuses on decision making and the facing of moral dilemmas. Merrill Harmin, Louis Raths, and Sydney Simon pioneered this approach in the 1960s with their work on values clarification, which used exercises to help students clarify their values and change their behavior. In a slightly different way, Lawrence Kohlberg worked on a developmental approach to moral reasoning by presenting children with moral dilemmas to think through and solve.

A third approach has been explored by Kevin Ryan and Karen Bohlin and concerns itself with virtue ethics and what may be called communities of character. Drawing on a range of resources, this approach aims at developing shared visions, values, and virtues in a school community.

The education of character has long been of central importance in the U.S. curriculum and remains a major challenge to contemporary education. The narrow focus on selecting educational activities that match desirable traits to their natural settings as captured from adult life cannot meet that challenge. When curriculum workers, including teachers, devise simulations; tell stories; practice improvisations; study and engage students in discussions of art, science, mathematics, music, and literature; and implement service learning projects, they communicate to students that the moral life is central to human living. To achieve remembrance of that seriousness in students' later awareness and practice is a central goal of curriculum.

13. To What Degree is the Concept of “Minimal Essentials” to Be Used in Curriculum Construction?

At the turn of the 20th century there was much ferment between teachers and curriculum experts, most of whom were specialists in content areas. As a result, the National Education Association formed a Committee on the Economy of Time (COET). This committee was established to explore wastes of time and potential savings of time in the school curriculum. Through analyzing and quantifying the activities of adults, the [Page 964]committee attempted to pare down the elementary school curriculum to include only those learnings that were of most social utility. This was a watershed moment in the history of the U.S. elementary school curriculum in that curriculum was no longer left in the hands of subject matter specialists, but was to be constructed by processes educators considered to be scientific.

From 1911 to 1915, COET published four yearbooks for the NSSE concerning what the editors called the minimum essentials. The authors believed that the curriculum from elementary school through college could be reduced from 16 to 14 years. The 14th Yearbook is a classic in the tradition of social efficiency in curriculum studies. The report claimed that the greatest waste in those 16 years was to be found in the elementary school curriculum, which they wanted to reduce from 8 to 6 years. The essential knowledge, habits, ideals, and attitudes for individual and social needs, they said, could be learned in that amount of time.

The authors and editors settled on a two-stage process for defining these minimum essentials. In the first stage, curricularists needed to decide which subjects and which parts of subjects were both comprehensible and socially useful for the students at any given level. In the second stage, they developed criteria for excluding curriculum material. To exclude material, its social utility needed to be weighed against the time and effort it took for a majority of students to learn it. When the committee finished its work, the members realized that their results were tentative and incomplete. So the question of the place of minimum essentials was still alive at the time of the 26th Yearbook.

In the 1940s, it was widely thought that Ralph Tyler had resolved the question by including the needs of society, the needs of learners, and the demands of subject area specialists as the basis for curriculum construction. But actually, what Tyler did was bring to light that the rationale for minimum essentials was not so much science as it was philosophy. In the 1950s, academic traditionalists such as Arthur Bestor and progressive thinkers such as Jerome Bruner attempted to reemphasize the importance of subject matter and the disciplines of knowledge in curriculum building. In the late 1960s and 1970s, a more child-centered approach was championed by educators such as Herbert Kohl and John Holt.

The standards movement, which officially began in 1983, has, ironically, much in common with the advocates of minimum essentials and the work of both Bestor and Bruner. Yet this movement led to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The assessment approach mandated by NCLB has vitiated any connection the standards movement may have had with the likes of Bestor and Bruner. An almost universal rejection by teachers of current state and local testing practices has garnered responses from curricularists such as Linda McNeil who advocate the collaboration of students and teachers in the cocreation of curriculum.

One promising development in this debate has been a growth in scholarly interest in teacher education. One such effort began in 1991 with the Holmes Partnership, which is a consortium of 80 schools and colleges of education committed to academic improvement of teacher education programs. The Holmes Partnership schools affirm the need for high academic standards in colleges of education, which, in addition to requiring broad and rich liberal education, require teacher candidates to achieve a degree in an academic discipline in addition to their professional education degree. Teachers with such strong academic backgrounds ought to be trusted to develop curriculum at the schools in which they teach. Progressive educator Deborah Meier affirms such an approach to curriculum improvement, and it has been proven effective in the education miracle that has occurred in Finland, where colleges of education are the most competitive colleges in the universities.

14. What Should Be the Form and Organization of the Curriculum?

The form and organization of the curriculum is in every case a matter of choice, the product of a decision. The curriculum is in essence a selection of culture and politics, and the selection that is made depends upon the cultural and political interests of the curriculum designers.

Herbert Kliebard has suggested that there are three major tendencies among curriculum designers that may be expressed in terms of three metaphors: (1) the metaphor of production, (2) the metaphor of growth, and (3) the metaphor of travel.

The metaphor of production has dominated curriculum development since the 1920s beginning [Page 965]with the scientific rationalist approach of Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, and David Snedden and continued through the 20th century culminating in No Child Left Behind. The form of curricula developed under this metaphor is fundamentally industrial. Curriculum designers delineate the specifications of the results they want to achieve and state them in terms of goals and objectives or standards and benchmarks. They then set out to design and organize materials and procedures in such a way that teachers can deliver instruction in a manner and pace that will produce the desired results. These results are often expressed in terms of grades, grade-point averages, or standardized test scores. The approach is so common that in ordinary conversation one hears graduates of particular schools referred to as products of those schools. The major interest here is the control of the process and the product of the curriculum.

The metaphor of growth is at least as ancient as civilization itself, for it represents the inevitable resistance to the rules and regulations imposed by civilization. It was the basis of the educational classic Emile, of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi provided a major impetus to this way of thinking about curriculum by focusing on the inner capacities of the individual child and permitting children to grow first as they observe and interact with the world around them and only later through language, mathematics, and other subjects that would broaden their horizons into personal and social maturity. Friedrich Froebel and, later, Maria Montessori expanded upon Pestalozzi's work through developing elaborate sets of materials and placing them in what Montessori called a prepared environment in which the child naturally grew with the support of a carefully observant, tender, and relatively unobtrusive teacher. Contemporary followers of Jean Piaget, called constructivists, have also inherited this tradition. Eleanor Duckworth and Eileen Knight have made significant curricular contributions in science and mathematics from this perspective. The major interest in this case is the growth of the individual child.

The metaphor of travel has much in common with the metaphor of growth, but it moves beyond the growth of the individual child to the broadening of the child's horizons into the world of public responsibility. The content of the curriculum that is, reading, writing, mathematics, science, social studies, fine arts, and humanitiesare taken as seriously as they are under the earlier two metaphors, but all these studies are understood in terms of how they may be used to engage and in some cases, transform the world. Perhaps the best exemplar of the travel metaphor was Boyd Bode. A progressive, Bode insisted on grounding curriculum on social and public philosophy and understood the subject matters of the curriculum as instruments to inspire students to engage in democracy as a way of life. The major interest served by the metaphor of travel is the emancipation of society, and some curricularists such as George Counts and, later, Michael Apple understood the school primarily as a force to achieve justice in U.S. society and culture. The philosopher Maxine Greene emphasized the notion that the transformation of the individual consciousness of students leads directly to the transformation of society.

Because curricula are grounded in choice, curriculum studies is a normative field of study, and requires scholars to understand the deep connection among the goals chosen, the standards embraced, the materials and textbooks selected, the teaching practices encouraged, and the methods of evaluation adopted. Once scholars grasp those connections, they are required to engage in ethical dialogue about whose interests are being served by each curricular approach. In such a way, curriculum scholars can clarify who is and who ought to carry the burdens of justice in our society.

15. What, if any, Use Shall Be Made of the Spontaneous Interests of Children?

The authors of this question were struggling to come up with a way to synthesize their disparate views of curriculum making. This was quite a challenge, for as editors of the 26th Yearbook, they represented a wide range of opinion precisely about this question. William Bagley, whose views have been called essentialist, held firmly to the primacy of school subjects, especially language, mathematics and science, and had a low regard for the project method advocated by another of the editors, William Heard Kilpatrick. There was a similar conflict between the views of Franklin Bobbitt, whose activity analysis functioned as a method for the reproduction of the contemporary society, and those of George Counts, who was [Page 966]moving from the child-centered views of some progressive educators to a theory that the school should be an instrument of social reconstruction. In a joint statement, these four and the eight other members of the yearbook's editorial board dealt with their differences with generosity and civility, yet they could not come up with a synthesis concerning the place of spontaneous student interests and the making of a curriculum.

Ten years before the NSSE 26th Yearbook, in his book Democracy and Education, John Dewey defined interest as being enraptured by some object and to be alert and totally attentive. Dewey thought that when students pursue their interests, they develop the required discipline that enables them to reconstruct their original concern into new and vital knowledge, a very reconstruction of experience. Whether or not the interests of the children, conceived in such a profound sense, can serve as the mainspring of curriculum making remains an open question to this day. Clearly, Dewey himself had a nuanced view of school subjects and did not reduce curriculum to a working through of children's interests.

Maxine Greene has recast the question of the curriculum and the child's interest by talking about a student's re-creating the materials of the curriculum in terms of his or her own consciousness. This manner of conceiving curriculum takes for granted that the materials of the curriculum are to be selected as a synthesis of culture and that the task of the student is to transcend the narrowness of his or her own personal world and empathically engage with and be transformed by the curriculum, thereby enriching herself, the curriculum, and the culture. The curriculum maker's task then becomes one of selecting and framing school subjects, materials, and practices in such a way that moves children beyond superficial motivation to vital engagement with the public world in which they are participants.

16. For the Determination of What Types of Materials Should the Curriculum-Maker Analyze the Activities in Which Adults Actually Engage?

The term material in this question included textbooks, audio-visual aids, and whatever learning situations a curriculum maker might choose for students. The editors of the yearbook were concerned that people thought learning to be merely the ability to repeat back correct words, phrases, or formulas without genuine understanding of their meaning. To move beyond mere memorization was important to every member of the board, for they understood learning as any change in students' ability to manage their conduct in an increasingly advantageous manner. In fact, they coined the term advantageous learning to make this point. It was agreed, therefore, that lifelike learning experiences needed to be discovered and chosen for incorporation into the curriculum. The analysis of adult activities, then, was a method for determining those learning experiences that were most lifelike.

Social efficiency educators have tended to think that materials that most closely resemble adult activities in the home, the workplace, and in leisure time ought to be sought out and utilized in education. Traditional and perennialist educators have tended to find activities for students that move them to think and act like professional historians, mathematicians, scientists, writers, and the like. Progressive educators have tended to find problem-solving activities so that students might grow in the habit of analyzing and solving problems in their responsibilities as citizens and members of communities. In brief, socially efficient materials would aim at efficiency in the workplace and home, traditionalist materials would aim at developing early scientists or mathematicians, and progressive materials would aim at creating informed and pragmatic citizens.

Most recently, the educational philosopher Gary Fenstermacher has advocated studying adults in society to derive standards for curriculum in the schools. He claims that adults who have made a democratic society function have been characterized by four qualities: (1) reasonableness, (2) agency, (3) a sense of relationship, and (4) morality. Each of these, he says, must become a conscious aim of the curriculum. By reasonableness he means the ability to think clearly with the ability to pay attention to evidence and to connect evidence to claims about the world. By agency he means the ability to act on one's own plans and intentions and not solely on the plans and intentions of some other person or institution. By a sense of relationship Fenstermacher means a sense that other persons [Page 967]are truly other and that relationships require a recognition of the legitimacy of that otherness. By morality he means cardinal virtues such as prudence, temperance, and courage.

Fenstermacher goes on to show that a liberal and progressive curriculum is required to meet those four aims and cites the work of Andre Comte-Sponville, Thomas Green, and Israel Scheffler as sources that support such achievement. The liberal education sponsored by this approach would combine the commitment to achieve the common good that is found in the work of orators such as Quintilian and John Dewey with the commitment to discover the truth that is found in philosophers such as Socrates and scientists such as Einstein.

17. How Far Shall Methods of Learning Be Standardized?

The editors of the 26th Yearbook believed in the right of the individual student to learn what she or he needed to learn in the way that was most suited to that individual. Yet they also realized that there was a need to manage the curriculum so that student learning would not be lopsided. They thought that the weighting of material in the curriculum was primarily a responsibility of a centralized group of experts, and it was the responsibility of the school and the teachers to administer that curriculum. The accountability movement of the past 25 years has inspired the development of standards by subject matter organizations such as the National Council for Teachers of Mathematics and the National Council for the Social Studies for each of the areas of the curriculum. These national standards tend to be fairly general, but the mandate of the federal government has been to render them more specific through the generation of benchmarks and ultimately standardized test items through the agency of state and local boards of education. The tension between efforts to centralize curriculum standardization on the one hand and to rely upon the prudential professional judgment of teachers and school principals on the other has been very high at the beginning of the new century.

Any curriculum today needs to address the specific challenges arising from contemporary life. These challenges include the following: the increasing divide between the rich and poor, both between and within nations; the mass displacement of peoples and families and the homeless-ness of millions; the mobility of student populations; the historically disproportionate number of single-parent families; religious, ethnic, gender, and racial conflicts; the rights of handicapped persons; and the dominance of computer and Internet technologies.

In the light of these challenges, Mortimer Adler and others have argued for one curriculum for all U.S. students from the perspective of traditional and humanistic education. They view this unity of curriculum as crucial to democracy and equality of opportunity in society. However, standardization of curriculum requires more uniformity than what these theorists would accept. With the possible exception of legislators, higher level governmental administrators, and single-minded advocates of educational accountability, it is difficult to find a curriculum thinker who advocates a highly standardized curriculum. For the most part, students of curriculum look at the complex set of challenges noted in the previous paragraph and acknowledge there must be a range of ways for curriculum to address them and an acknowledgment that no curriculum can address them all.

On the other hand, the mobility of children from one school to another argues for some level of standardization. In the 19th century, William Torrey Harris had developed a curriculum in St. Louis, Missouri, according to which if a student moved from one school on one day and into another the next he or she would not miss a beat, for all students would be on the same page in the same book. Harris's curriculum congers up an image of a standardized curriculum, which in the context of current technological prowess, shows promise for contemporary social sufficiency advocates. Whether or not the image is realistic is open to debate.

Perhaps the question is best understood through asking another question: What is learning? Is learning limited to exhibiting behaviors sought after by school administrators? If that is true, what could the philosopher of education Eugene A. Walsh have meant when he told students not to let school get in the way of their education? Curriculum scholar William Pinar has spent much of his career exploring the ramifications of currere, the Latin infinitive form of the verb to run. On this view, [Page 968]one only understands learning in terms of the lived experience of individual persons and on how they report that experience and standardization if curriculum is in some respects irrelevant to learning. He and Walsh are probably on the same page and in fundamental agreement with the authors of volume 1 of the 107th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education.

18. What Are the Administrative Questions of Curriculum Making?

The editors of the 26th Yearbook were part of the Progressive Era, and even when they disagreed about issues of the curriculum, they believed in the expertise of those who studied education as a science. Thus, they advocated at the same time a more centralized educational system and a more differentiated curriculum, both of which were to be managed by highly trained educational experts. This approach facilitated a divide between curriculum talk and actual curriculum practice, a divide which continues to this day.

In the first half of the 20th century there was a flurry of curriculum innovation including the project method of William Heard Kilpatrick, the Dalton plan of Helen Parkhurst, and the Eight Year Study of the Progressive Education Association. In the second half of the century, innovation continued with the disciplines of knowledge approach spawned by the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), a renewed focus on early childhood education supported by the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the accountability movement sanctioned by the Educate America Act of 1994. The accountability movement was renewed in the new century by the federal law NCLB.

A major difference between the innovations before mid-20th century and those after mid-century was the growing influence of the federal government on curriculum policy. Before NDEA, most curriculum reform was either endorsed by, supported by, or studied by some independent educational organization such as the National Education Association or the Progressive Education Association. The administrative progressives wanted curriculum to be in the hands of education experts who were independent of politics, but that independence has eroded gradually over the past 50 years. Especially since NCLB, the curriculum field has been floundering in a kind of no man's land. Curriculum scholars, subject area experts, teachers, school principals, social scientists, psychologists, and public intellectuals engage in what Tyack and Cuban call policy talk, while the actual curricular decisions are in the hands of politicians, and the implementation of those decisions are in the hands of standardized test and textbook publishers, computerized school management systems, and state and local board-of-education-level administrators. Some school districts have eliminated their curriculum departments to make sure there are sufficient funds for testing. The question “What knowledge is of most worth?” hardly seems relevant to actual school practice, and the range of contested curricular visions seems to these school districts as no longer important. Critical thought about curriculum is sought in theory, but scorned in practice.

So the administrative questions about curriculum are challenging indeed. A considerable amount of research has shown that when the school principal acts as an instructional leader the school improves significantly. Research on staff development, on the personal practical knowledge of teachers, on teachers' action research projects, on the formation of teachers into learning communities, and on consultancies and tuning protocols are examples of ways that principals have influenced curriculum effectively. School principals, however, need far more support from universities and from professional education organizations to redress the balance that has been lost since the middle of the 20th century.

The hope of an engaged curriculum movement in this country is to be found in trust in schools, trust in teachers, trust in administrators, trust in curriculum thinkers and researchers, and trust that politicians can be persuaded to pay as much attention to democracy and equality as a way of life; to research in neurobiology, educational anthropology, and arts education; and to the lived experience of teachers in schools as they currently do to test publishers and psychometricians.

• See also
  • Fundamental Curriculum Questions, The 26th NSSE Yearbook