Activity Analysis

The basic idea of activity analysis is that the best place to begin when creating curriculum is by looking at the daily activities of adults. With this method, every range of human experience must be subjected to analysis, including language activities, citizenship activities, occupational skills, health activities, and religious practices. Curriculum developers would study the adults who are the best at the various activities in order to select and perpetuate the most efficient skills. Once the daily activities of the most efficient adults have been analyzed and catalogued, these activities should become the basis for curriculum in the schools.

Activity analysis is one of the most powerful and enduring ideas in the field of curriculum. It became popular during the 1910s and 1920s, especially during the years immediately following World War I. John Franklin Bobbitt, a professor of educational administration at the University of Chicago, and W. W. Charters, a professor of education at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, were deeply influential in the spread of activity analysis.

In his 1923 book, Curriculum Construction, Charters uses the example of a cook to illustrate the central idea of activity analysis. To produce efficient cooks, curriculum workers should find the best cook possible, study his daily activities scientifically, catalog everything that he does, and then use these data as the basis for a curriculum that is designed to produce efficient cooks. This same process should be used for all human activities, both vocational and nonvocational.

Activity analysts such as Bobbitt and Charters sought numerous goals through the popularization of activity analysis. First, they wanted to make curriculum relevant during a time when the United States was undergoing rapid changes because of industrialization and immigration. Millions of children were immigrating to the United States during the early 1900s, and schools needed a way to develop curriculum that was relevant to these new students, many of whom came from eastern European countries such as Russia, Romania, and Poland. Second, Bobbitt and Charters presented activity analysis using the language of science and industry, which made the method popular among business leaders who wanted schools to operate like businesses as well as train workers. Third, activity analysis gave school administrators a way to create a curriculum that was not directly tied to the traditional subjects. Bobbitt and Charters were [Page 10]part of the early 20th-century progressive movement that sought to displace the traditional curriculum of subject-matter disciplines with something different, most often a curriculum based either on the individual desires of students or on the needs of industry. Educational reformers who followed Bobbitt and Charters could look to the adult activities in their local communities as the basis for their curriculum. At the same time, they could marginalize the traditional subjectsfor example, Latinthat many of them found distant from the students who were enrolling in their schools.

Almost from the time it was introduced, activity analysis became the subject of criticism. The most common criticism has been that it relies too heavily on the current activities of adults and thereby leaves no room for social improvement. In other words, if all curricula were created using activity analysis, we would be training students to perform only the activities that adults currently perform, not the ones they will perform in the future. A method that at first glance appears to be forward looking turns out to be deeply conservative in its outlook, argue the critics. Activity analysis also has been criticized because of its heavy emphasis on vocational training. Traditional subjects such as history and philosophy are no longer studied for their own sake, but only for their functionality in the world of work. This overreliance on utility, argue traditionalists, eliminates many of the joys that come with learning for its own sake. Critics also argue that activity analysis neglects a central dimension of moral education, which can come only from learning such challenging subjects as mathematics, philosophy, and foreign languages for their own sake rather than for the use that students will make of them later in life.

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