Child-Centered Curriculum

Child-centered curriculum is a central and contested concept in curriculum studies. In implicit and explicit ways, examination of this term raises at least three fundamental curricular questions: What are the most desirable ends of education? What are the most effective means to these desirable ends? Who should influence and determine these decisions? These core curricular decisions remain subjects of continuing controversy into the 21st century.

Historically, the child-centered curriculum is most associated with John Dewey's progressive views on education and, particularly, with his critique of the disengaging, rote-minded methods schools typically employed in transmitting to youth a traditional subject matter composed of the classics, history, mathematics, and science. Rather than organizing learning around the separate subject disciplines and insisting that students adapt to this preset curriculum, Dewey recommended a more holistic, interdisciplinary, and developmental vision of education. In his experiential, inquiry-oriented approach, students' keen expressive impulses to investigate, construct, and understand their world would be prime centers of gravity that would both energize and ground the selective introduction of curricular concepts.

Many of Dewey's educational ideas were implemented and refined in his University of Chicago laboratory school. Through a curriculum that sought to unify the practical and the conceptual around robust organizing themes (e.g., social occupations, progress through inventions and discovery), students learned about math, architecture, and the manual arts through building miniature houses, looms, and garden tools. They studied industrial history through the process of weaving cloth. They learned botany through working in a garden. They enhanced their understanding of the culinary arts through planning and cooking meals. In these and related processes, they refined their powers of observation, inference, reflection, and documentation as well as their capacities for community service and democratic living through the cultivation of group building and conflict negotiation sensitivities.

The role of the teacher in this educational dynamic is demanding and multidimensional. In [Page 108]collaboration with colleagues, teachers establish a curricular structure that is horizontally and vertically coordinated as well as psychologized to resonate with and stretch students' expressed interests and latent capacities. Teachers guide students through the interactive process of posing questions and designing engaging educative projects. Done well, this teacher guidance vitalizes a formerly sterile curriculum, makes curricular concepts more concretely available for students' understanding and meaningful application, enriches students' connection to their community, enhances their sense of efficacy and responsible citizenship, and animates their desire for further, more sophisticated experience. For Dewey, these dynamics reflect the artful integration of teacher-assisted, child-centered, subject-mattering curriculum designed to promote education as a process of continuous growth.

Given competing authoritarian and democratic conceptions of the purposes of education, the asymmetric dynamics of youthful development, the bureaucratic nature of schooling with its characteristically sluggish responsiveness to individuality, among other factors, implementing Dewey's views of an integrated curriculum is tangled with challenges. On the one hand, a Rousseauian deference to Rousseauian the inherent wisdom of youth can lead to adult nonintervention in the face of youth's potentially myopic and meandering pursuit of the immediate, the pleasurable, and the interesting. Frequently diminished if not discarded are the shaping role of history, the rigorous use of the mind, and the often arduous pursuit of the genuinely meaningful.

...