Curriculum Books

Surely it is must be a daunting task to write about 100 years of curriculum books. But in the second edition of their seminal work, Curriculum Books, William H. Schubert, Ann Lynn Lopez Schubert, Thomas P. Thomas, and Wayne M. Carroll offer at once a masterful resource for those studying curriculum literature while at the same time providing scholars and practitioners with a reflective work on the study of curriculum as grounded in social history. Each chapter of the book details a decade of curriculum history combining the information along with the social, political, and the cultural events of the time period. The first edition also presents a categorization of three dominant schools of curriculum thought and a fourth category was added in the second edition. These schools of thought remain as viable today in analyzing schooling in general and curriculum work in general.

The authors set forth in their introduction the premise that curriculum is focused on the human journey that produces learning as a result. In addition, they state that the work puts forth a historical consciousness for curriculum inquiry. They ask the reader to consider the needs of learners and the content of the activity that can help them acquire the experiences that will prompt further learning. This type of learning then should ideally result in not right answers but rather in providing insights to further points of inquiry and to more questions. They end their introduction with a series of queries that are even more poignant today than when the second edition was published in 2002, culminating with this point: Will there continue to be histories about curriculum thought in the twenty-first century?

Given the political environment that has engulfed public education since the last decade of the 20th century, the view of curriculum thought between the scholar and practitioner is now as wide a chasm as ever when examined within the context of the field's history of the past 100 years. Schooling has been co-opted by the corporatization of U.S. education through book publishers, testing companies, and the federal government's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that has now established that learning is all about taking a test and getting the one right answer. Many see education and by extension, curriculum, as ripe for change. Educational management organizations are often touted as the answer for underperforming schools in poor school districts, with the emphasis on financial returns rather than on learning and developing students as critical members of society. Perhaps ironically, the various schools of curriculum thought still tend to be in evidence today—some more so than others, especially the social behaviorist tradition because there has been an obvious bonanza for testing and publishing companies that create test-taking packages as well as supplemental service providers such as [Page 195]Sylvan and Kaplan, whose revenue has doubled since NCLB was passed.

In this environment, there is no room for multiple questions or multiple right answers. The power and influence for crafting lessons and curriculum now rests with those far removed from the classroom. Even when practitioners confront some version of curriculum study in a graduate program, many are confounded by its lack of specificity, its lack of one and only one definition of curriculum, and initially see no connection between schooling and democracy. They seek what has come to be the comfort of the chains of standards, testing, and pacing guides that regiment their times with students in bowing to the all-mighty achievement test.

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