Curriculum Change

In order for schools and curricula to be responsive to new students and new societal conditions, scholars and practitioners alike must also understand the forces of change and how those forces impact and shape the curriculum.

To trace how curriculum changes, one must understand the evolution of the field itself. It was born during the early 20th century when control, management, and measurement were the driving forces in various academic fields, such as political science, sociology and the natural sciences. Its early leaders, John Franklin Bobbitt and William Charters, presented the field as a science based upon empirical studies with objective results. Showcasing how curriculum could be a process for meeting society's needs, Bobbitt's work, The Curriculum, was viewed as a scientific contribution to U.S. education. The study of curriculum then slowly became a field populated by scholars who eventually viewed it from different perspectives.

The seeds of this growth were actually fermented in the progressive reform movements of the 1890s as the country went through massive changes in its social, cultural, and economic foundations. Civic leaders and educators slowly recognized these great seismic shifts and how they were impacting schools and schooling. The country was becoming increasingly urban as people left the rural farms behind to seek work in the factories of the Northeast and Midwest. This increasing industrialization, along with both mass journalism and railroads, was penetrating every town, village, and hamlet across the country. At the same time, the country had to absorb 14 million new immigrants, and they were quite unlike the original settlers who were White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. These newcomers did not look like, sound like, nor believe like those who already lived here.

Therefore, school became an important institution that served as a mediator between the family and the shifting social and cultural worlds of the changing cities and towns. It became the place where norms and values would be taught by and through the curriculum. Because curriculum is at the heart of schooling, it has changed over the past 100 years as the various forces have battled for dominance in deciding what should be taught, to whom, and when.

Leaders of the various schools of curriculum thought viewed it from the perspective that schools should focus on what was good for society, or what was good for the child, or what subject or discipline was more important for an educated person, or lastly, how a combination of each of these factors, the child, the subject, and the society, [Page 197]would work best. There are many curriculum scholars who worked from within just one perspective and whose work had great impact on the field, but there are two whose scholarship and influence is so important that they have transcended the times and are still seen as preeminent in curriculum work today.

One of these is Bobbitt's student at the University of Chicago, Ralph Tyler, who developed a curriculum planning model in 1949 that is still being used today. Tyler was a scientist and believed that you could measure all activities and outcomes in education, and his Tyler Rationale is representative of that philosophy. In stark contrast to Tyler is John Dewey. Dewey was a contemporary of Bobbitt, and his scholarship was based upon his work at The Laboratory School at the University of Chicago where he watched children learn from tasks set up in model communities.

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