Curriculum Design

School Subject Designs

The school-subject approach has a long lineage. Its familiarity, however, can mask shifts in what counts as a subject or an academic discipline as well as its boundaries with other subjects. By the 1890s, for instance, progressive thinkers were referring to the old education giving way to the new. The latter both brought in new subjects and redefined old ones. For example, living languages such as French and German were introduced alongside Latin and ancient Greek, much of what had been considered geography in the 19th century was annexed by history, and the sciences of physics and chemistry, with laboratory methods extolled, entered the curriculum. Such modern methods for the enactment of curriculum, indeed, went hand in hand with modernization of the content of the curriculum.

The rapid rise of popular secondary education at the close of the 19th century took the form of the high school. It made urgent answering questions of what should be taught. The Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies in 1893 was the first major attempt at standardizing high school curriculum in the United States. Was the traditional classical curriculum in private academies, which prepared young people for college, adaptable to high schools that enrolled a broader swath of society? What kinds of curriculum design served the purposes of general education for this relatively heterogeneous population?

Although the Committee of Ten does not appear to have questioned that subjects should be the organizing principle of the high school curriculum—in contrast to practices of contemporaries such as Jane Addams—they saw themselves as a modernizing force. For example, the committee afforded history considerable space in the secondary curriculum while simultaneously tying the subject to the task of citizenship education. An academic subject arrangement, they insisted, was a good education for young people whether they were next headed to college or the workforce. A half century later, however, influential curriculum designer Ralph Tyler vigorously disagreed. He described the committee's recommendations as too narrow for purposes of general education, even charging that the committee had actually designed a program for educating subject specialists.

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