Curriculum, History Of

The field of curriculum history, as the broader education history, is organized by traditions of intellectual and social history; the former is concerned with the organization and changes in ideas and the latter with ideas as representing institutional and social changes found in policy and the actual programmatic developments. Typically, the historical narratives are about the progressive hopes of democracy in national schooling and/or its denials through issues of the social control and structural inequities.

Another approach is to view curriculum as a history of the present. Although it is easy and almost clichéd to say that the past is in the present and a historical understanding of schooling is needed, the placement of our self in time and space is a difficult and profound task. History is not the movement toward some form of reliable representation that tells us about children's growth, learning, or civic responsibilities. Nor is history the point that culminates in the present from which people learn about their domestication and that provides a temporal index for their future. History is the critical engagement of the present. Ironically, an effective history undertakes to suspend history itself by making visible the conditions that make possible the thought and actions of the present. For example, to talk about the child as a problem solver is not merely a category to help children learn and become better people. The pedagogical distinction of problem solving embodied a cultural thesis about a mode of living—that is, problem solving instantiates particular principles about how to order reflection and action. Historical rather than natural and inevitable, problem solving is a style of life historically produced and not something natural to the mind. As such, the principles ordering problem solving constitute the political nature of schooling by partitioning and governing the sensible (and sensitivities). Further, the rules and standards that order pedagogy embody comparative style of thought that differentiates, divides, and establishes differences in how one lives and should live. Today the narratives of the lifelong learner who problem solves differentiates the qualities of others who are spoken of as, for example, at-risk and disadvantaged, with the latter as different from the child who problem solves.

The discussion proceeds first with considering curriculum as converting ordinances, thinking of curriculum as related to Puritan notions of schooling as evangelizing and calculated designs on the souls of readers. The invocation of converting ordinances is to explore internationally the making of curriculum—narratives of national belonging and science coupled with salvation themes that generate cultural theses about modes of living. The early educational sociologies and psychologies of G. Stanley Hall, Edward L. Thorndike, and John [Page 182]Dewey are discussed in the context of the pedagogy as converting ordinances. The second section discusses U.S. progressive education in a cross-Atlantic Protestant reformism concerned with the social question. The concerns of the social question were given expression in reform efforts. It embodied fears of urban moral disorder at the turn of the 20th century. Welfare policy and the new human sciences were to change the social conditions that also changed people—the poor, immigrants, and others of urban life. U.S. progressivism and progressive education cast the social question in expressions of reforms. The fears were double gestures of exclusion and inclusion. They expressed hopes of a cosmopolitan society and democracy through education; and simultaneously of the threats posed by the dangers and dangerous populations to that future. The final section explores the cultural theses generated in the formation of mathematics, literacy, and music curriculum.

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