Curriculum Studies in Relation to the Field of Educational History

The link between curriculum studies and educational history is to be found in the emergence of the field of curriculum history. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, curriculum history came into its own as a distinct area of inquiry within the field of curriculum studies with such disciplinary trappings as a complement of identifiable practitioners, an array of investigatory methods, and a more or less shared research agenda. Arriving on the scene when it did, curriculum history developed at the time that a number of educational historians were involved in a revisionist movement for reinterpreting the nature and purpose of their discipline. And it was the conflict surrounding revisionism that became the defining issue among those scholars who shaped the study of curriculum history.

Because of the close association of curriculum history to educational history, it is not always easy to differentiate the issues that distinguish these two fields. There is much in the way of overlap in the topics that educational historians and curriculum historians explore. They both, for example, are interested in the development over time of the course of study. What does seem, however, to distinguish these two groups of scholars is the focus that curriculum historians accord to the development of curriculum as a professional field of study. This is not an issue that has attracted much attention on the part of educational historians.

Key to the revisionist effort in educational history was the question of the regulative role of the school—that is, was the U.S. public school an instrument for advancing democracy and opportunity? Or was the school an instrument of social control for enhancing the power and privilege of the nation's elite? For much of the 20th century and now into the 21st, this has been a question that has engendered conflict among educational historians. Central to their work on this subject was the role over time that schools have played in an ongoing conflict that they saw between the aspirations of racial and ethnic minorities and the working class on one side and the interests of the White middle and upper classes on the other.

As a group of scholars, curriculum historians are largely divided between those who view the curriculum as a means for realizing democracy and opportunity and those who challenge this celebratory account of the development of the curriculum. This latter group has been generally sympathetic to the revisionist view of schools as instruments of social control for reproducing existing social class [Page 258]relationships. They share the revisionist criticism of curriculum differentiation as a means of channeling the children of the rich and poor to different courses of study and ultimately to different and unequal life destinies. Yet they question the totality of the resulting regulation. They reject the view of the most radical revisionist educational historians that minorities and the working classes simply acquiesced in the directions that elites have set for them through the schools. Instead, they have defined a more balanced position that recognized the patterns of both conflict and consensus that have defined the development of the U.S. curriculum.

...