How to Make a Curriculum

John Franklin Bobbitt's How to Make a Curriculum, published in 1924, was a targeted sequel to Bobbitt's groundbreaking and highly popular book The Curriculum, which appeared in 1918. How to Make a Curriculum focuses on Bobbitt's detailed process of curriculum making, whereas The Curriculum addresses the much larger subject of curriculum itself. In The Curriculum, Bobbitt was making his initial case for his philosophy of curriculum. In How to Make a Curriculum, on the other hand, Bobbitt assumes that his view had taken root and then proceeds to explain how to make curriculum in detail.

Bobbitt wrote How to Make a Curriculum to provide specific guidance to schools and school districts that were facing the problem of needing to revise their curriculum during the mid to late 1920s. The United States was changing rapidly due to pressures such as industrialization and immigration, and many people began to believe that the U.S. public school curriculum had become outdated. Bobbitt provided school administrators and teachers with a process they could use to revise their curriculum to match the new age. In this respect, Bobbitt intended for the book to be deeply practical in the sense that he wanted it to provide specific guidance, rooted in the new social sciences, about how school practitioners could develop their curriculum most effectively.

Making sense of How to Make a Curriculum begins with recognizing how Bobbitt viewed the purpose of education. To Bobbitt, education exists to prepare young people for the various activities they will perform as adults. Life is about activities, and schools should prepare young people to perform them. At first glance, this purpose seems narrow, but to Bobbitt it is quite expansive. Bobbitt's goal was to make society more efficient by training people for the roles they will play as adults, be they construction workers or lawyers or teachers. Bobbitt explains the process of activity analysis, which he created to show public school workers what they should do to revise their curriculum. He [Page 454]explains how practitioners should analyze adult activities and then use the results of this analysis to establish educational objectives.

Bobbitt acknowledges that any curriculum revision project must begin by looking at the adult activities in a particular community, but he also conducted research to capture adult activities across the country. This research led him to break down all human activities into 10 categories: (1) social intercommunication, (2) physical efficiency, (3) efficient citizenship, (4) social relationships, (5) leisure, (6) mental efficiency, (7) religion, (8) parental responsibilities, (9) unspecialized practical activities (such as taking care of the house), and (10) occupational activities. Bobbitt argues that all human activities can be classified within these 10 categories. He then breaks down each of these areas into highly specific skills that all students should develop, a list that came to a total of 821. Bobbitt defined productive citizens as people who were effective at performing all 821 skills, which by definition could be observed and measured.

In later chapters, Bobbitt takes his 821 objectives and categorizes them based on the various subject matter fields. He shows, for example, how the objectives that he lists under effective citizenship can be fostered in social studies classes and how the goals included in his leisure category should be developed in courses on literature. All of the subject matter fields must be tied to the original 821 objectives that Bobbitt asserts are the foundation for schooling.

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