Interests of Students and the Conception of Needs

Attending to the interests of students and the conception of needs proved to be one of the more important curricular design issues of the early-to-mid 20th century. In what became a progressive education emblem, the now forgotten phrase “attending to the interests of students” represented one of the fundamental principles of progressive education. More sophisticated definitions of progressive education added the phrase, “meeting the needs of students,” in what would historically prove to become a factor for determining the scope of the curriculum. Although designing curriculum to attend to the interests and needs of students may seem a commonsensical belief and simple concern, the topic proved highly controversial within the Progressive Education Association (PEA) and continues to prove problematic for designing any student-centered curriculum.

The importance of students' interests and creative expression helped to form the PEA and to articulate a type of education separate from the institutional, factory-oriented conception of schooling. Focusing the curriculum on student interests was popularized in the 1918 article, “The Project Method,” by William H. Kilpatrick. Students' interests could become the center of the curriculum; however, for Kilpatrick a hearty, purposeful act was a requirement for this curricular-instructional focus. Yet many educators were concerned that such a curriculum would lead to any interest becoming a legitimate part of the curriculum. Kilpatrick's requirement of purposeful activity introduced a filter that ruled out what some educators would consider a childish whim of students with little educational purpose.

During the 1930s to 1940s, a number of PEA members turned their attention to the sociological and psychological determination of adolescent needs rather than student interests as a way to configure the curriculum. These developmental needs, based upon the emerging conception of adolescence, came to be seen as a balance of student interests. The concept of needs expanded to include personal and social needs and in many ways, received its most sophisticated treatment in the PEA's Eight Year Study and the work of the Commission on the Secondary School. This group, led by V. T. Thayer, issued a series of curriculum reports that configured the middle and secondary school curriculum around a framework of student needs: personal, immediate personal-social relationships, social-civic relationships, and economic relationships. These themes served to identify worthy interests and needs for selecting and organizing appropriate learning experiences. The Commission on the Secondary School, however, emphasized personal and social needs more than academic content in designing curriculum, proving disconcerting for some educators.

Although the PEA believed its recognition of personal and social needs reconciled the unfocused aspect of centering the curriculum on student interests, Boyd Bode expanded further the conception of needs by distinguishing between real needs and felt needs (e.g., whims) and criticized the PEA and Eight Year Study for their use of needs as the organizing principle for curriculum design. Determining student needs, which ultimately proved an act of determining what students lacked and what they ought to know, was a form of indoctrination and the imposition of values. Bode reconciled the issue of the conception of needs by maintaining that the defining principle for curriculum construction was not defining needs, but instead determining a social vision and philosophy of school in society. Rather than viewing what students lacked—an absence of knowledge—Bode reconceived the conception of needs as an act of establishing a social philosophy.

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