Jackson, Philip W.

Philip W. Jackson achieved prominence first as an educational psychologist, then as an observer of classroom life, and later as a philosopher of education. Throughout his career, he contributed seminal work to the field of curriculum studies. In deceptively simple prose, he has argued that the unintentional curriculum is as worthy of study as is the official curriculum; that the study of curriculum is healthiest when it draws on many perspectives, including its own history; that efforts to define curriculum prescriptively have been more provocative than instructive; and that the moral nature of teaching is a necessary starting point for curriculum studies.

After receiving his PhD from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1955, Jackson joined the faculty of the University of Chicago (where he remained until his retirement in 1998). Initially known for his work (with Jacob Getzels) on gifted-ness and intelligence, Jackson began to look for ways to get closer to the phenomena of schooling than he could get through the examination of data sets generated by student responses and performances. He spent months as an observer in classrooms, and his reflections on these observations appeared in Life in Classrooms, a book that inspired generations of curriculum scholars to pay more thoughtful attention to the complexities and uncertainties of classroom life. Jackson showed that the hidden curriculum was a powerful shaper of student experience and that much of the most significant and most lasting student learning was being missed by the ordinary methods of educational research.

In “Curriculum and Its Discontents,” a paper first delivered in 1979 to Division B of the American Educational Research Association, Jackson addressed the recurring criticism (launched by Decker Walker and Joseph Schwab in the 1960s) that the field of curriculum was moribund (or already dead). Jackson questioned both the value of the metaphor of the dying field and the helpfulness of the responses to the supposed crisis. Acknowledging the freshness brought to curriculum study by existential, phenomenological, Marxist, psychoanalytical, literary, and philosophical thought (some of which had been inspired by Life in Classrooms), Jackson nevertheless critiqued the tendencies of the new perspectives to become bogged down in jargon and to be dismissive of earlier traditions and methodologies of curriculum studies. These concerns with making the products of curriculum study readable and with reconciling opposing views of curriculum and curriculum study recur throughout Jackson's work.

In “The Mimetic and the Transformative” (the concluding essay from The Practice of Teaching), Jackson sketched two competing traditions of teaching that are based on two contradictory conceptions of knowledge. In the mimetic tradition, knowledge is information and skills that are transmissible, testable, and forgettable; they are moved from teacher to student through a sequence of routine steps—test, present, perform, assess, remediate (if necessary), and move on. In the transformative [Page 504]tradition, knowing cannot be separated from living; to learn is to be fundamentally and pervasively changed, and there are no routine steps to guide the teacher. These two conceptions of knowledge imply two starkly different definitions of curriculum, perspectives on the nature of curriculum study, and roles for curriculum specialists. But, in keeping with his habit of reconciling opposing points of view, Jackson argues that the two traditions can be mutually supportive, suggesting that curriculum studies also need to be guided by both traditions.

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