Kliebard, Herbertm.

Over the course of four decades, Herbert M. Kliebard (1930–) has been one of the leading [Page 514]U.S. curriculum theorists and historians, influencing countless scholars, administrators, and teachers who took his classes and read his many publications. As a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1963 through 1999, he taught several thousand students who learned, for example, that curriculum planning could be approached in other than an overly technocratic and rational way, indeed as an area of thoughtful and creative deliberation and decision making concerning interrelated issues of purpose, selection, organization, assessment, culture, and politics. He has also shared his historical and theoretical insights in close to 100 journal articles, book chapters, and reviews, some of which have become classics in the curriculum literature, such as several that first appeared between 1968 and 1977 and have been reprinted many times: “The Curriculum Field in Retrospect,” “The Tyler Rationale,” “The Rise of Scientific Curriculum-Making and Its Aftermath,” and “Curriculum Theory: Give Me a ‘For Instance.’ ” Kliebard has also published eight books: The Language of the Classroom (coauthored); Religion and Education in America: A Documentary History; Teacher, Student, and Society: Perspectives on Education (coedited); Curriculum and Evaluation (coedited); The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958 (three editions); Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum History and Theory; Schooled to Work: Vocationalism and the American Curriculum, 1876–1946; and Changing Course: American Curriculum Reform in the Twentieth Century. It would be incorrect to say that anyone invents a field of study, but Kliebard has certainly been one of the most influential contributors to the historical study of the U.S. curriculum, to the idea that in order to understand complex curricular and other school phenomena, one must go back to its genesis.

Kliebard was born and raised in New York City, graduating with an AB in English in 1952 and a MA in 1953, both degrees from City College of New York. After working for 1 year as an English teacher at Bronx Vocational High School (the school that formed the basis for the Blackboard Jungle novel and movie), he served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps for 2 years before returning to his previous high school position. From 1956 to 1962, he worked as a reading specialist for the Nyack, New York, Public Schools and then served 1 year as a research associate at Teachers College, Columbia University. By this time, he had begun his doctoral studies in reading at Teachers College, but switched his major to curriculum and teaching, working closely with Arno Bellack. He earned his doctorate in 1963 and joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, teaching in the departments of curriculum and instruction and educational policy studies until his retirement in 1999 (having attained full professor rank in 1970). Kliebard has received many professional honors, including a distinguished faculty award from the University of Wisconsin, a distinguished alumnus award from Teachers College, the Outstanding Achievement Award of the John Dewey Society, and a lifetime achievement award from the Curriculum Studies division of the American Educational Research Association.

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