Life Adjustment Curriculum

Life adjustment curriculum emphasized the role of the secondary school in preparing students not for further formal schooling, but for successful engagement in the life activities of adult society. A rejection of the theory of mental discipline and a critique of academic formalism informed the rational for life adjustment curriculum. The proposals of the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education influenced the idea and practice of life adjustment curriculum. In some ways, life adjustment curriculum represented the culmination of several decades of progressive education theory and practice. Life adjustment education, however, was not a monolithic curriculum reform and is best understood in one respect as one man's career-long idea and in another respect as a diffuse, ill-defined, largely symbolic, and short-lived reform initiative.

In the late 1930s, Charles Prosser, who is credited as the inventor of idea and practice of life adjustment education, articulated a conception of education for life that represented a culmination of his lifework in vocational education. Prosser criticized traditional academic curriculum as too focused on preparing students for further education rather than for adult life and as essentially selective rather than educative in character and intent. Prosser maintained that what he variously termed life adjustment education, life education, or just education for living was the best preparation for life and for college life. Although he held that every secondary school subject should be useful to living, he proposed that half of the high school curriculum be devoted to life education and half be devoted to academic studies.

Prosser proposed that curriculum content should be selected according to four criteria that he [Page 546]derived from E. L. Thorndike's psychology: Subject matter should be selected that offered a wide range of utility, should directly meet life demands, should be widely usable in life, and should meet both present and future needs of students. Applied to conventional subjects, for example, life education would emphasize the use of English in business correspondence, everyday applications of arithmetic, analysis of current events, acquisition of basic business knowledge, and the role of science in everyday life. Life education would feature classroom activities such as using the local community as a laboratory for experience, use of wide range of print sources of information beyond conventional textbooks, active participation of students in learning experiences, the teaching of study skills, emphasis on application versus regurgitation of information, and emphasis on purposeful problem solving and decision making. Prosser envisioned secondary education as an apprenticeship for life.

As a result of a resolution Prosser proposed in 1945 at a conference of vocational educators, the United States Office of Education launched an initiative to promote life adjustment education for the alleged 60% of students who were ill-served by either the vocational or academic components of the high school curriculum. Two commissions served as clearinghouses and catalysts to stimulate interest in life adjustment education through state departments of education. Because of differences of opinion among commission members about which students should be served, about the definition of life adjustment education, and even about what the name of their initiative should be (almost half of commissioners preferred the designation general education), it is difficult to define exactly what life adjustment curriculum was. It is even problematic to associate two school programs, the Illinois Secondary School Curriculum Program and the course Basic Living at Battle Creek (Michigan) High School with life adjustment curriculum because they preexisted the work of the two commissions and were affiliated with them mainly by name.

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