Realms of Meaning

Sputnik was launched in 1957; the National Educational Defense Act was passed in 1958; the Woods Hole conference that yielded Jerome Bruner's Process of Education was held in 1959. It was a time of anxiety over our scientific and technological competitiveness. In curriculum studies, the watchwords were “disciplinarity” and “the structure of knowledge.” Against this backdrop, Philip Phenix published his comprehensive philosophy of the general curriculum, Realms of Meaning, in 1964.

Responding to the new interest in the epistemo-logical foundations of curriculum, Phenix attempted to counter the narrow emphasis on science and instrumental rationality. (“Empirics” was to become only one of six of his realms of meaning.) Indeed, his defense of meaning as an educational aim can be read as a response to the existential predicament of modernity itself, to its skepticism, alienation, and fragmentation. In an era of exploding information and hyperspecialization, Phenix offered a vision of a whole curriculum for the whole person.

In the tradition of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Phenix analyzed the myriad subjects and disciplines into six fundamental modes of human meaning making. Moral, aesthetic, and personal ways of knowing thus joined the more familiar logical and empirical modes. In this respect, Realms of Meaning could be said to have anticipated the basic argument of Howard Gardner's much celebrated Frames of Mind (1983) by some two decades.

For Phenix, meaning has both a subjective side, in the (1) experience of reflective self-consciousness, and an objective side, as it is (2) organized by logical principles into a variety of patterns, (3) elaborated into scholarly disciplines, and (4) expressed in symbolic forms. In Phenix's analysis, these myriad experiences, patterns, disciplines and forms fall into six primary “realms of meaning”: (1) symbolics (ordinary language, mathematics, and nondiscursive symbolic forms), (2) empirics (the sciences), (3) aesthetics (the arts), (4) synnoetics (intra- and interpersonal meanings), (5) ethics (moral meanings), and (6) synoptics (comprehensively integrative meanings).

A curriculum organized around these realms of meaning, Phenix argues, would still include the disciplines, but would approach them differently. Disciplines would be presented not as bodies of knowledge already constructed, but as groupings of representative ideas and distinctive methods of [Page 735]inquiry. For example, in mathematics, students might first learn about sets, elements, functions, and rules of combination; all specific mathematical knowledge learned subsequently can therefore be seen to grow out of these fundamental concepts of knowledge formation. Thus, what is unique about each discipline is presented, but the stress is on the unity of meaning across disciplines. In this way, Phenix suggested, it should be possible to craft a curriculum of general education at once comprehensive and unified.

Phenix suggests that learning should begin in symbolics, followed by empirics and esthetics once language is learned. Ethics and synnoetics should wait until the child is older and has acquired the necessary experience to undertake inquiry in a free, self-directed manner. Finally, study should culminate in synoptics, because this realm encompasses all of the others. The idea is only that the realms be introduced in this order; Phenix acknowledges that strict sequential study is neither possible nor desirable.

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