Schwab, Joseph

Curriculum Innovation

At the University of Chicago, Schwab graduated with an English major, and went on to a PhD in Zoology (genetics). As chairperson of Chicago's Natural science sequence, he developed discussion methods in place of lectures, introduced primary sources in place of textbook accounts of scientific discoveries, and worked to integrate the sciences with the humanities. In the Examiner's Office under Ralph Tyler, he worked to separate testing from teaching so that the learning bond with the teacher would not be compromised by competition for grades.

As a faculty colleague, dissertation advisor, and classroom teacher, he challenged interlocutors to think through real problems on the spot, without slipping into sloppy anecdotes or vague generalities. He taught nearly every course in the special undergraduate program designed by Robert Hutchins at the University of Chicago and was twice winner of the outstanding teacher award. Exploiting the freedom to explore a variety of subjects and their connections, he developed an impressive scholarship to support his teaching. He represented this in extended essays, such as “What Do Scientists Do,” for which he read more than 4,000 books and articles. In both activities, Schwab insisted on dynamic incarnations of ideas because any plausible solution must show the need to know more and know it from more than one perspective.

In 1952 when the University of Chicago program conceived by Hutchins was beginning to alter its curriculum and organizational structure, Schwab shifted his pluralistic view of subject matters to the structures of scientific disciplines. These he examined as modes of inquiry rather than rhetorics of conclusions because most scientific conclusions and methods were obsolete within a few decades. He focused this attention in a series of articles and, as chairperson of the BSCS Committee on Teacher Preparation, edited three widely used versions of its teachers' handbooks.

The Practical

At the same time as he began work on The Practical, Schwab produced a quasi-practical version of it in College Curriculum and Student Protest. This focused his intellectual and character-building orientations on the problems of campus unrest. Using a medical model, he diagnosed the students' turmoil as symptomatic of failings in their schooling, and his prescriptions were curricular changes and innovative teaching methods. The proposals involved eclectic modifications of academic structures and nontraditional uses of traditional liberal arts that would enable students cogently to explore their concernsa curriculum to improve student protest. He later elaborated the philosophical foundations for these recommendations in extended essays on polity such as “Freedom and Liberal Education.”

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