Social Control Theory

Historical Development of Curriculum and Social Control Ideas

Certainly, questions of curriculum have dominated scholarly work in education from the time of the Ancient Greeks. The framing question of “what knowledge is of most worth” can be seen in thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle continuing on into the present day. Contemporary scholars suggest that the distinction between who has the power to make these decisions concerning the value of knowledge and who does not in and of itself points to issues of social control. As differing notions of which segments of the population should be afforded educational opportunity arose throughout history, debates ensued as to what should be taught to whom. So then, issues of social control in curriculum reside closely to fundamental questions of the purposes of education.

Social control theory begins in a critique of the highly influential social efficiency curriculum. Social efficiency theorists believe that the purpose of school is to sort the nation's youth into future occupations according to their abilities. As this focus on the tight connections between schools and the workforce drives curriculum thinking within this model, an inequitable economic system based on competition necessarily creates a system of inequitable educational opportunity. Taking their lead from the scientific study of industry, perceived waste in the educational system becomes a target for reform. The sorting of students into particular tracks or curricular paths seems to be logical as part of the pursuit of efficiency in aligning schools to the needs of society. How gender, race, or class might affect these seemingly objective processes rarely made it into the equation.

The rise of social efficiency's prominence in the U.S. educational conscience can be traced to the upheaval that U.S. citizens experienced in the second half of the 19th century when immigration and industrialization collided. An influx of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe into [Page 787]postCivil War United States dramatically changed the demographics of a rapidly changing country, and with those changes came heated debate as to the role of education. Until that point, the most U.S. residents emigrated from Northern or Western Europe, and the new wave of immigrants were often framed as savage, genetically disposed to be ignorant and destined to fill the lower classes of U.S. society. Concurrently, the late 1800s brought the dawn of the Industrial Age, leading to the development of large urban centers that contrasted sharply with heretofore agrarian and provincial U.S. communities. Combined, the ethnically shifting population and new urban centers posed, for many U.S. citizens, a threat to the society to which they had grown accustomed. In the views of many curriculum scholars, the new immigrants who were flooding into urban centers for the promise of industrial employment required socialization to U.S. values and customs to maintain or regain order.

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