Struggle for the American Curriculum The

In 1961, Lawrence Cremin published his landmark study, The Transformation of the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876 1957, in which he identified a progressive education movement comprising an array of theorists and policy makers and asserted that it had a significant influence on public education until the movement's rapid collapse after World War II. Twenty-five years later, Herbert Kliebard presented a compelling, meticulously detailed account that questioned the existence of a cohesive progressive education movement as well as the movement's impact on U.S. education. In The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 18931958, which was revised in 1995 and 2004, Kliebard portrays this 65-year period as more about competing ideas and policies and less about a unified progressive approach to educational (and social) change. Rather than transformation, he suggests a battleground; rather than a movement, Kliebard highlights the role of interest groups with rather consistent and recognizable ideological positions, sometimes allying for the achievement of reforms but more often vying for control in the contested terrain that is the U.S. curriculum.

A least four such interest groups competed for supremacy in the determination of the curriculum. The first group, which held sway on curriculum matters during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was the humanists. Such educators as William Torrey Harris and Charles Eliot sought to provide children with a common curriculum that stressed mental discipline and the powers of reasoning on the one hand and the best of Western cultural [Page 822]heritage and academic (university-based) disciplines on the other.

Reacting to the humanists' approach were three other groups of reformers that sought to change what schools taught and how the curriculum was organized. Developmentalists or child-centered progressives such as G. Stanley Hall sought curriculum that was more allied with the child's presumed interests, needs, and ways of learning. Some adherents, such as William Heard Kilpatrick, believed that children should not be taught directly but instead should engage in projects that essentially linked their immediate experiences and interests with worthy living.

A second group consisted of social efficiency educators or scientific curriculum makers who were particularly concerned with creating a smoothly running society. Educators such as John Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters, and David Snedden looked to the work of industrial efficiency experts such as Frederick Winslow Taylor to guide them in their quest to make the best use of resources and effort in school life. They sought to ascertain, with expanded testing and counseling, the expected futures of children and then differentiate the curriculum so that children would receive the kind of education that would best prepare (fit) them for their predicted life after school.

A third group of reformers, reacting to the humanists' position, took a social meliorist or social reconstructionist approach to curriculum work, whereby teachers and students would function as principal actors in the advance of progressive social change and social justice. Emphasizing the political character of curriculum choices, the primary question for George Counts and Harold Rugg was not whether to advocate for a social vision, but the nature and extent of one's advocacy. These educators sought to strongly and openly advocate elimination of inequality, poverty, and prejudice (and in the view of others, to impose and indoctrinate their beliefs and values).

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