Traditionalist Perspective

The traditionalist perspective represents the foun-dational idea that dominated the curriculum field from the beginning of the 20th century until well after the middle of the century. This perspective is connected to traditional curriculum work that is focused on the schools, and particularly on curriculum development as an orientation narrower than curriculum studies, in the service of teachers, administrators, and school personnel. Through this perspective, the traditionalist designed and developed school curriculum in the narrow sense of the term that served practitioners in teaching the appropriate content and instilling particular skills in an uncontested way. The traditionalist perspective pertains to curriculum development in service of schools and not as a larger cultural phenomenon in which schools are but a part.

The traditionalist perspective is derived from William Pinar's work, which in the second half of the 1970s provided a comprehensive image of the traditional field. Most of the curriculum work was field based and conducted by curricularists, former school people, whose intellectual and subcultural ties tended to be with school practitioners. Likewise, curriculum writing had schoolteachers in mind. Even those who were teaching curriculum at universities were former school people with extensive field experience and with microscopic views of curriculum focusing on organizational, adminis-trational, and instructional concerns, excluding connections to the larger system within which the school is located.

From a traditionalist perspective, the reason of being of curriculum consisted the first organized and systematic effort to design and develop programs of study, which was supported by a particular rationale focusing exclusively on schools. A representative person of the era was Ralph Tyler whose rationale became very influential and was one to be followed for several decades. In Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, originally developed as a course syllabus, Tyler elaborates on the principles and rationale for viewing, analyzing, and interpreting the curriculum and instructional program of an educational institution. Tyler's principles of developing curriculum included setting educational objectives, choosing and organizing activities to attain these objectives, and evaluating the outcomes based on the set objectives. What became known as Tyler's Rationale became the basic guide adopted by the majority of curricularists and practitioners for many years. It still is an influential document in designing and developing daily lesson plans by school practitioners.

The curriculum field's birth in the 1920s and the theory that supported it, which was represented by the Tyler Rationale model, are connected to the happenings of that period. The focus of curriculum on a bureaucratic model, which was characterized by ameliorative orientation, ahistorical posture, and adherence to behaviorism and to a technological rationality, was shaped by the emerging scientism and the scientific techniques from business and industry. The curriculum worker, characterized by a technician's mentality, accepted the curriculum structure as it was, and was dedicated to the improvement of schools by comparing resulting behaviors with original objectives.

The move from curriculum development to curriculum studiesthat is, from the curriculum field as merely a facilitator of institutional and state policy or mandates to curriculum studies for understanding how we have come to be what we [Page 887]are as a cultural phenomenonwas initiated by scholars and philosophers who challenged the bureaucratic-technocratic character of the curriculum. Work that was not field based can be viewed as a reaction to the status of the curriculum, leaning toward a more progressive orientation. More progressives in the field, such as Thomas Hopkins, argued for a child-centered curriculum. George Counts argued for a curriculum focused on socially relevant problems, and democratic values, and Horace Mann Bond analyzed education as reproductive of the political status quo. These progressive undertakings are well-documented in the book Understanding Curriculum. In this context, educators were called to shift their work habits from technicians who implement a set curriculum to teachers who challenge their assumptions about curriculum and consider the needs of children.

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