Tyler Rationale, The

The Tyler Rationale consists of four fundamental questions that first appeared during the late 1940s in Ralph W. Tyler's curriculum syllabus, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. This document is still in print and continues to sell thousands of copies each year. The questions of the Tyler Rationale include these: What educational purposes should the school seek to attain? What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes? How can these educational experiences be effectively organized? How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained? These questions rest on a conceptual foundation where educational purposes are defined by objectives that arise from three sourcesthe needs of the learner, expectations of society, and insights from content specialists. Because a program's educational objectives may become too divergent and numerous, the rationale was to filter objectives through philosophical and psychological screens. This simple array of four questions has proven to be one of the most defining professional concepts of curriculum design and development.

Much lore surrounds the origins of the rationale. Tyler, as research director of the Eight Year Study, describes a lunch occasion in the 1930s when he, H. H. Giles, and Hilda Taba were discussing curriculum development and the rationale's legendary questions were conceived (by Tyler) and written on a napkin. During the same period, Giles and the Eight Year Study Curriculum Associates were charged with formulating basic principles for the secondary school curriculum and, on the first page of their 1942 report entitled Exploring the Curriculum, their fundamental questions included these: What is to be done? What [Page 908]subject matter is to be used? What classroom procedures and school organization are to be followed? How are the results of the program to be appraised? Both frameworks stressed the use of educational objectives, although neither represents the use of behavioral objectives as the term was later developed.

Tyler's call to “formulate objectives” required educators to reconsider their most fundamental educational goals and, when situated within the context of a classroom problem, became a way to reestablish “intentions” (which would have been a better term to have used). Objectives did not represent the confining, convergent dimension that was later popularized in the 1960s and 1970s with behavioral objectives and management by objectives programs. In fact, Tyler, Giles, and the Curriculum Associates describe the genesis of educational objectives in relation to the central purposes of education. For Tyler, behaviors meant all types of human reactions at all levels of cognition, and objectives were developed for nonobservable behaviors: social sensitivity, appreciation, personal and social adjustment. Yet, the Tyler Rationale is now often cited to have introduced behavioral objectives, even though Tyler later dismissed this claim and maintained his belief that behavioral objectives had become too specific. Further, the four questions were not meant to be a linear sequence of actions but, instead, questions as aspects of a conversation. Further, “why” questions were not part of the rationale, in part, because Tyler originally used the framework to assist teachers with immediate (classroom) problems. That issues of “purposefulness”the why of a situationwould be implicitly addressed when one sought to identify (what) and to solve (how) problems.

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