University of Illinois Collective of Curriculum Professors

The University of Illinois developed a long-standing tradition as a collective for curriculum studies promoting social foundations and philosophy as a basis for curriculum development, education for furthering democracy and advancement of liberal arts in schools with attention to aesthetics, particularly in the last half of the 20th century. The College of Education made a powerful impact on curriculum theory with important collaboration on curriculum books produced in the 1950s and 1960s by B. O. Smith, William Stanley, J. Harlan Shores, Harry S. Broudy, and Joe R. Burnett; the proposal of Lawrence Metcalf for the social studies curriculum; and contributions of Louis Rubin. Ironically, a more prominent impact on curriculum policy was the diatribe against the life skills curriculum by Arthur Bestor, a history professor at the University of Illinois.

An ambitious new direction for curriculum development emerged in 1950 with the publication [Page 917]criticism of public education was that essential intellectual processes and emotional commitments were being overshadowed in the high school curriculum that focused on facts and concepts. In a previous work, Building a Philosophy of Education, Broudy contended potentialities mark the distinctive nature of humanity; developing these potentials fosters the “good life.” Broudy located three essential human purposes endemic to the character of democratic life: (1) self-determination; (2) self-realization, drawing from individual gifts and capacities; and (3) self-integration. Broudy, Smith, and Burnett contended schools should promote the formation of intellectual habits in each person, attending to the cognitive development of learners and the integrity of the valued disciplines.

Bestor was a major voice in the traditionalist revival at mid-century with the success of Educational Wastelands. Bestor centered his attack on the life needs movement curriculum, maintaining democracy's vitality depended on taking the lessons of the culture and presenting them in a methodical, disciplined fashion to young people. Education proceeds systematically to offer students a command of intellectual tools and a store of reliable information. The standard academic disciplines were socially determined according to Bestor. For elementary education, the basic skills of computation, reading, and writing are sufficient to establish the skill base for knowledge acquisition. Specialization begins in high school, but only with assurance that a foundation has been established in general studies. Bestor criticized schools of education as meddling with curriculum when their responsibility was to provide training on effective instruction.

Bestor had the attention of conservative critics, but Metcalf was reshaping social studies as an academic discipline in the U.S. high school. With Maurice Hunt, Metcalf produced a methods text that applied reflective thinking and practical intelligence to consideration of personal and social problems relevant to the lives of learners. Hunt and Metcalf's text restructured traditional approaches to social studies by crossing conventional academic boundaries, presenting the social sciences as a skill set.

Rubin emerged in the 1960s as a counterpoint to the insistence that academic content drive curriculum development. With J. C. Parker, Rubin argued that intellectual skills or processes not be subordinate to academic content in curriculum development. Rubin promoted curriculum for individual development and social participation, evident in the editing of an ASCD yearbook dedicated to revision of the life skills curriculum. Rubin's thinking evolved into an interest in aesthetic thought in education and his volume Artistry in Teaching, published in 1984, described teaching as performance with curriculum development being an essential personal dimension of this art.

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