Curriculum, Theories of

Philosophical-Prescriptive Approaches to Curriculum Theory

Philosophical-prescriptive approaches to curriculum theory have their origins in philosophy of education and philosophy in general. John Dewey (1966, p. 328), for example, maintained that, because “education is a process of forming fundamental dispositions, intellectual and emotional, toward nature and fellow man,” philosophy, which seeks to define the good person leading the good life in the good society, may be considered “the general theory of education.” That is, the problem of philosophy was to determine fundamental intellectual and emotional dispositions toward nature and fellow man, while the corresponding problem of education was to implement those dispositions among the rising generation. Because the fundamental intellectual and emotional dispositions toward nature and fellow man that arise from philosophical work became the aims of education, curriculum theories could be as variegated as the range of ideas in the field of philosophy.

Curriculum scholars, in order to make sense of the variety of philosophical-prescriptive approaches to curriculum theory, typically organize curriculum theories into categorical schemes. While around the mid-twentieth century, educational philosophers organized educational thought around prevailing philosophical perspectives, namely, the Aristotelian, [Page 252]Thomistic, absolute idealist, realist, and pragmatic, Theodore Brameld identified four more specific categories of educational philosophies that held implications for curriculum: progressivism, essentialism, perennialism, and reconstructionism. Later, Daniel and Laurel Tanner updated Brameld's scheme by substituting experimentalism for progressivism and adding romantic naturalism and existentialism, referring to these categories as “educational theories.” William Schubert collapsed these categories into three curricular “orientations,” intellectual traditionalist, social behaviorist, and experientialist, which respectively emphasized academics, efficiency, and experience as dominant aspects of the educational situation. Elliot Eisner proposed the following curriculum “ideologies”: religious orthodoxy, rational humanism, progressivism, critical theory, reconceptualism, and cognitive pluralism. This brief and partial listing of categorical schemes for philosophical-prescriptive curriculum theories reveals several important points, including the migration of these theories from philosophy to philosophy of education to educational theory and then to curriculum theory, as well as the sheer variety of curriculum theories. Also noteworthy is the reality that curriculum theories often originate from sources outside the academic field of curriculum; because they have implications for determining what knowledge is of most worth, such theories nevertheless hold great import for curriculum theorists. No categorical scheme, of course, is comprehensive or conclusive. For present purposes, however, philosophical-prescriptive curriculum theories will be organized into the following major categories: traditional-academic and progressive-experimentalist.

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