The Curriculum 1900 Present 2008

The Struggle for the American Curriculum Curriculum Ferment 1900-Present

A New Vision of Schooling
1800-1830
The monitorial method
Teachers monitored or tutored students
Idiosyncratic
The Lancastrian system
A course of study
Units of work
Textbooks
McGuffy readers
Blueback spellers

Standardization
The Lancastrian system led to a common (standardized) course of study
Textbooks gave teachers a “default” course of study
Grades and grade levels
William Harvey Wells- Chicago Superintendent of schools (1856-1864)

Social Transformation
Social Change resulted in a radically altered vision of the role of schooling
The standardizing effect of the “Printed Word”
The penny press
Mass distribution of books
Utopian and Muckraking novels
Railroads
Travel broke down aspects of provincialism
Industrialization – the factory system
Immigration
The Panic of 1893
Edward Bellamy- author of “Looking Backward”

The “Status Quo” 1890
The Doctrine of Mental Discipline
Plato’s Theory of Forms
The world of ideas (forms) leads to perfect Truth and Good. It is eternal
The material world is imperfect and constantly changing
Certain subjects had the ability to strengthen
Memory, Reasoning, Will power, Imagination, Character
Metaphor- the mind is like a muscle- it needs the right kind of exercise.
Christian Wolff

1828 Report to the Yale Faculty
A defense of the traditional curriculum
Jeremiah Day & James K. Kingsley
Two Main Functions of Education
“ Discipline of the Mind”
The ability to think
“ Furniture of the Mind”
Knowledge
Discipline of the Mind is most important
James Kingsley

Mental Discipline Curriculum
The Classics
Greek
Latin
Great Literature
The Trivium
Grammar, rhetoric, logic
The Quadrivium
Arithmetic
Geometry
Astronomy
Music

Instruction
Recitation
Verbal memorization
Skill drills
Problem sets
translation
Strict Discipline
Necessary for a disciplined mind

Reform
Theoretical problems
Why was the classic curriculum necessary for “mental exercise”?
Professional Educators
The National Education Association

The High School Curriculum
The NEA Committee of ten
Lead By Charles Eliot (President of Harvard)
Believed in “Modern Liberal Arts”
A curriculum that was “College Prep”
A curriculum that was “Life Prep”
Four courses of study were recommended but there was not distinction between college and life preparation

The Struggle for the American Curriculum
The Humanists
The Curriculum should reflect our Western Cultural Heritage
The Social Efficiency Educators
The curriculum should produce an efficient, smoothly running society
The Developmentalists
The Curriculum should be based upon the natural order of the development of the child
The Social Meliorists
The curriculum should bring about social change

Joseph Mayer Rice

Social Efficiency Movement
John Franklin Bobbitt
Frederick Winslow Taylor
David Sneeden
Ross Finney
Elwood C. Cubberley
Leonard Ayres
Edward Lee Thorndike
School Survey Movement
The Boise Study

Domination of Administrative Progressives
Structure of Schooling
Schooling broken into specialized parts
Kindergarten
Elementary
Junior high
High school
Vocational education
College
Graduate or professional school

Hierarchy of authority established
Administrative power is extended
Power over budgets
Curricular control
Teacher evaluation- hiring and firing
Workplace conditions
Teacher response
Compliance
Establishment of unions
NEA
Emma Flagg Young
Margaret Haley in Chicago

Social differentiation
Tracking by social/economic class
I.Q. and other standardized testing
Behavioral Psychology dominates
Schools operate as bureaucracies
Administrators
Central
School
Teachers
Support Staff
B. F. Skinner

Humanists/Mental Disciplinarians
"Guardians" of ancient tradition tied to the power of reason and the finest elements of Western cultural heritage.
Humanists sought to reinterpret and preserve "revered" traditions and values in a rapidly changing society .
Charles W. Eliot
President of Harvard

William Torrey Harris
Basic function of the school is for the development of reason
He sought to preserve the humanist ideal by incorporating into the curriculum the finest elements of Western civilization
The “five windows of the soul”
arithmetic and mathematics
geography
history
Grammar
literature and art

Child-Study Movement/Developmentalists
Curriculum should allow for the natural order of development of the child.
Scientific data important with respect to different stages of child and adolescent development and also to nature of learning.
General agreement among the developmentalists was that schools thwarted the child's basic need for activity by treating children as passive receptacles and presenting them with a program of studies that ran contrary to their natural tendencies and predilections

G. Stanley Hall
Schools are in need of drastic reform in order to bring their program of studies in line with scientific findings about the nature of child life
The contents of children's minds (1883)
The child recapitulates in his or her individual development the stages that the whole human race traversed throughout the course of history (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny)
Play until the age of eight
Read myths and legends during the “savage” stage.
“ The guardians of the young, should strive first of all to keep out of nature's way, and to prevent harm, and merit the proud title of defenders of the happiness and rights of children.”

Child-Study Movement William Heard Kilpatrick
Foundations of Method (1925)
The Project Method- “Education [should] be considered as life itself and not as a mere preparation for later living.”
The child was the key to revitalized curriculum
Curriculum planning starts with life... with subject matter brought in only incidentally as it bears on real problems
Learning is synonymous with purposeful activity

Social Melorists
Individuals have a moral responsibility to work for social justice
Schools are a major force for social change and social justice.
Schools were the vehicles to create a new social vision and to empower the young

Lester Frank Ward Dynamic Sociology 1913

Social Meliorists
Schools are a major force for social change and social justice. Schools were the vehicles to create a new social vision.
George Counts
Response to Sumner-“The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over”(1884) with “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” (1932)
Harold O. Rugg
Social Reconstructionism
Boyd Bode
Progressive Education Association

George S. Counts - Social Meliorist
Dare the School Build a New Social Order?
He was among the first to reflect on the undercurrent of uneasiness about American society during the 1930’s and connect it to American schools
He argued that the American school system preserved and maintained the existing social order
Counts challenged schools to meet the social issues of the day

John Dewey
Dewey tried to synthesize the positions of the four interest groups
Humanists
Developmentalists
Scientific Efficiency Educators
Social Meliorists

Dewey began as a philosopher/psychologist
Pragmatism/Instrumentalism
Philosophy must be useful
Psychology must be about the individual and the social

Dewey’s Problem-Solving Approach
Avoid “Either-Or” positions
Always consider the consequences of a decision
Experiment
The scientific method

Purpose of Education
What is the “problem”?
Industrial organization has replaced the home and the neighborhood
Schools must change to provide learning that is:
Real
Immediate
Able to initiate children into the social world
Create a miniature community

Criticism of Humanist Curriculum
He rejected the idea that the interests of the child should be subordinated to future “rewards”
He rejected Harris’s “five windows to the soul” because:
They didn’t address human experience in a unified way- they were formal, artificial, separated
They were presented as “given” and “finished”

Criticisms of Developmentalists
The Culture-Epochs model was too simplistic
The curriculum was imposed in the same way as the humanist curriculum

The Dewey School
A “Laboratory” school
“ Occupations”
Evolution of basic social activities
Growing food
Constructing shelter
Making clothing
Traditional subjects taught by “doing” not telling
Harmonize individual and social ends

The School and Society
“ What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children”

Social change (industrial revolution) has had a dramatic affect upon education
Household
Neighborhood
Factory (p. 8-12)

Occupations
Methods of living
Genuine forms of active community life
Schools should reproduce in miniature the activities fundamental to community life as a whole.

The four instincts that characterize children’s behavior
The Social instinct (communicative)
The Constructive instinct
The instinct of investigation
The expressive instinct
Spinning wool

Waste Response to the Social Efficiency Movement
All waste is due to isolation
Organization is getting things in connection with one another.
Administrative waste comes from
Friction
Duplication
Lack of transitions.

Waste
From the standpoint of the child, the great waste in school comes from his inability to utilize the experiences he gets outside of the school in any complete and free way within the school itself, while, on the other hand, he is unable to apply in daily life what he is learning in school.

Child Psychology
The school should be a laboratory of applied psychology
The individual mind is a function of social life.
Curriculum should be related to stages of growth.

Attention
A person who has gained the power of “reflective attention”
The power to hold problems and questions before the mind;
Has developed “Habits of Mind and is, therefore,
Educated.

Colonel Francis Parker Applied Dewey’s principles to a create a Progressive school in Chicago. Dewey sent his own children to Parker’s school

Pockets of Progressivism
New York 1920-1940
The Activity program
An experimental program involving 69 elementary schools and over 70,000 students
Child centered
Flexible scheduling
Activity or project based curriculum
Freedom for teachers to determine instruction
Dalton Plan
High school
Individualized learning programs

Pockets of Progressivism
Denver 1920-1940
The eight year study
Experimental design
Core curriculum (areas of living)
Personal living
Immediate personal/social relationships
Social/Civic relationships
Economic relationships
Integrated, project-based
Teachers controlled the curriculum

The 1950s-1960s
Post World War II saw a growing criticism of American Education
Sputnik (1957) gave evidence that Russia was doing a superior job of educating it’s youth.
Cold War implications

1950’s Humanists after Sputnik (Soviet satellite launched in 1957)
Curriculum reform projects are from academic departments in major universities.
The attempt to replace the academic subject as the basic building block of the curriculum was brought to abrupt end
Longstanding emphasis on local efforts at curriculum change replaced by pattern of centrally controlled curriculum revision.
“ Back to Basics” movement

The 1950s-1960s
Arthur Bestor
“ Educational Wastelands”
Rudolf Flesch
Why Johnny Can’t Read
Admiral Hyman Rickover
Education and Freedom

The 1950s-1960s
Admiral Hyman Rickover
Education and Freedom
Dewey's insistence on making the child's interest the determining factor in planning curricula has led to substitution of know-how subjects for solid learning and to the widespread tendency of schools to instruct pupils in the minutiae of daily life--how to set a table correctly, how to budget one's income, how to use cameras, telephones, and consumer credit--the list is endless.
Add to this that Dewey insisted the schoolroom must mirror the community and you find classrooms cluttered with cardboard boxes, children learning arithmetic by keeping store, and education stuck in the concrete and unable to carry the child from there to abstract concepts and ideas. Our young people are therefore deprived of the tremendous intellectual heritage of Western civilization which no child can possibly discover by himself; he must be led to it."

Influence of the Federal Government
1954- Brown vs. the Board of Education- Topeka, Kansas
Rejection of the “separate but equal” clause
1958- National Defense Education Act
Federal funds to improve science, math, foreign language instruction
1965- Elementary and Secondary Education Act
Johnson’s “War on Poverty” (Title 1)

Advocates of “Child-Centered” Progressive Education
John Holt
How Children Fail
Children are subject peoples. School for them is a kind of jail.
Do they not, to some extent, escape and frustrate the relentless, insatiable pressure of their elders by withdrawing the most intelligent and creative parts of their minds from the scene?
Is this not at least a partial explanation of the extraordinary stupidity that otherwise bright children so often show in school? The stubborn and dogged "I don't get it" with which they meet the instructions and explanations of their teachers--may it not be a statement of resistance as well as one of panic and flight? ...

John Holt
How Children Fail
We encourage children to act stupidly, not only by scaring and confusing them, but by boring them, by filling up their days with dull, repetitive tasks that make little or no claim on their attention or demands on their intelligence.
Our hearts leap for joy at the sight of a roomful of children all slogging away at some imposed task, and we are all the more pleased and satisfied if someone tells us that the children don't really like what they are doing. We tell ourselves that this drudgery, this endless busywork, is good preparation for life, and we fear that without it children would be hard to "control."
But why must this busywork be so dull? Why not give tasks that are interesting and demanding? Because, in schools where every task must be completed and every answer must be right, if we give children more demanding tasks they will be fearful and will instantly insist that we show them how to do the job. When you have acres of paper to fill up with pencil marks, you have no time to waste on the luxury of thinking.

Johathan Kozol
Death at an Early Age
I noticed this one day while I was out in the auditorium doing reading with some children: Classes were taking place on both sides of us. The Glee Club and the sewing classes were taking place at the same time in the middle. Along with the rest, there was a 5th grade remedial math group, comprising six pupils, and there were several other children whom I did not know about simply walking back and forth.
Before me were six 4th graders, most of them from the disorderly 4th grade and several of them children who had had substitute teachers during much of the previous two years. It was not their fault; they had done nothing to deserve substitute teachers. And it was not their fault now if they could not hear my words clearly since it also was true that I could barely hear theirs. Yet the way that they dealt with this dilemma, at least on the level at which I could observe it, was to blame, not the school but themselves. Not one of those children would say to me: "Mr. Kozol, it's too noisy." Not one of them would say: "Mr. Kozol, what's going on here? This is a crazy place to learn."

James Herndon
The way it spose to be
How to survive your native land
Grouping by ability, formerly anathema in the district, has caught on. We group them high, low, and average in math and science; English teachers are waiting their turn. Below that we've tried "remedial" classes, and above that, "enrichment." (The remedial kids complain that they ain't learning nothing but that baby stuff, and the enriched that they do the same thing as the other kids, just twice as much of it.)
We "experiment" a lot. We teach Spanish experimentally to everyone, then drop it experimentally. We experiment with slow learners, with nonachievers, with core programs, team teaching, with "innovative" programs. These programs, being only "experiments," remain on the fringe of things; the general curriculum, not being an experiment at all, isn't affected by them.

Herbert Kohl
36 Children
I put an assignment on the board before the children arrived in the morning and gave the class the choice of reading, writing, or doing what was on the board.
At no time did any child have to write, and whenever possible I let the children write for as long as their momentum carried them. Time increasingly became the servant of substance in the classroom. At the beginning of the semester I had tried to use blocks of time in a predetermined, preplanned way--first reading, then social studies, arithmetic, and so forth. Then I broke the blocks by allowing free periods. This became confining and so I allowed the length of periods to vary according to the children's and my interest and concentration.
Finally we reached a point where the class could pursue things without the burden of a required amount of work that had to be passed through every day. This meant that there were many things that the class didn't "cover"; that there were days without arithmetic and weeks without spelling or my dear "vocabulary."
Many exciting and important things were missed as well as many dull things. But the children learned to explore and invent, to become obsessed by things that interested them and follow them through libraries and books back into life; they learned to believe in their own curiosity and value the intellectual and literary, perhaps even in a small way the human, quest without being overly burdened with a premature concern for results .

The Open Classroom Movement 1970’s
The British Influence
A.S. Neill & Summerhill
The British Infant Schools
Joseph Featherstone
Where Children learn
Alternative schools
“ Free schools”

The Open Classroom Movement
Vito Perrone-
Dean of the Center for Teaching & Learning, University of North Dakota
“ Open Classroom”
Learning centers
Team teaching
Active – project based learning
“ multi-media”
Child-centered curriculum

The Open Classroom Movement
Vito Perrone-
Dean of the Center for Teaching & Learning, University of North Dakota
“ Bottom Up” reform
Teacher training
Workshop model
Mass distribution of materials

Today Does Progressive Education Exist?
Pockets on the margins
Hybrids
Cooperative learning
Project based education
Middle School model
James Beane
Current research from Cognitive and Developmental Psychology
School “Choice” models
Charter schools
Alternative schools

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The Curriculum 1900 Present 2008

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