The Curriculum 1900 Present 2008

The Struggle for the The Struggle for the American CurriculumAmerican Curriculum

Curriculum Ferment 1900-Curriculum Ferment 1900-PresentPresent

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 QuadriviumArithmeticGeometryAstronomyMusic

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

Domination of Administrative Progressives

• 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

Domination of Administrative Progressives

• 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 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 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”

The School and Society

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

The School and Society

• 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

WasteResponse 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’sHumanists 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? ...

Advocates of “Child-Centered” Progressive Education

• 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.

Advocates of “Child-Centered” Progressive Education

• 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."

Advocates of “Child-Centered” Progressive Education

• 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.

Advocates of “Child-Centered” Progressive Education

• 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 Movement1970’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

TodayDoes 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