Being Practical with Schwab

ABSTRACT

One of a series of comments on a set of papers by Joseph Schwab concluded by “The Practical 4: Something for Curriculum Professors to Do” (Curriculum Inquiry, 13:3, Fall 1983), this paper undertakes a review of Schwab's conception of “the practical” in relation to curriculum by examining the function of deliberative thinking and treating Schwab's own proposals as an example of such thought. Initially, therefore, attention is concentrated on the proposals for institutional relocation of curricular decision-making proposed by Schwab in his concluding article. Reflection on the kind of organ for deliberation proposed by Schwab leads eventually to consideration of the deliberative function itself, and it is argued that Schwab's treatment of deliberation fails to take account of the autonomous character of deliberative (in this case, educational) thinking and probably rests upon a confusion of two incompatible conceptions of the relation of thought and action. Fundamentally, this amounts to arguing that Schwab's treatment fails to offer for or even to make clear the necessity of a conception of education as a practice in educational deliberation.