The practical: a language for curriculum

Abstract

The field of curriculum by inveterate, unexamined, and mistaken reliance on theory has led to incoherence of curriculum and failure and discontinuity in actual schooling because theoretical constructions are ill-fitted and inappropriate to problems of actual teaching and learning. There are three major incompetencies of theory: failure of scope, the vice of abstraction and radical plurality. A renascence of the field of curriculum will occur only if curriculum energies are diverted from theoretic pursuits to three other modes of operation: the practical, the quasi-practical and the eclectic. The practical mode differs from the theoretic in many aspects: its outcome is a decision. Its subject matter is always something taken as concrete and particular and treated as indefinitely susceptible to circumstance. Its problems arise from states of affairs. Its method, ‘deliberation’, is not linear but complex, fluid and transactional aimed at identification of the desirable and at either attainment of the desired or alteration of desires. The quasi-practical is an extension of the practical methods and purposes to subject matters of increasing internal variety. The eclectic recognizes the usefulness of theory to curriculum decision, takes account of certain weaknesses of theory, and provides some degree of repair of these weaknesses.

Keywords:

• curriculum
• curriculum problems
• educational theories
• deliberation

Acknowledgement

This article was previously published by the National Education Association, Centre for the Study of Education, 1970. We are very grateful to the publisher for allowing us to reprint the article’s full text here.

Notes

1. For a more complete treatment of the principles of theoretic enquiry, see Schwab, J. J. (1960) What do scientists do? Behavioural Science, 5, 1–27; Schwab, J. J. (1964) The structure of the natural sciences. In G. W. Ford and L. Pugno (eds.), The Structure of Knowledge and the Curriculum (Chicago: Rand McNally), 31–49.

2. Brameld, T. (1961) A reconstructionist view of education. In P. H. Phenix (ed.), Philosophies of Education (New York: John Wiley & Sons), 106.

3. Rugg, H. (1966) Social construction through education. In J. M. Rich (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Education (Belmont, Calif: Wads-worth Publishing), 112.

4. It should be clear by now that ‘theory’ as used in this paper does not refer only to grand schemes such as the General Theory of Relativity, kinetic-molecular theory, the Bohr atom, the Freudian construction of a tripartite psyche. The attempt to give an account of human maturation by the discrimination of definite states (e.g. oral, anal, genital) and the effort to aggregate human competences into a small number of primary mental abilities—these too are theoretic. So also are efforts to discriminate a few large classes of persons and to attribute to them defining behaviors: e.g. the socially mobile, the culturally deprived, the creative.

5. Schwab, J. J (1969) College Curriculum and Student Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

6. It will be clear from these remarks that the conception of curricular method proposed here is immanent in the Tyler rationale. This rationale calls for a diversity of talents and insists on the practical and eclectic treatment of a variety of factors. Its effectiveness in practice is vitiated by two factors. First, its focus on ‘objectives’, with their great ambiguity and equivocation, provides far too little of the concrete matter required for deliberation and leads only to delusive consensus. Second, those who use it are not trained for the deliberative procedures it requires.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joseph J. Schwab

Joseph J. Schwab was the William Rainey Harper Professor of Natural Sciences and a professor of education at The University of Chicago. In 1974, on his retirement from the University of Chicago, he joined the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions. His books include The Teaching of Science: The Inglis Lecture [and] the Burton Lecture, 1961 (with Paul Brandwein; Harvard University Press, 1962), Genesis: The Student’s Guide (with L.I. Newman; United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education, 1967–1969), College Curriculum and Student Protest (University of Chicago Press, 1969), Genesis: The Adult’s Guide: A Publication of the United Synagogue Commission on Jewish Education (with P. Fishman and L.I. Newman; Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1973) and Science Curriculum and Liberal Education; Selected Essays (University of Chicago Press, 1978). He was the editor of the Biology Teachers’ Handbook (Wiley, 1963). He died in 1988.