NOTES
- Joseph J. Schwab comes to a somewhat similar conclusion in a recent article, “The Practical: A Language for Curriculum,” School Review, November, 1969.
- An interesting history of the twentieth-century development of curriculum theory can be written in terms of how curriculum thinkers attempted or did not attempt to conceptualize educational experience. For instance, John Dewey clearly identified the difficulties of the problem but did not resolve it, while Franklin Bobbitt wrestled with the problem for thirty years without ever clearly identifying the difficulties.
- Ralph Tyler, Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950).
- Ibid., pp. 5–6.
- Ibid., pp. 7–8.
- Interestingly, one of the primary “tensions” Tyler identifies is sexual. Yet what public high school, operating under the Tyler rationale, has ever presumed to meet this need by designing a course that provided overt sexual activity?
- Hilda Taba, Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962).
- Ibid., p. 287.
- Review of Educational Research, 39 (3), 1969.
- Ibid., pp. 369 and 374.
- Ibid., p. 302.
- Ibid., p. 312.
- Ibid., p. 313.
- Herbert M. Kliebard, “Curricular Objectives and Evaluation: A Reassessment,” The High School Journal, 51(6), 1968.
- Robert M. W. Travers, “Towards Taking the Fun Out of Building a Theory of Instruction,” Teachers College Record, LXVIII, October, 1966.
- Elliot Eisner, “Educational Objectives: Help or Hindrance?”, The School Review, 75(3), 1967.
- Perceiving Behaving Becoming, ed. by Arthur W. Combs (Washington: ASCD, 1962); New Insights and the Curriculum, ed. by Alexander Frazier (Washington: ASCD, 1963); Nurturing Individual Potential, ed. by A. Harry Passow (Washington: ASCD, 1964); Learning and Mental Health in the School, ed. by Walter B. Waetjen and Robert R. Leeper (Washington: ASCD, 1966); Humanizing Education: The Person in the Process, ed. by Robert R. Leeper (Washington: ASCD, 1967).
- Dwayne Huebner, “New Modes of Man's Relationship to Man,” in New Insights and the Curriculum, op. cit.; “Curricular Language and Classroom Meaning,” Language and Meaning; “Implications of Psychological Thought for the Curriculum,” in Influences in Curriculum Change, ed. by Glennys Unruh and Robert Leeper (Washington: ASCD, 1968); “The Tasks of the Curriculum Theorist,” a paper presented at the ASCD convention in Atlantic City, March, 1968.
- John S. Mann, “Functions of Curriculum Research,” Educational Leadership, October, 1966; “Curriculum Criticism,” The Record, 71(1), 1969.
- Carl R. Rogers, in Freedom to Learn (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E. Merrill, 1969), indicates that enhancing experience may be the best general way not only to promote learning but also to unleash the whole range of behaviors loosely termed “creativity.” The two conceptions of curriculum, then, may not be in as sharp opposition as might be supposed. Nonetheless, the normative conception obscures this idea as well.
- See especially Dwayne Huebner, “Curricular Language and Classroom Meaning” and Eugene T. Gendlin, “The Discovery of Felt Meaning” in Language and Meaning, op. cit.
- Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. by T. A. Sebeok (Cambridge: The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1960). The Jakobson paper is somewhat technical, and in this essay I will attempt neither to do justice to its finer points and complexities nor to treat it critically.
- Another reason is that what I have called the traditional curriculum theory and have identified closely with the Tyler rationale has taken almost no cognizance of the analysis of linguistic structures, even in those areas—particularly academic subjects—where both the curricula themselves and the ensuing learning are preponderantly linguistic. Presumably, this lack can be explained on the grounds that, in the actual practice of building curricula, linguistic knowledge is unimportant as long as subject matter specialists screen content to remove outright inconsistencies and to reconcile, usually intuitively, the language of the curricula with the nature of the subjects, and as long as psychologists fractionalize content according to the best information derivable from learning theories. A better explanation, however, is that regardless of the efficacy of any practice, to be truly rigorous in theory Tyler's panel of experts must include a linguist, even when the operationalized view of curriculum leads only to behavioristic outcomes which in no way take account of communication or meaning. In other words, the linguistic arrangement of a subject matter affects how it is learned. Even in these terms, then, Jakobson's set of coordinates should be helpful in filling another long-standing and generally unrecognized deficiency in curriculum thinking.
- Ibid., p. 352.
- Ibid., p. 353.
- Ibid.
- Some studies have taken carefully circumscribed portions of educational environments and attempted to assess their effects, usually on learning. Many studies of teacher personality are of this type.
- I would like to thank Dr. Richard A. Macksey for first pointing out the problem to me in these terms.
- Jakobson, op. cit., p. 356.
- Ibid., pp. 370–371.
- Ibid., pp. 375 and 377.
- “Ignored” may be a somewhat misleading term, since these functions may be regarded simply as incorporated into a pattern of stimuli intended only to manipulate behavior. In this case, however, all stimuli have the phatic function only, and all attempts to explain behavior are given over to efforts to control it.