Curriculum Theory: Give Me a 'For Instance'

Often, in our attempts to make sense out of social and intellectual movements, we use guideposts to set off the route our subject has taken. The publication of Origin of Species in 1859 is frequently taken as the starting point for a massive intellectual upheaval that went far beyond the realm of scientific inquiry alone. There is, of course, nothing in the curriculum field comparable to Darwin's revolutionary theory. Nevertheless, we do have a few modest guideposts which help us mark our way in the development of curriculum as a field of study. One is the publication in 1918 of Franklin Bobbitt's The Curriculum, which set off curriculum as a field of professional specialization in its own right and not simply, as had been considered earlier, an offshoot of general educational considerations. While the publication of Bobbitt's book cannot be said to have actually initiated the movement toward a distinctive field of study called curriculum, it is reflective of that movement as it developed in the early part of this century, at least insofar as it embodied the particular assumptions and predispositions that were to dominate the thinking of those who were identified with the curriculum field for at least half a century and extending to the present. The publication of The Curriculum may be taken as the starting point of the era of so-called scientific curriculum making with all that implied for how the curriculum was to be conceived, how the development of the curriculum was to take place, and what constituted the criteria of success by which the curriculum was to be judged. A second milestone in the development of the field was the publication, in 1927, of the Twenty-Sixth Yearbook of the National Society for