In its organizational aspect the curriculum is an authoritative prescription for the course of study of a school or system of schools. In their traditional form, such prescriptions set out the content to be covered at a grade level or in a course or sequences of courses, along with recommended or prescribed methods of teaching. In their contemporary form such prescriptions have been re-presented as national and state standards, outlining outcomes to be achieved by schools without prescribing the specific bodies of content to be covered or methods of teaching to be used.
Curricula in both of these senses are seen as defining what schools purposefully do. However, most scholars and administrators who work with curricula or evaluate the impact of curriculum prescriptions or reforms do not believe that "curricula-as-documents" direct the work of schools in significant ways. Curricula-as-documents are more often than not developed after the fact, and are based on existing practices of teachers or a simple listing of the content of textbooks being used. Further, many teachers are not familiar with the curriculum their district has mandated.
Nevertheless, curricula and curricular mandates are the objects of persistent and hotly contested debates around schooling, and are widely taken to be important. Interest groups, governments, school districts, and their staffs devote much time and attention to discussions of the curriculum. Why does the idea of the curriculum and curriculum reform assume such importance in educational discourse and policymaking? Is it possible to direct the work of schooling?
Curricula, Education, and Schooling
All curricula emerge from ideas about what should be taught and learned, and how such teaching and learning might best be undertaken and then certified. As a result the fundamental question lying behind the prescription and development of all curricula is often seen as "What knowledge is of most worth?"–because it is the knowledge that is of most worth that education should, seemingly, reflect. In its ideological or philosophical aspect, much curricular thought seeks to articulate reasoned starting points for one or another form of curriculum. Such work can accept the framework of contemporary understanding of the scope and nature of education and schooling. It can be critical, seeking to articulate the hidden assumptions around such categories as race, gender, and class that have driven, and drive, schooling in inappropriate, even morally wrong, directions.
However, looked at more analytically, the curriculum of the school reflects layered cultural understandings of what is considered necessary for young people to know or experience if they are to take their place in the social and cultural order. Thus, as the central component of a pervasive modern institution, the curriculum is necessarily a part of all of the sociological and cultural ambiguities within societies. As such, the scope and nature of the curriculum are viewed as critically important for teachers, parents, cultural critics, interest groups, and the employers of the graduates of the school. As the curriculum as an idea is seen through the eyes of all such groups, it becomes a mirror that reflects different visions of the society and culture, and the tensions within the society around, say, the proper nature of the work of schooling and/or status-attainment and employment possibilities. As a result inevitable and unresolved differences of viewpoint characteristically surface around all discussions of the curriculum as a symbol of both a normative order for education and of the quality and character of what schools are understood as doing.
For these reasons the history of curriculum thinking and practice is marked, on the one hand, by popular and professional conflict and debate about what the curriculum should be and how teaching should be undertaken and, on the other hand, by rationalization of the good and/or bad consequences of one or another curriculum. What, for example, should the curriculum that is most appropriate for young people be based on?
The needs of the economy for human resources
National or international ideals
The need for societal and cultural change or preservation
Ameliorating pervasive distinctions of gender and race
The set of perennially "essential" and fundamental forms of knowledge and ways of thinking
The forms of a life that is most worth living
As a result of the competition between such starting points, there is political, cultural, and policy conflict around what should be authoritatively prescribed in curricula, how teaching should be undertaken, and how schooling should be organized.
The classification of such different conceptions of education and educating has been one of the core approaches used to give both teachers and laypeople a framework for approaching the normative issues that circle around such starting points for education and curriculum building. Often, as with Elliot Eisner and Elizabeth Vallance's 1974 classification, these issues are presented as involving perennial controversies. Thus in their frame there is a web of controversy built around an unresolved conflict among five classical curriculum "conceptions": (1) curriculum as the development of cognitive processes; (2) curriculum as technology; (3) curriculum as self-actualization or consumatory experience; (4) curriculum for social learning; and (5) curriculum for academic rationalization. But Eisner and Vallance also point to other ways of framing such debates: child-centered versus society-centered; futurist, that is, socially reconstructive, versus presentist or adaptive; values-centered education versus skills-training; and humanist or existential versus behaviorist models of education and teaching.
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