Curriculum What Are the Dominant Influences on Essay

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Curriculum

What are the dominant influences on school curriculum in America? What was the approach to curriculum development in the past? Those issues are addressed in this paper.

The Literature on Curriculum and its Influences

Philosopher and educator John Dewey wrote in 1906 that there was a wide gulf between the child of that era and the curriculum being offered. He posed a picture of the "…narrow but personal world of the child" put up against the "…impersonal but infinitely extended world of space and time" (Dewey, 1906, p. 11). In other words, Dewey was trying to make the point that curricula should attempt to allow the child to proceed "…step-by-step to master" each separate parts of a lesson rather than present "…an abstract principle of logical classification and arrangement" (11-12). The road is long when you're asking a child to view a subject in its entirety, Dewey continued (12), but it is far more "…easily traveled" when it is broken down into simple steps.

Dewey had a way of using metaphors and illustrations to make his points. On page 14 the iconic author and philosopher asserts that "Subject-matter is but spiritual food, possible nutritive material" but it "cannot digest itself" and it can't turn "bone into muscle and blood.

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" To students in 1906 (and this is likely true today in most instances), raw facts (grammar, arithmetic, geography) can be repulsive to the student and expecting the child to "swallow and digest the unpalatable morsel" is unreasonable (38).

Meanwhile the "Reconceptualization of Curriculum Studies" by curriculum theorist William F. Pinar offers a bit of the past and of the present. Pinar explains that curriculum work "…tends to be field-based" but the writing of curriculum leans towards what the teachers need (Pinar, 2004, p. 149). And in the past those who wrote curricula were former teachers, school practitioners that tended not to care much about research into the dynamics of today's classroom and how students are changing along with society. Not until the 1930s did the development of curricula become a part of universities and colleges, Pinar explains (150).

Today the "traditional curriculum field has been declared terminally ill" or in fact it has already been laid in the ground, Pinar continues on page 151. Why is this true? The….....

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