… and Every Other Woman Giving Up Hope Today Curriculum is—Still—Politics Today, my twenty-something daughter stood in our kitchen, furious, crying, hurt and hopeless. This is the grown woman from whom—it seems to me—that only a few short weeks ago, I could wipe away those tears, take her back to bed and tell her another … Continue reading
Tag Archives: politics
Curriculum is Politics (Revisited)
The National Curriculum of England, Wales and Ireland (EWI). Curriculum has always been influenced by the politics of the day, and the need for standardization in education has been expressed historically and globally, examples include The Committee of Ten in late 19th century America, Franklin Bobbitt’s scientistic approach of 1918, or the Tyler Rationale of … Continue reading
Kliebard closes with life adjustment and some dodgy mental hygiene
Kliebard, H. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum. Ch. 11–Afterword, pp. 250–270, 271–292. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. Chapter 11, discussed life adjustment education in the late 1940s and 1950s. The pre-cursors of life adjustment, with what Kliebard terms its goal of “a curriculum attuned to the actual life functions of youth in preparation for … Continue reading
Pinar and the reconceptualists
Pinar, W. (1978b). The reconceptualization of curriculum studies. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 10(3). 205–214. doi: 10.1080/0022027780100303 The space-race and the field of curriculum study changed on October 4th 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched their simplest satellite, prosteishy sputnik (PS1), more commonly known as Sputnik I. In the 1960s, following perceived weaknesses in American … Continue reading
Post WWII curriculum reform—to do Greek or not to do Greek
Kliebard, H. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum. Ch. 9–10, pp. 200–249. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. Chapter 9, covers the years during and immediately after World War II and begins data-driven approach then the academic history of previous chapters. Predominantly, the immediate post-war period continued the trend of interest group ideologies, which Kliebard observed … Continue reading
Eclecticism and what was progressive education?
Kliebard, H. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum. Ch. 7–8, pp. 151–200. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer. The crisis of the Great Depression, with mass school closures and laying-off of teachers, brought a renewed interest in using education to reform society. Kliebard’s seventh chapter described how, the social meliorist position of blending social efficiency with … Continue reading
Curriculum is politics
Curtis, B. (1997). The State of Tutelage in Lower Canada, 1835–1851. History of Education Quarterly, 37(1), 25-43. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/369903. Most of the postmortem examinations of the Canadian Rebellion of 1837-38 identified one of its leading causes as faulty political education… (p. 25) Talking Point: Define education. The British wanted to use education to guard … Continue reading
Duncan McArthur: The history of a civic-minded politician that cared about education. Yes, there really appears to have been one.
Christou, T. (2013). The complexity of intellectual currents: Duncan McArthur and Ontario’s progressivist curriculum reforms. Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, (49)5, 677–697, Doi: 10.1080/00309230.2012.739181 The author described a period of “dramatic reorganisation” (p. 677), from 1937–1938 and 1941–1942, when progressivist reforms were directed amidst a complex reformist agenda, at a time … Continue reading