… 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
This is just a quick post to take a look at a brief quotation from a paper I was re-reading this week… Because the curriculum ideologies represent ideal types abstracted from reality, and not reality itself, even though educators will be spoken of as believing or behaving in accordance with certain beliefs, it is difficult … Continue reading
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
Historically, curriculum questions have been seen to address a number of major themes… Citizenship/societal needs: Where it has been argued that schooling should aim to provide citizens, ready to participate in a democracy; or even schooling as a politically subversive activity (Counts, 1932; Freire, 2008). Individual growth/self-actualization: Education for a life of the mind; education … Continue reading
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, 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
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
Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education, pp. 17–23, 25–31. New York, NY: Touchstone. Traditional vs. Progressive Education “Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.” (p.17) Dewey’s opening statement may fit well for belief, for systems … Continue reading
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
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
Talk Curriculum 