Katie Pickrell
Molly Hamm
School & Society
21 September 2017
The Effects of Each Curriculum Tradition on Education
What students learn and, consequently, what their futures hold depends largely on the approach their teachers and administrators take in providing them with a quality education. What should and should not be included in curriculum is often determined by the preexisting beliefs of those who are in charge. Their thinking can often be defined by looking at the four curriculum traditions: Humanist, social efficiency, developmentalist and social meliorist. The humanist approach, also known as traditional curriculum, focuses on transmitting knowledge from one generation by emphasizing “the finest elements of [Anglo] Western heritage” (Kliebard). Social efficiency agrees with the humanist tradition so far as the purpose of education goes, but believes that in order for schools to be the most efficient, they should teach students according to preexisting ability in order to produce the most effective pupils for the job market. The developmentalist tradition focuses on individual students and what will help them achieve their full potential regardless of the society they are being educated in, often relying on project-based and applicable education methods. Social meliorism shares the focus that developmentalism has on project- and communication-based learning, but also sees schools as agents for social change and asserts that teachers should act as advisers to students, teaching them to think critically and for themselves about the world around them and the issues within it.
I. Humanist
Intellectually, there are three functions of traditional curriculum: To acquire cognitive skills, substantive knowledge and inquiry skills. In order to achieve these intellectual goals, traditional curriculum focuses in on what it considers to be the most important subjects, basics like math, science and English. The belief of those who most closely follow the traditional approach is that education’s job is to produce an “efficient and productive workforce that will benefit the economy and maintain the country’s competitiveness in global markets (SSR). The curriculum leaves little room for exploration of other subjects and gives little control to the students. By organizing subjects from most to least importance, humanists often devalue vocational subjects, which can prepare students for life outside of school, while putting too much focus on abstract subjects that have little to no practical use outside of the educational realm (Bleazby).
Humanist curriculum often focuses deeply on American thought and writing in an attempt to promote patriotism, assimilate immigrants and educate future citizens for the preexisting political order. This is often problematic, as it does not allow students to study and explore other cultures or gain a proper worldview. For example, in a traditional classroom, only the positive aspects of American history will be given much attention while the negative aspects will be dramatized or skipped over altogether. This phenomenon often erases the struggles of minority groups within the United States and distorts the bigger picture of the international community. It also only allows students a very select set of views and creates a definition of knowledge that may not be applicable to all.
Politically, traditional curriculum is also focused on ensuring order through conformity to given social structures and legal practices. This curriculum tradition is most in line with the functionalist theory, which believes that every social institution has a certain task to carry out in order to ensure society runs as it should. Traditional curriculum sees that the role of schools is to promote the current social order by passing on similar knowledge and traditions through each generation. The tradition also sees the teacher as “the authority and expert who dispenses knowledge to students” rather than as a someone who challenges students to think for themselves, as we see in other traditions.
II. Social Efficiency
Social efficiency curriculum, much like traditional curriculum, believes that schools should act as a mechanism to sort students into job slots that will best serve the economy. But unlike traditional curriculum, social efficiency believes in creating “different programs of study according to differences in students’ abilities” (SSR). This theory relies heavily on standardized testing to filter students into the proper corresponding program. Students who are considered able to learn and succeed will be placed on a track similar to what is available to all students in the traditional curriculum, but those who are not will be placed into classes that stress vocational skills that may come in handy without achieving a higher education.
Outside of standardized testing, proponents of social efficiency focus in on other defining characteristics of students to decide what kind of classes would be most suitable. For example, women and men would presumably have different professional and social roles, so their classes should take that into consideration; for women, that meant limiting curriculum to “general literacy and homemaking skills” (SSR). According to John Franklin Bobbitt, dividing classrooms by gender would make for the most efficient system as men and women have different needs “along lines of vocation, recreation, civic labors and personal hygiene.”
The social efficiency tradition, in many ways, prohibits students who may have potential to learn from doing so through a series of setbacks and tracks that micromanage the education of each student to produce the most efficient results. The labels we assigned to students based on their standardized-testing performance often “fatally leads to social, economic and educational inequalities and injustice,” and they are often based off preexisting class differences (Chomsky). Social efficiency believes that class, gender and racial differences are not something that can be transcended with the help of education; rather they are permanent features of the society we live in.
III. Developmentalist
The developmentalist curriculum has the least impact on schools in the United States (SSR). Unlike traditional or social efficiency curriculum, the tradition focuses around the needs of the individual student rather than the society it will eventually live in. Curriculum in developmentalist tradition is comprised of both experiential and intellectual knowledge, thus teaching in both the context of the real world and abstracted from it (SSR).
Students, instead of being divided into age groups as they are in conventional American schools, are taught when they are ready and willing to be taught. This methodology allows for students of different age groups to learn from each other “in ways explicitly related to certain areas of development, including language, social and physical development” (Edwards, Blaise and Hammer). In the same manner, teachers do not act as authority figures who are there solely to spread information from one generation from the next; instead, they act as “advisors, supporters, observers, learners, facilitators and senior partners” who encourage and support students as they learn without domineering the content or the methods of the students (SSR). Maximizing the interactions between students, specifically of different ages, allows students to “take the lead” while teachers act more as supervisors (Edwards, Blaise and Hammer).
In the developmental tradition, concepts are taught the an “integrated curriculum” which combines multiple subjects to be taught in unison with the use of “thematically organized units” (Edwards, Blaise and Hammer). Much of the learning is hands on, and students acquire knowledge by taking what they already know and “extending that knowledge to a new situation” (Kroll and Black). The curriculum emphasizes the present and the future rather than focusing on the past. This, combined with the tradition’s lack of structure, allows students to formulate their own critical thinking skills that encompass many subjects, rather than teaching concrete and mutually-exclusive lessons for math, history, language and so forth.
IV. Social Meliorist
In terms of impact on American education, the social meliorist tradition is the second-least important, right behind developmentalism. Social meliorism envisions the education system as a vessel for promoting social change by focusing deeply on the social and cultural context surrounding it. Teachers, in this view, should act as activists for social reform. The social meliorist tradition thus shares very close ties with critical theory. Critical theory insinuates that schools have the ability to transform culture rather than reproducing it. The main focus of critical theory is the question of who holds how much power. Instead of accepting the current power structures, critical theorists question and contest “hidden assumptions that govern society — especially those about the legitimacy of power relationships,” as does the social meliorist curriculum tradition (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner).
Critical theorists believe that schools are sites of power struggles between dominant and marginal classes and scrutinize the idea that schools are a place of democratic growth. Michel Foucault describes these differences in meaning as a difference in “general politics” and “truth” that varies from one society to the next. Each society, based on its own historical context and power structure, “has its regime of truth… the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true” (Foucault). Knowledge, and education, thus can never be value-free or independent of the power structures that it operates within; society is what differentiates “right” from “wrong.”
But in spite of the harmful and oppressive power structures that exist, conflict theorists remains hopeful because of the power of human agency. Schools can act as a tool of social and cultural change if teachers successfully encourage their students to become more politically aware and involved.
V. Personal Philosophy of Schooling: Social Meliorist & Developmentalist
While reading through School and Society and other assigned readings and engaging in discussion during class, the developmentalist tradition is what first stuck out to me as the most effective way of teaching; by treating each student as an individual and allowing them to thrive in a fluid and liberal environment, I think you can most effectively teach critical thinking and inspire curiosity. While I do believe that it’s important to learn the basics of math, science, history, writing and other subjects, I also believe that it’s possible to teach every subject in a way that’s applicable and coherent. For example, with the exception of one class where we actually built toy cars and studied real-life statistics, I’ve always hated math (despite being fairly good at it) largely because the way that is was taught seemed irrelevant and disingenuous. The age fluidity of the tradition also stuck out to me. I started pre school when I was barely three years old, and was started kindergarten on my fifth birthday. Since then, I’ve always been one of the youngest in my grade, and some of my peers have even been two years older than me. When I was in third grade, the teachers noticed I wasn’t learning anything and suggested moving me up a class. My parents thought because of my social development, it would be a bad idea. To this day, that upsets me because I know I wasn’t challenged at any point in my education until I reached college and could choose how many classes to take an how quick (I’ll graduate in two years). It’s not that I was in a low-performing school district (I went to school in Douglas County, which is one of the wealthiest areas in the United States), but I did most of my learning on my own because I was one of the only kids that genuinely loved to read.
Moving forward in the text and reading into the social meliorist tradition, I was intrigued by how the curriculum is based around current events and project-based learning. It seemed to me like it would be the tradition that moves away from this idea of fixed knowledge and grade-based assessment (which, despite how easy school has been for me, has never been my strong suit). I know that many of my friends with 2.5s are smarter than my friends with 4.0s, but because of the way the education system is set up, no one else would ever assume that. In my view, the education system is ran in a way that privileges those who abide by traditional education methods and punishes those who learn in an unconventional way.
My preference of these two traditions is obviously largely inspired by my own educational experience. Although the school I went to was in a fairly traditional district, I managed to cheat the system by loading up on history and science classes during my freshman and sophomore years so I could take a total of 12 journalism classes by the time I graduated (not including periods where I was the journalism adviser’s teaching assistant, or the writing-based classes that I took). Looking back on my educational experience, it’s quite obvious that my journalism adviser took the approach of a social meliorist: Instead of formulating strict lessons, our adviser allowed the program to be entirely student-ran, and didn’t even give us ideas for stories or content. All he did was encourage us to be curious about what was going on around us. During high school, I published over 200 stories, blogs, photo galleries and videos and discovered what I was personally passionate about all thanks to one teacher who was able to teach the majority of my classes during my junior and senior year.
Essentially, I don’t think it’s necessarily what a teacher teaches that makes or breaks a students academic career; I think it’s how the material is taught. If I didn’t have a teacher that encouraged me to think for myself, I probably wouldn’t have found any motivation in high school or going on through the rest of my life (not to mention if I wasn’t born into a wealthy district with never-ending opportunities for its affluent students). Likewise, if I didn’t have a teacher that taught me to think of everything in the context of the world we live in, I would’ve never formed my own opinions or strived to understand the differing opinions that others hold. Works Cited
Bleazby, Jennifer. “Why Some School Subjects Have a Higher Status than Others: The Epistemology of the Traditional Curriculum Hierarchy.” Oxford Review of Education, vol. 41, no. 5, Oct. 2015, pp. 671–689.
CU Boulder School of Education. School and Society: A Reader in the Social Foundations of Education and Educational Diversity. Kendall Hunt, 2010.
Herbert M. Kliebard. The Struggle for the American Curriculum 1893-1958. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986.
John Franklin Bobbitt. The Elimination of Waste in Education. The University of Chicago, 1912.
Linda Kroll and Allen Black. “Developmental Theory and Teaching Methods: A Pilot Study of a
Teacher Education.” The Elementary School Journal, vol. 93, no. 4, March 1993, pp. 417-441.
Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Pantheon Books, 1980.
Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan S. Turner. The Dominant Ideology Thesis. George Allen & Unwin, 1984.
Noam Chomsky. “Standardized Testing as an Assault on Humanism and Critical Thinking in Education.” Radical Pedagogy, vol. 11, no. 1, 2014.
Susan Edwards, Mindy Blaise and Marie Hammer. “Beyond developmentalism? Early childhood teachers' understandings of multiage grouping in early childhood education and care.” Australasian Journal of Early Childhood, vol. 34, no. 4, Dec. 2009, pp. 55-63.