Educational Productivity

Mulvihill's Synopsis of Development of CURRICULUM THEORY in US

HUMANIST CURRICULUM (HC):  HC reflects the idealist philosophy that knowledge of the traditional (Western) liberal arts is the conerstone of an educated citizenry and that the purpose of education is to present students with the best of what has been thought and written.  The HC claims that transmitting a common body of knowledge will reproduce a common cultural heritage.  This was the dominant curriculum theory in the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries. NL_SD_TI_HUMANIST CURRICULUM

SOCIAL EFFICIENCY CURRICULUM (SEC):  SEC was a philosophically pragmatic apprach, developed in the early 20th centruy.  Rather than viewing the need for a common academic curriculum for all students advocates for the SEC argued the different groups of students, with different sets of needs and aspirations, should receive different types of schooling.          http://tikkun.ed.asu.edu/edrev/reviews/rev19.htm  

Although this perspective emerged from the progressive visions of Dewey about the need for individualized and flexible curriculum, many critics (Cremin, 1961; Hofstadter, 1966; Sadovnik, 1991; Tyack, 1974) believed that the SEC was a distortion of his progressive vision.  The SEC was an outgrowth of the scientific management of institutions of higher education.  This included the belief in the division of knowledge into strictly defined areas and its transmission into scientifically defined goals and objectives, s well as the division of students into different aspects of the curriculum, based on ability.  Beginning in the early 20th century, the definition of ability became increasingly based on performance on standardized tests.  Curriculum tracking associated with the SEC has continues to be the subject of fierce debate.

DEVELOPMENTAL CURRICULUM (DC):  DC is related to the needs and interests of the student rather than the needs of society.  This philosophically progressive approach to teaching was student centered and was concerned with relating the curriculum to the needs and interests of each child at particular developmenta; stages.  Thus, it stressed flexibility in both what was taught and how it was taught, with the emphasis on the development of each student's individual capacities.   NL_SD_TI_DEVELOPMENTAL CURRICULUM

CRITICAL CURRICULUM (CC): In the 1930s two Columbia University Teachers College professors, George Counts and Harold Rugg, radicalized Dewey's philosophy into an explicit theory that claimed that schools ought to change society, not simply reproduce it.  The curriculum should be designed to teach students to think and to help solve societal problems.  Contemporary educational theorists such as Paulo Freire, Michael Apple, Maxine Greene, bell hooks and Henry Giroux expanded the work of Counts and Rugg. "  NL_SD_TI_CRITICAL CURRICULUM

Skills in perceiving and analyzing the world in terms of systems are not innate to humans, they must be learned.

We are born blind to systems in three principal ways.

We have an inherent inability to clearly perceive ourselves


1. in space
2. in time
3. in our relationships to what appear to be remote objects, forces, people and events.

 

Spatial blindness

Is a failure to grasp "big picture" connections. Most of us are almost totally unaware of what is happening elsewhere that can indirectly but powerfully affect our lives. We are like the legendary blind people describing an elephant as they each grasp a different part of its anatomy. When we mistake the parts for the whole we lose perspective and miss the context in which seemingly isolated events occur. We are dismayed, for example, to discover man-made chemical toxins in the fatty tissue of polar bears.

An aspect of spatial blindness is scale blindness. It is easy to miss the big picture when concentrating on details, and vice versa. For example "one size fits all" regulation by the federal government is often not the best solution for every local jurisdiction. On the other hand, a patchwork of local autonomies can result in competitive harm and obstruct measures for the common good. The common practice of up-scaling or down-scaling a set of conditions by linear extrapolation can be a recipe for serious error. Yet with improved scientific and mathematical tools, we can begin to overcome scale blindness.

 

Temporal blindness

Results from a natural human focus on the immediate, compounded by our ignorance of the past and neglect of the future. It prevents us from learning what human history can teach us, how we got where we are, and what it took to get here. It erodes our appreciation of the slowly changing connections between ourselves and other forms of life over long periods of time, and of the increasing potential for humans to impose serious impacts relatively quickly on the rest of the world.

Temporal blindness can also keep us from effectively planning ahead. If we are plagued by the uncertainties of accelerating change, for example, it becomes easy to argue that planning for an unpredictable future is an exercise in futility. It likewise becomes easier to choose cures over prevention, and to deny any connection between "scientifically unproven" causes and commonly observed, long term effects. Blindness to the needs of the future leads us to disregard consideration of the carrying capacity of the earth's life support systems, and inhibits the development of fairer intergenerational ethics.

 

Relationship blindness

Can lock us into unproductive "us" versus "them" behaviors. We sometimes forget that each one of us plays many roles in life - child, parent, consumer, neighbor, voter, investor, buyer, seller etc. - each role with its own network of changing relationships. In these interlocking systems it is no longer uncommon for us to be affected often by unknown events or decisions made at home, next door, or on the other side of the world.

Relationship blindness contributes to one-step thinking. Overly simplistic "solutions" can merely replace old problems with new ones. One-step thinking may miss the more subtle web of causality leading to our most important problems. Such thinking has contributed to unintended adverse consequences of many actions taken by "experts" in the name of progress."