The concept of curriculum has existed for just over 100 years. The industrial revolution brought about many changes in society including a greater focus on efficiency and scientific management of social functions. Schools would follow the leadership of industry and place a greater focus on the product that should be capable of contributing to American Capitalism. There are three foundational areas that have worked together to foster the evolution of curriculum in America. This website will focus on the relationships between the social, the philosophical, and the psychological aspects of curriculum and how they worked to develop the curriculum we use in our educational system today.
From the beginning of the American educational system there has been a constant evolution of the curriculum. We first focused simply on teaching the core classes, grammar, literature, writing, mathematics, science, history, and foreign languages. As the industrial revolution fostered changes in many areas of society including education. Taylorism showed us how to be more efficient with educating students. The 1900’s we learned to understand both the planned and unplanned curriculum. Students are learning from a range of experiences both direct and indirect. In the 1930’s the student experience was the focus, not the end product. In the 40’s research began to study curriculum in three areas: the study of society, the study of learners, and the study of subject matter. In the 1950’s we began to understand how the school influenced the students’ lives as the curriculum was viewed as any learning that was planned and directed by the school. Also in the 50’s research began to look at a fourth area, the study of learning. These became known as the four bases of planning. In the 1960’s we began to call for more accountability in schools and emphasized the outcome with the concept of what you learn is a consequence of what you do in school. In the mid 1990’s with a post-modern transformation curriculum developers learned to focus on design, implementation, and evaluation of curriculum with desired goals and values. Eventually we developed seven steps of curriculum development: a diagnosis of needs, the formation of objectives, the selection of content, the organization of content, the selection of learning experiences, the organization of learning experiences, and the determination of what to evaluate and means of doing it. A selection of learning experiences was also developed. There are six steps in the selection of learning experiences: the validity and significance of content, a consistency with social reality, a balance of breadth and depth of experiences, a provision for a wide range of objectives, learn ability and adaptability of the experience to life of the student, and appropriateness to the needs and interests of learners. Curriculum is now viewed as what is taught in the classroom and what is taught in society. Ralph Tyler created a model of four basic principles: what education purposes should a school seek, what experiences are kely to attain those purposes, how can these experiences be organized, how can we determine if those purposes are being attained? Hilda Taba who lead a grass roots approach that involved teachers in the development of curriculum added three more steps to Tyler’s model. She suggested a diagnostic of learners needs before which would drive the entire process in a different direction. Tyler’s model was outcome oriented, while Taba’s focused more on the students’ needs. Her seven step process for allowing teachers’input on curriculum development were: diagnosis of the learners needs and expectations of the larger society, formulation of learning objectives, selection of learning content, organization of learning content, selection of learning experiences, organization of learning activities, and determinations of what to evaluate and the means of doing it. Another contribution to curriculum development came from Allan Glatthorn who came up with seven types of curriculum: recommended curriculum, written curriculum, taught curriculum, supported curriculum, assessed curriculum, learned curriculum, and hidden curriculum.