Joseph Schwab: A Revolutionary Seeking an Overthrow
A Historical Background
A Curricular Perspective
- Involved in the National Science Foundation-sponsored Biological Sciences Curriculum Study curriculum
- "...a science education curriculum designed by scientists far removed from local school conditions...[and] any understanding of the nature of the learner"
- This experience led Schwab to voice an opposition to a "centralized command curriculum"
- In designing the elements of a problem-solving team that would revise curriculum, Schwab did not focus on a particular method to solve the problems. Instead, he outlined four commonplaces of curriculum that should be considered:
- Teachers, subject matters, students, and milieu.
- (Hlebowitsh, 2005, pg. 80)
- Over reliance on theory has turned curriculum science into a dilapidated, dying field.
- "The aim of the curricularist is not to know, but to do..."
- Creating curriculum is an act of deliberation; it is a process which is at once messy, and quantitatively unsatisfying.
- "Curriculum is...uneasy, uncertain, and practical."
- Curriculum that is teacher-proof and objective to a fault is tantamount to intellectual death.
- "...the uncertainty, the need for flexible rationality, the significance of context, and the uniqueness of the particular..." all relate the direction that curriculum-creation must go: away from generalized notions and standardized methods.
- (Eisner, 1984, pg. 201-202, 209).
The Importance
A Crisis Unfolded
- Schwab was a revolutionary thinker who put on the chopping block eighty years of curriculum construction theory
- His work called for the necessity of "...[working] in schools rather than [talking] about them; [taking] charge of the school rather than [allowing] others to do it; build on past knowledge and not reinvent the wheel; focus more on the practical than the theoretical"
- He called for the humanity to be put back into human education, for there could be no such thing as a teacher-proof curriculum
- "[Teachers] will be in [their] classrooms only as good as [their] rationality permits. And for rationality to optimally function we need both an image of teaching and planning that recognizes the need for rationality and a school system that allows it to be used"
- (Hlebowitsh, 2005, pg. 86) and (Eisner, 1984, pg. 209)
Schwab identified six crises he saw within the field of curriculum-creation
A Curricular Viewpoint
They are, paraphrased, as follows:
- A transference of the problems within the curriculum field away from the practitioners (teachers) to others
- A shift from using principles and methods to only a discussion of them
- An attempt by practitioners to approach subject matter from a state of innocence, scorning not only current principles, but all principles
- A transition to the sidelines, "...to the role of observer, commentator, historian and critic of the contributions of others to the field"
- A repetition of old and familiar knowledge in new languages which add nothing to the original meanings as framed within the old languages
- A marked increase in "...in eristic, contentious, and ad hominem debate”
- (Hlebowitsh, 2005, pg. 84)
- Schwab claimed that "...what we teach, and how we teach it, is undeniably important, but that the best way of nurturing such processes is to look to the participants in the curriculum"
- One of his main arguments in curriculum creation centered around those involved in its deliverance, and the role of deliberation within this group in creating a fulfilling curriculum
- Deliberation - "...speaks to who teaches, what gets taught, who gets taught, and the cultural climate in which it is taught"
- Schwab directly challenged the role that theory has to play in curriculum creation
- He "...perceived overzealous commitment in the field to the prescriptive powers of theory," and believed that "...theory could not act alone in the schooling context; it had to be supplemented by practical arts that kept the real or concrete in focus"
- (Hlebowitsh, 2005, pg. 81-83)
References
Eisner, E. (1984). No easy answers: Joseph Schwab's contributions to curriculum. Curriculum Inquiry, 14(2), 201-210.
Hlebowitsh, P. S. (2005). Generational ideas in curriculum: A historical triangulation. Curriculum Inquiry, 35(1), 73-87.