ournal of Crruum and Su/penion 167Winter 1991. Vd. 6, No. 2,167-177

Perspectives and Imperatives

CURRICULUM ANOMALY

PAUL SHAKER, National-Louis Unittslty

Curriculum encompasses students' experience that is attributable to theschool. It is present at school and away from school, wheneverthe events andencounters of school life influence students. It is an accumulation of thereadings, talk, nonverbal communication, and physical environment of theschool-whether intended or accidental-and whether student- or adklt-initiated. Curriculum is graffiti as well as textbooks, personality as well aspedagogy, and architecture as well as audiovisual aids. It is the tone of themorning announcements, the selection of magazines set out on the libraryracks, the color and condition of the school's walls, the after-school activities,the films, the standardized tests, the teachers' questions-the students' com-plete lives each day. The curriculum is as complex as life itself and as immunefrom control. In curriculum design, however, an intentional aspect to educa-tion is exercised.

The assumptions traditionally governing our concept of curriculum arelimited to the elements that we can control and manipulate through theirempirical accessibility and their epistemological simplicity. In the spirit of ananalytic reduction of experience, we can define curriculum according to whatwe can deal with positivistically rather than what curriculum is comprehen-sively. Thus, an instrumentalist fallacy has permeated curriculum work andshaped its definition and potential effectiveness. Critics have challenged andexposed the claims of control with analyses like the "hidden curriculum" andthe "null curriculum," questioning the sincerity as well as the insight ofcurriculum designers.' In a more fundamental way, however, post-structuralistcommentators on education have set'up an unrelenting attack on applying thepositivist-empiricist paradigm to this social process field. After more than 15years of sustained commentary, this transformational perspective has co-alesced into a coherent alternative.

'On the hidden curriculum, see Philip W. Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt,Rinehart & Winston, 1968). On the null curriculum, see Elliot W. Eisner and Elzabeth Vailance,ed., Conflicting Conceptions of Curriculum (Berkeley. McCutchan, 1974).

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What does this post-structuralist or naturalist perspective consist of forthe curricularist? It surrenders notions of positive control--over the meaningof the curriculum or its composition. Control depends on a series of assump-tions about knowledge and the learner that the naturalist cannot abide--thebelief that we can fragment experience into discrete components, like objec-tives, without changing its meaning or oversimplifying its scope. Controlfurther rejects the notion that we can evaluate even fragmented knowledgeobjectively and validly using unidimensional techniques like standardizedtests. Control suggests, too, that a predictable student-product emerges fromthe process of schooling, but the record of education's effects suggests thatstudents graduate with qualities and competencies that are largely unplannedfor and often at odds with our planning. The product has continually defiedcontrol or prediction and may well be more affected by nonschool influencesand unintended factors in the school than by the articulated curriculum of aimsand objectives.

This naturalist perspective does not obviate the need for curriculum workor deny the usefulness of the field. It does, however, redirect and refocus ourefforts. Curriculum should interact fully with students' world. Instead of anaustere isolation from everyday experience and popular culture, curriculumshould provide a commentary and critique of it. The school experience shouldencourage students' theoretical understanding of their social, emotional, andintellectual encounters. We should conceive of curriculum as expansive andinclusive, widening its relevance beyond the school rather than seeking tointrovertedly align it with the minutiae of micro-objectives derived from taskanalyses. Educators have allowed the curriculum to be coopted by onesegment of society--the scientific managers-and have forfeited the transcen-dent and ancient function of education-creating a transformational aware-ness in learners. Education at its best fosters questioning and the creation offiner ideals. On the other hand, education should not, as it often does today,confuse itself with training and limit its aspirations to vocational preparation,a task better accomplished by internships and on-the-job training.

Ironically, the ostensible subject matter of schools is utterly germane tostudents' lived experience, although the connections are infrequently madeThis omission is partly due to the misguided training function that permeateseducation and partly due to teachers' concepts of themselves As a by-productof the technologization of the field, teachers' professional status has dimin-ished. In its lofty original conception, education is a mission to students' spirits,not an everyday or economic pursuit From students' viewpoint, the teacherremains a role model and societal exemplar--for better or worse-and soci-ety's most formal suggestion of what an adult should be.2 Just at a moment

Martha M. McCarthy, 'Legal Rights and Responsibilities of Public School Teachers," inKnowledge Basefor the Beginning Teacber, ed. Maynard C. Reynolds (New York Pergamon,1989), pp. 255-268.

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when some allege this viewpoint is anachronistic, another instance emergesof a teacher criticized or released for his or her dress, life-style, or generalunconventionality. Teachers, like the curriculum, have a hidden dimension,and this exemplifying aspect of their role may be more significant than any other

Now, when we call on education to provide more benefits to society thanever before, the field is mired in a legacy of assumptions it misguidedly drewfrom physical science and technology. Today, as we call on education toliberate society from the banality of modem materialism, education finds itselfa prisoner of the values of this worldview. The assumptions we hold aboutthe scope and structure of the curriculum, the role of schooling and teachers,and the needs and aspirations of learners are, therefore, critical to our defini-tion of the field. The curriculum is not a training ground for economicproductivity. It has a more fundamental purpose, which if achieved, providesthe motivation and rationale for people's economic productivity, as well as asource of meaning and inspiration for living in the world.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

Beyond the assumptions we hold about the definition of curriculum isthe operational realm of aims and objectives, the common starting point ofcurriculum design. Because education is cleady purposive, few people objectto enunciating broad aims for its pursuit. A straightforward example is thisshort list from Malaysia:

(a) A common Malayan culture should be developed.(b) Equal opportunity should exist for free primary education.(c) Malay and English should become the media of instruction.)

General aims (a) and (c) are curricular and necessarily guide school personnelat the broadest level.

Problems begin to emerge when we extend the principle of statingpurposes to the second and third level of specificity.4 Conventionally, thisprocess includes making the objectives behavioral and moving to an instruc-tional rate that exceeds one objective per hour of learning. Like the steps inan assembly-line process, the curriculum is subdivided and atomized. Intheory, this approach implicitly ignores as much curriculum potential as itacknowledges and carries grand assumptions about the nature of knowledgeand cognitive processes. In practice, the approach poorly characterizes theteaching act as it occurs or as it realistically could occur. The rich, interactiveflow of teaching and the demands of the group setting dictate a reality removed

'Arieh Lewy, ed., Handbook of Curriculum Evaluation (New York: Lonrman, 1977), p 38.4David iR Krathwohl, Benjamin S. Bloom, and Beram B. Masia, Taxonomy ofEducationalOdbecirev Tbe Classification of Educational Goals, Handbook II AffeafweDomain (New YorkDavid McKay, 1964).

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from the austere world of level-three behavioral objectives. The measures ofbehavioral performance and rates of successful achievement that are a part ofthe approach are commonly criticized as arbitrary and short on validity.

The attempt to describe curriculum through specific objectives hangs onin writings about pedagogy despite cogent criticism and, more damningly,practicing teachers' broad rejection. As another manifestation of our scientificmanagement legacy, documents based on this approach are copied or com-posed, compiled, filed, and ignored. They have become an inert manifestationof bureaucracy that helps schooling little and harms it a good deal by screeningout a more salient understanding of classrooms and by occupying the time ofprofessional staff fruitlessly.

The main current of educational thought running from Socrates to Deweyincludes the assertion of this broad aim. Education is not primarily for thepurpose of acquiring knowledge but for learning how to learn. The behavioralobjectives movement is a chronic throwback to sophistic attitudes abouteducation and the curriculum that undervalue what the curriculum means tostudents and their need to make it personal. To recall a familiar metaphor,curriculum spirals outward from learners to their experiences of living It doesnot wind inward toward the preordained ideas of others in authority.

INSTRUCTION

The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE)has been committed for several years to promulgating a knowledge base forteaching that "is expressed in articulated understanding, skills, and judgmentswhich are professional in character and which distinguish more productiveteachers from less productive ones." This knowledge is "not known by thosewho are simply well-educated people, who walk into the profession off thestreet"5 In the press of trying to make teaching knowledge esoteric and clearlydistinguishable from the realm of common sense, AACTE has strongly en-dorsed the rationalist paradigm of inquiry in education and has widely im-posed the paradigm through the procedures of the National Council for theAccreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE).

Nonetheless, all professions are subject to claims by the uninformed thattheir special knowledge is, in fact, no more than common sense. Politics in ademocracy, for example, is consciously put into the hands of untrainedeverymen. Educators, perhaps saddled with feelings of low social and eco-nomic standing, have reacted through entities like AACTE to a perceived lackof respect by expending great effort on producing a lore that is proof from

'Maynard C. Reynolds, ed., Knowledge Basefor the Begfnnfng Teacher (New York. Per-gamon, 1989), p. ix.

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commonsense analysis. An esoteric knowledge b-e does not, however, bestdefine professions based on social process endeavors.

Law, politics, social work, as well as artistic fields such as architecture,journalism, and graphic design, are not so removed from every informedperson's cultural experience that practitioners can insulate their language andmethods from common discussion or understanding. Professionals' accom-plishment in these fields is based on the quality of their performance and,when appropriate, their artifacts. The ability to perform their profession in thesocial system sets practitioners apart from others, not primarily their ability todiscuss their field with intelligence and insight. In any event, we have littlereason to believe that education's efforts to "scientize" itself have generatedrespect for the profession. Certainly, education has not generated the recog-nition that improved teaching practice would accomplish. But we have createda large industry of professional educators communicating with each other ina circle largely closed to the world of practicing teachers.

Evidence of this journey to irrelevance is the separate track that theAssociation for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) has takenfrom other higher education counterparts. Oriented toward public schooleducators' inservice needs, ASCD propagates a largely distinct literature ofschool reform, increasingly separate from the realm of AACTE and the Amer-ican Educational Research Association (AERA), where teachers and supervi-sors rarely tread.

In the interest of better understanding instruction as a component ofcurriculum, let us look at how the sanctioned NCATE approach treats the topicand how we might otherwise view it. In Reynold's Knowledge Base for theBeginning Teacher, the chapter dedicated to summarizing what the beginningteacher needs to know about "classroom instruction" revolves around fourorganizing ideas expressed in state-of-the-art jargon to ensure their scientificrespectability:

1. Lessons in which learners perceive links among main ideas are more likely tocontribute to content learning than are lessons in which links among main ideas areless easily perceived by learners. One way that teachers can facilitate students'perceptions of links among main ideas is through well-organized lessons andpresentations. 6

How does this organizing idea remove teaching from the realm ofpedestrian pursuits accessible through commonsense analysis? Who wouldpropose poorly organized lessons with main ideas not related to one another'Literature, art, and music in our era, however, all employ deliberately discon-tinuous streams of ideas to stimulate interest, provoke intuition, or point to theirrational aspects of experience. We are left somewhere between oversimpli-

61bid., p. 102.

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fication and being simply misled by a principle such as this. We may betroubled, too, by the metaphor of 'links among main ideas." The image raisesas many questions as it answers. Are the links emanating from the learnerr Orfrom expert opinion or disciplinary structure? Are some links correct andothers incorrect Is it sometimes just as valuable to see main ideas as unlinked,as in different geometries or various theories on the movement of light?

Alternately, we might claim in this area of methodology that teachersshould reveal the schemes they use for understanding content and prodstudents to explore their own means. At some point, the teacher should makethe rationale for a lesson explicit to students so they can understand thecurriculum designer's approach to structuring experience and so better dis-cover their own.

2. Teacher-student interactions about academic content are also an importantmeans through which students come to perceive links among ideas (and thus toconstruct knowledge). In particular, teacher-student dialogue that involves 'scaffold-ing" and eventually 'fading" by the teacher appears to be associated with academicgoals of knowledge construction and self-regulation.7

Again, a wealth of cited studies seems to bring us to recognize somethingthat hardly seems worth stating-students learn from interacting with theirteachers, and they learn more about the curriculum if the interactions are aboutthe curriculum. Reynolds then claims that conventional school practice in-cludes too much time off task and poorly executed lessons. We might allconcur with his point, but this information comes from the qualitative evalu-ation of practice that a sensitive observer would report. It has few hallmarksof positivist experimentation. Reynolds makes much of the knowledge basefor scaffolding, largely the notion that puzzled students should have thebenefit of simply phrased or rephrased questions or problems Apparently, weare still mired in the world of common sense: How else can we explain apuzzling task to someone? As a more direct way of expressing this methodo-logical assertion, why not claim that we teach what the phenomenal record ofour classroom demonstrates that we have attended to, whether purposivelyor by chance, and our students benefit from various explanations and ourpersistence.

3. Teachers facilitate learning by engaging students in active cognitive processingabout academic content through academic tasks. The teacher's selection andspresen-tation of tasks will determine the quality of cognitive processing by students

We can translate Reynolds's point. Teachers teach students best by havingthem act on the curriculum. Curriculum and instruction dictate the level of

7Ibid.,p. 105.Cobi., p. 107.

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abstraction of student thinking. Although some methods, like Lozanov's inforeign language instruction, do not emphasize students' active engagement,how would students learn if they were not attending to the lesson. Is "activecognitive processing" something different from 'paying attention" or 'think-ing"? The second sentence, which suggests that an involuntary effect takesplace if teaching is well done, is more troublesome. The effect is learning andis exclusively under the teacher's control and influence.

This view is the ancient empty-vessel metaphor for teaching in an unqual-ified form. What about the home's influence on students and their ownindependent states of mind? The latter statement is a completely frank expres-sion of the positivist-behaviorist point of view: Learners are fully manipulableentities, controlled by their environment in ways simple enough to be identi-fied and manipulated in a school setting. They are rats in a maze, pigeonsplaying the piano. This portrayal is the most succinct possible of the rationalistvision of the school. Set up the correct environment, and students will thinkin the prescribed ways. Reflection suggests that we are hardly so certain ofhow we wish to control students or that we wish to control students in thisway. Even totalitarian states have fallen short of this ideal practice. Could wesay instead about methodology that active, engaged students benefit mostfrom the curriculum and that teachers should call students' attention to thelevels of interpretation inherent in any text?

4. Teachers' decisions about classroom structure and organization have implica-tions for students' beliefs about themselves and about school tasks.9

The entire environment for learning influences the experience of learn-ing. We can deduce this point from our encounters with the visual and appliedarts, as well as from our study of psychology. What else explains a humanhistory of decorating, furniture making, sports and games, or fine arts Moredifficult are assertions about whether we can prove in exact ways the limits ormagnitude of these effects. Criticism has never reached that stage in otheraesthetic endeavors, and so professionals in those fields practice without suchexpectations or claims. The same committed but diffuse attitude continues toguide the best practice in education.

SELECTION AND SCOPE

The metaphorical term curriculum comes from the concept of a race-course, like that of the Circus Maximus, where a competition is run. In practice,curriculum has come to mean a formal, sequenced structure of material forstudy that is a route to enculturation. There are other types of racecourses,however, and this central metaphor may function more fruitfully if applied

9lbid, p. 110.

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differently. A marathon, for example, is a race run outside a stadium, throughthe highways of the country or the streets of a town. Its scale is too large for abuilding to contain it without demanding an intolerable amount of repetitive-ness. Curriculum is more a race of this character-beginning and endingformally at the school-stadium and attending to the structures of the educator-rulemakers. The student-runners do not pass through the controlled environ-ment of the sports arena, however. The panorama includes the vistas of theirlived experience, and the school-race is but one part. Student-runners areaffected by rain or heat, although the teacher-referees cannot predict or controlthese factors. They are distracted by events in the towns they pass through andmay even quit the competition if these peripheral phenomena dominate theirinterests. At best, the athlete-scholars can run and observe and meet thestandards of the sport while being conscious of the people and sights of thecourse they pass over.

By attempting to run a marathon inside a closed arena, we have forcedmany competitors to ignore their repetitive surroundings by withdrawing theirattention from the racecourse environment. Some in desperation quit the race,stultified. Others grow frustrated with the confining oval they circle, yearningfor the open expanse and changing terrain that challenged the first maratho-ner, an Athenian soldier, whose purpose was life and death, not sports orgames. A closer replication of the lived experience in the curriculum wouldbring the education game more into congruency with its original intent-preparation for life-and imbue schooling with clearer purpose and meaning.

To naturalize the curriculum-to take it outdoors-we need to includestudents' world of perception and society's panoply of occurrences. Students,for example, watch about 50 hours of television each week, but school findslittle occasion to sharpen students' critical or observational faculties for thisdominant medium. In America, television may be the most widely sharedcultural experience, and its influence, unchallenged, may act to undoeducation's higher goals before they are fully introduced to learners. Theformalist racecourse curriculum cannot adapt to this interference. It can neitherincorporate and exploit student interest and familiarity with the medium norcan it turn student attention away from it. Reading gives way to viewing as thedefinitional means of obtaining information, and educators neither adapt tothe change nor confront it. Like a sporting event from which the public'sattention has strayed, the curriculum becomes anachronistic and marginal.Many of the best participants and their best energy go elsewhere. The curric-ulum has importance if it enables learners to respond to their phenomenalworld actively and insightfully, to discern quality in human performance, andto sense a purpose in their being that transcends the materialism societycommonly proffers.

Recalling our marathon metaphor, the student-runners are competingultimately for "personal bests," for this race has no one winner. They are welladvised to strive to attain the high standards they have set for themselves. In

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a marathon, some set their goals in accord with age or gender, others race inwheelchairs. The racecourse is individually perceived and employed Greatbenefit may fall to those whose time is long as well as to those whose time isshort.

Jung's analytic psychology gives self-realization as the source of motiva-tion for people, and it serves well as a theme for education. In our par-ticularistic ways, we look for wholeness in life--an ability to experience thesocial, natural, and introspective realms with the subtlety and adaptabilitytheyrequire. We construct a destiny for ourselves--some call it a myth-andconsciously or unconsciously we seek to fulfill it. Students look more energet-ically to their popular culture heroes today than to the historical figures of thecurriculum for guidance in their quest. Youthful and inexperienced, un-equipped by education to recognize or conduct their journey, students fre-quently turn their fervor to frustration and antisocial acts. Crime, violence, andalcohol and other drug abuse are the products of their lost rage. They haveabandoned the patterned arena of school and, instead, are wandering themarathon racecourse that could have been their pathway to understandinghad we made it so.

RECAPITULATION

As we reflect on the direction of education in this century and think ofhow the field might have developed, a pervasive theme is the dominance ofa cult of efficiency, of scientific management values over the student-centeredprogressivism of Dewey and others. The evolution of curriculum theory andpractice dearly illustrates this struggle over values. Dewey expresses nobleaims for education that influence and parallel what we find in nationalstatements of purpose, but we cannot imagine him trying to subdivide thesegoals into behavioral objectives that would govern each teacher'sday. Instead,we expect the pragmatist to project that we would achieve these overarchingpurposes because problem-centered activity spontaneously flows from aproperly conceived curriculum. This curriculum replicates life outside theschool and attends to student interest. In responding to it, students addresssociety's concerns because these concerns have effectively become theirconcerns.

The fragmentation and indirection of the scientific management approachare so complete today that teachers as well as students lose sight of the aimsintended to guide them all. From the pieces of curriculum that constitute dailylessons, few if any participants can reconstruct the original grand design.Dewey cites "active occupations" as the vehicle for creating and sustaining aholistic, integrated view of the curriculum. He has continually called for anorganization of schooling that emanates from students' phenomenologicalworld, not from the structure of the disciplines.

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The progressives never imagined that any but active learners couldsucceed as students. Activity in learning has never fit, however, into theadministrative needs for order and quiet that have dominated life in schools.Nor does segmenting the day into short periods give active learning a stageon which to function. The assembly-line metaphor, so pervasive in scientificmanagement thinking, translates poorly to schools. Workers' motivation isconcrete-eamrning their livelihood; students' motivation is remote and ab-stract-preparing for life. Production must govern the factory, but interest, adeep human characteristic, should govern the school. Workers have limitedneed for seeing the overall picture of production; their motivation is extrinsic.For students, however, the fundamental purpose of education is to envisionwho they are to become, who they wish to become. Perhaps most ironic is themovement in America away from many scientific management principles inindustry itself as productivity has declined in the face of worker dissatisfaction.Humanized theories fromJapan and Scandinavia have become commonplacein contemporary management. Emulating the models of other fields by defi-nition has put educators a step behind.

When Dewey visited China, he was received with great enthusiasmbecause his ideas about the relatedness of action and learning were rooted,too, in Confucian thought The two philosophers, ancient and modem, viewmotivation in related, but not identical, ways.

Dewey places student interest at the center of the educational enterpriseand uses it as a governing principle in designing curriculum. Student interestwas to be the source of energetic attention and involvement by students withtheir schooling. The sources of interest are rooted in human nature, and traitscommon to all primates, like curiosity, and traits uniquely human, like thedevelopment of an autonomous personality or self, parallel the sources ofinterest.' 0

Confucius proposes that this energetic engagement comes from students'sheer diligence. Today, the Chinese culture associates hard work with theachievement of success in education as in other pursuits. To redress insuffi-cient learning, learners simply apply themselves harder. The will to persevereoriginates in obligation to the family in the Confucian model, not in individualor biological traits. Lest anyone too quickly dismiss this scheme as quaint anduninformed in view of modem learning theories, consider the positivists' ownyardstick, the results of standardized tests. The Scholastic Aptitude Test inAmerica, for example, shows Oriental students outperforming the majorityCaucasian population while other minorities lag behind. Family values anddiligence seem to be the key.

'°Robert E. Proctor, Educations Great Amnesia (Bloomington. Indiana University Press,1988).

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After explorations that have included many metaphors as heuristic de-vices in the quest to understand education and its subfields-and aware of thelimitations of these metaphors-let me propose a final one in closing. This lastparallel is in fact the first in historical terms because it is the professioneducation came from. Literacy and the conveyance of formal culture intraditional societies was once the province of priests. The ancient goal ofeducation was to acquire knowledge of Scripture, and schooling occurred atthe place of worship. Religion and education remain intertwined in manymodern nation-states. Yet the teacher as priest or minister is a metaphor littleexplored in modern educational thought, and to many in this age of secularnation-states and materialist ideologies, the idea may seem anachronistic.

Many comparisons, however unfashionable, remain. Ministers foster thefaithful's consideration of a collected body of wisdom, fully recognizing theparticular needs and orientations of their flocks. At their best, ministerspromote reflection, insight, and personality development. They perform acommunicative art as well as a service profession. Who, on the other hand,would scientize their occupation? Can we imagine the ministry being struc-tured around behavioral objectives or standardized, objective evaluations. Isthe profession given credibility and respect by the esoteric studies of seminarytheologians or by the services of practitioners that those they minister to feeldaily?

To some, these questions demonstrate why the metaphor fails. There isan absurdity to applying contemporary educational technique to understand-ing the ministry. Perhaps, however, the alternative analysis is more telling.Perhaps the metaphor is promising and more revealing than the wealth ofothers we can pose. What is absurd is that we have allowed education tobecome defined in such a way that this comparison seems impossible whena look at the goals of education suggests we are still related more closely toour forbears, the priests of the temple, than to any other occupation.

If we help young people to construct a rationale for their being and waysof realizing that personal meaning, the force of human intellect and personalitybecome engaged in the pursuit of learning, and the petty problems of tech-nique fall away. If education does not effectively provide the content andinspiration, no appeal to method or design can give it significance. Preachingand teaching may be separated from each other, one sacred and the othersecular, but we should not alienate them from their common origin or purpose.They are not as different as art and science, though some would wish it so.

PAUL SHAKER is Dean, National College of Education, National-Louis University,2840 Sheridan Road, Evanston, IL 60201-1796.

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Copyright © 1991 by the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. All rights reserved.