Present and future

Hunkins, F. P., & Hammill, P. A. (1994). Beyond Tyler and Taba: Reconceptualizing the curriculum process. Peabody Journal of Education, 69 (3), 4-18.
Keywords: Tyler rationale, Taba, Bobbit, Modernism, Technocrat, postmodernism

Parkay, F. W., & Hass, G. (2005). Curriculum planning: A contemporary approach (7th Ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. (Chapter 2. Social forces: Present and future, pp. 45-58)
Keywords: social forces, developmental tasks, future planning

Cetron, M, & Cetron, K. (2003). A forecast for schools. Educational Leadership, 61 (4).
Keywords: funding, diversity, technology, lifelong learning.

These three articles provide some basic ideas about “where we are” and “where we are headed.”

In this era of rapid social and technological change leading to increasing life complexity and psychological displacement, the educators have to rethink what modern education is and how curricula should be reformed to suit the future needs.

For decades, the modernism-scientistic tradition has been dominating curriculum and curriculum development. Even today, Bobbitt’s curriculum foundation, Ralph Tyler’s four-question rationale, and Hilda Taba’s seven-step model are still the mainstream views regarding curriculum development. However, the newly-emerged challenges, transitions and transformations, as in a post-modernism point of view, have announced that “there is no structure or master narrative in which we can wrap ourselves for comfort.” Education will be at risk if our educators continue to rely on a positivistic certainty in the procedures that Tyler and Taba advocated.

Examining contemporary social forces that influence the curriculum helps curriculum planners to understand the role education can play in shaping a desired future and thus incorporate an unknown future into their work. Among those ten major trends, I think we would draw special attentions to “increasing ethnic and cultural diversity”, “changing values and morality” and “microelectronics revolution”. Based on the understanding of these three fundamental issues, we should be able to deploy futures planning with considering three levels of social forces.

A forecast for schools projected from futurists provided directions for schools by yielding an understanding of societal and economic trends to help schools implement reforms that prepare students more effectively for the changing world. With all those concerns on funding, student population and diversity, technological transformation in the workplace, and needs in lifelong learning, our schools should make early preparations and careful countermeasures in response to the modern, high-tech world with cautious optimism.

Back to whole

Eisner, E. (2005). Back to whole. Educational Leadership, 63 (1), 14-18.

Progressive educators gave us a vision of the whole child. Where has that vision gone, now that we need it most?

1. The dominating values currently guiding the reform efforts focus heavily on boosting test scores and standardizing outcomes - a means-ends model. Measurement technology increasingly defines what students will be required to learn.

2. Limitations: means are not always follow goals - goals can also follow means; our preoccupation with standards freezes our conception of what we want to accomplish in our schools. Technical orientation vs organic or humanistic

3. Reasons driving technically rational approaches

• Historical. The industrial revolution invented a way of thinking about productivity (using systematic control to achieve high levels of predictability)
• Making comparative analysis possible. The competitive culture

4. Children respond to educational situations not only intellectually, but also emotionally and socially. School improvement is both a technical problem and a cultural problem.

Care for the whole child

• Recognize the distinctive talents that individual children possess and create an environment that actualizes those potentialities
• Take into consideration the various ways in which students respond to what teachers plan
• Provide a more complete picture of the developing child (not everything that matters is measurable, not everything that is measurable matters)
• Prioritize the social and emotional life of the child

Aims of education

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.

--Jean Piaget

Links
Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education? The encyclopedia of informal education.