Forging the American Curriculum

Essays in Curriculum History and Theory

Herbert M. Kliebard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429838934
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1992. Herbert M. Kliebard is considered one of the foremost historians in the field of education. This is a collection of 12 seminal essays that represents the best of his writing and reflection on the history and theory of curriculum studies. Asserting that the 20th century in particular has been a critical period in the development of the American curriculum, Kliebard delves into the historical events and theoretical principles that have formed the curriculum. Among other things he talks about the decline of the humanities curriculum, important education reformers such as John Dewey, and the "enemies" of the liberal arts curriculum in Victorian England.

Part I

Essays in Curriculum History

1

The Decline of Humanistic Studies in the American School Curriculum

“Humanism”, John Dewey once remarked, “is a portmanteau word.”¹ It packs together a variety of meanings, some drawn from its origins in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, some from its association with literature, particularly classical literature, some from its alleged opposition to religion, and, in more recent times, from its anti-romantic and anti-naturalistic temper. On its education side, it has come to be associated with a set of subjects, a segment of the school curriculum, believed to have the power to stir the imagination, enhance the appreciation of beauty, and disclose motives that actuate human behavior. From its early association with the study of Latin and Greek, humanism has gradually been expanded to the study of language generally as a distinctive possession of human beings, and with the arts—music, painting, sculpture, poetry—as the highest forms of expression by which human beings convey their experience and their aspirations. These, it turns out, are the very subjects that have suffered the steepest decline in the American school curriculum during the course of the twentieth century, a decline which, if continued, will at best make artistic expression and appreciation the province of a handful of sensitive souls whose mission it will be to preserve the higher culture and to protect it from degradation by the mob. In fact, the most persistent problem that humanism has had to face in the twentieth century is its inability to reconcile its central doctrine with the realities of mass public education. In some sense, that problem is a legacy dating back to the origins of humanism itself.

It is commonplace to refer to the Renaissance as a period characterized by a rebirth of learning. Actually, however, it would be difficult to argue that that period saw the spread of education to a significant segment of the European world. Instead, when compared to the scholasticism that preceded it, there emerged from the Renaissance not the spread of learning, but a redefinition of what it meant to be learned. The Renaissance was not only a time where learning was revered; it was a period when educational theory flourished and where education itself was being reconstructed. Many of the great works of that period are treatises making the case for one or another combination of studies, including their order and sequence. Desiderius Erasmus’s De Ratione Studii, François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Joannes Ludovicus Vives’s De Tradendis Disciplinis, and various works issuing from the school founded by Vittorino da Feltre are pedagogical tracts and, more directly, arguments for a particular curriculum. It is hard to imagine another period in which the scholars of the time dedicated themselves so assiduously to the central curriculum question, what should we teach?

From the way the leading scholars of the Renaissance framed their answer to that question we have derived our basic conceptions of what constitutes a humanistic education. As Emile Durkheim has pointed out, however, there were actually two, not unrelated but nevertheless distinctive, streams of thought in educational theory that emerged from that great body of pedagogical scholarship.² In the first, as represented mainly by Rabelais, the curriculum was conceived of as a vast and actually unending feast, a banquet so vast that it could only be consumed by giants. Nothing is omitted, not the casting of artillery, physical strength and manual dexterity, skill in every musical instrument, the work of apothecaries, geometry, Greek, Latin, Chaldean, Hebrew, Arabic, the dialogues of Plato, agriculture, metals, and precious stones. In short, Rabelais’s curriculum is hardly a selection from what was known in the Western world; it is practically a comprehensive catalog of everything known. His selection of authors places Virgil alongside obscure writers of the fifteenth century and lumps together Plato and Pausanias. The special association of humanism with literary style and linguistic elegance is not basically derived from Rabelais.

It is difficult if not impossible to distill from his curriculum catalog any body of studies that could be deemed more valuable than any other. The sciences of the day along with the practical arts enjoyed equal status with literary and linguistic studies. Durkheim interprets Rabelais’s contribution to educational theory as turning the direction in educational thinking from the purely formal to a curriculum that was designed to feed the mind. As Durkheim put it, in Rabelais we find a “curriculum whose object will be not to train the mind in formal intellectual acrobatics, but rather to nourish it, to enrich it, and to give it some substance.”³ A human being’s intellectual appetite was seen by Rabelais as insatiable, and essentially all knowledge should be consumed. If nothing else, Rabelais helped break through the narrow constraints that had characterized the curriculum of the earlier period.

The second humanistic strain derived from the Renaissance is represented principally by the work of Erasmus. There is much in Erasmus that at least superficially resembles the unbridled appetite for learning that characterizes Rabelais’s curriculum; but the list of authors to be studied that Erasmus drew up is not nearly as long nor as eclectic as is Rabelais’s. Here one is not simply gobbling up everything in sight, but selecting certain delicacies with a purpose in mind beyond the mere satisfaction of the intellectual appetite. That purpose is expressed in the development of the orationis facultas, the ability to use language elegantly and expressively. “There is nothing,” says Erasmus, “more magnificent and more worthy to be admired than discourse (oratio) which, when it contains a wealth of words and phrases, flows in abundance like a river of gold.”⁴ Unlike Rabelais, then, there is for Erasmus as well as for other educational theorists of the Renaissance, such as Vives, a hierarchy of studies with language in its several manifestations clearly at the top. The way of achieving the great purpose of education—elegance and precision in the use of language—was accomplished mainly by immersing the student in those masterpieces of literature that can serve as models. To humanist educators of the Renaissance, this meant intensive study of the classics of Greece and Rome, and hence the persistent legacy linking humanism to the study of Greek and Latin. As Durkheim expressed it, education in the Middle Ages was an intellectual fencing match; for Rabelais, it was a vast luxurious banquet; and for Erasmus it was the supreme development of the literary faculty.⁵ For Erasmus, literature was not simply one of an array of subjects. It was the vehicle par excellence for shaping mind and character. Contemporary versions of what constitutes the humanistic studies are traceable to that vision; the Rabelais tradition seems to have become submerged.

With all the appeal that that vision held and continues to hold today, it also contained the seeds of the decline of humanism in educational practice. The rise of humanism as an educational ideal coincided, not accidentally, with the rise of a highly restricted class of cultivated aristocracy, a class capable of rarified tastes, who was removed from the world in which the vast majority of Europeans lived. Humanistic education had its origins in a world where education served mainly as an adornment to courtly life. Without denying the value of that adornment to those privileged to enjoy it, humanistic education was never an education for power or even, for that matter, for survival. Individual feats of learning during the Renaissance are indeed astounding, but given the course of political and social events over the next three or four centuries, humanism as an educational ideal restricted to an elite class had to adapt or die. It did a little of both.

The Humanistic Curriculum in Nineteenth-Century America

The challenge of Rousseau and the Romantic movement notwithstanding, humanism continued its firm hold on the American curriculum through most of the nineteenth century. More than any other in this country, Yale’s course of study embodied the curriculum orthodoxy that had evolved over the previous two hundred years. The first three years were devoted mostly to Latin, Greek, and mathematics, the traditional classical subjects, but with a smattering of such other subjects as astronomy, history, geography, and English grammar and rhetoric. The final year was devoted primarily to moral philosophy, metaphysics, English composition, and belles lettres.⁶ The only options that existed were noncredit ones, but even these were sometimes alarming to college authorities. When Anglo-Saxon, for example, was introduced as a noncredit option, the outraged President Jeremiah Day announced: “It might soon be necessary to appoint an instructor in whittling.”⁷

By contrast, other American colleges of the period were beginning to experiment with modifications of the traditional humanistic curriculum. After some mainly unsuccessful attempts to modify the course of study at the College of William and Mary, Thomas Jefferson was able to introduce a certain measure of choice for students in electing departments of study in the University of Virginia. In 1827, at the urging of George Ticknor, the Harvard College curriculum was revised to permit students to substitute work in a modern foreign language for up to half of the requirement in Greek and Latin (although, in practice, such substitutions were rare). Three years earlier, in 1824, Hobart College was established as the first college in the United States (or England for that matter) with no instruction in Greek or Latin. There appeared to be a modest but decided movement among some of America’s leading colleges away from rigidly prescribed curricula with Latin, Greek, and mathematics at the core. A minor rebellion among Yale undergraduates in 1825 led, ultimately, to what became the first coherent attempt to justify the time-honored curriculum of Yale College and hence the mainstream of curriculum theory in early nineteenth-century America.

Two years following the rebellion, at the 1827 commencement, State Senator Noyes Darling, a former student at Yale College, proposed the elimination of the “dead languages” and the substitution of modern languages. At almost the same time, the Connecticut legislature, taking into account the apparent dissatisfaction of students with the Yale program of studies, called for similar reforms along practical lines. President Day sensed the danger, and on September 11, 1827, the President and Fellows of Yale College passed a resolution that a committee “inquire into the expediency of so altering the regular course of instruction in this college as to leave out of said course the study of the dead languages, substituting other studies therefor.”⁸ Also to be considered was the possibility of eliminating those “dead languages” as a basis for admission to Yale.

Published originally in 1828 under the title, Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College: By a Committee of the Corporation and the Academic Faculty, and a year later as “Original Papers in Relation to a Course of Liberal Education,” the report is at once the most comprehensive account of the conventional wisdom on the undergraduate curriculum in the early nineteenth century and the most spirited defense in its time of the humanistic curriculum against the onslaught of modernity. The report was divided into two sections with President Day himself mainly responsible for Part I, a general defense of Yale’s course of study, and with Professor James K. Kingsley, probably America’s leading classical scholar, undertaking the defense of the study of Latin and Greek in Part II. By the nineteenth century, humanistic education had become closely associated with faculty psychology, and much of President Day’s defense was based on the idea that certain subjects of study had the power to invigorate the various faculties of the mind, such as memory, imagination, and reasoning. (President Day himself had earlier published two books on faculty psychology.)

Day began his defense by admitting that Yale’s “present plan of education admits of improvement.”⁹ He also expressed surprise that there were reports to the effect that the program of studies was “unalterable” and alluded to the fact that many alumni have remarked upon return visits that the college had changed considerably. Day thus established that he was not opposed to change per se. What concerned him particularly was the persistent cry that “our colleges must be new-modeled; that they are not adapted to the spirit of age; that they will soon be deserted, unless they are better accommodated to the business character of the nation.”¹⁰ What he seemed to fear most was an abandonment of the humanist ideal in favor of the immediately practical.

After asserting that the chief purpose of any college is to “Lay the Foundation of a Superior Education,” Day presented, in what has become the most famous passage of the report, the chief defense for the continued validity of the humanist curriculum.

The two great points to be gained in intellectual culture, are the discipline and the furniture of the mind; expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge. The former of these is, perhaps, the more important of the two. A commanding object, therefore, in a collegiate course, should be to call into daily and vigorous exercise the faculties of the student. Those branches of study should be prescribed and those modes of instruction adopted, which are best calculated to teaching the art of fixing the attention, directing the train of thought, analyzing a subject proposed for investigation; following with accurate discrimination, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Essays in Curriculum History
• Part II. Essays in Curriculum Theory
• Index