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THE HISTORICAL U. S. CURRICULUM FIELD’S SENSE OF THE PAST 
 

William Wraga 

University of Georgia 

 

Abstract 

Contrary to claims by curriculum historians that 

the historical field of curriculum development in 

the US was ahistorical, this analysis of curriculum 

writings from the period 1918 to 1964 found that, 

from the beginning, the US field of curriculum 

development manifested a persistent historical 

perspective. This historiographical analysis offers 

a view of the historical curriculum field’s 

perspective on the past and identifies past 

curriculum development initiatives that may serve 

as potential research topics. 

 

When in the late 1960s the US curriculum 

field began to become increasingly aware of its 

own history, the historical field of curriculum 

development, spanning the second through the 

sixth decades of the twentieth century, was 

characterized as having been ahistorical. 

Subsequently, interest in the history of curriculum 

and curriculum development grew, resulting in, 

among other things, the founding in 1977 of the 

Society for the Study of Curriculum History (e.g., 

Kridel 1989; Burlbaw and Field 2005; Burlbaw 

2011).  A review of literature from the historical 

field of curriculum development, however, reveals 

a somewhat different reality. In fact, from the 

beginning of the US curriculum field a significant 

number of curriculum works devoted substantive 

attention to the history of curriculum and of 

curriculum development. 

This historiographical study attempts to document 

and explain a persistent historical perspective 

manifest in the literature of the curriculum field in  

 

Curriculum History 2018: 19-28  

 

the US. By doing so it corrects, or qualifies, a 

misrepresentation of the historical field of 

curriculum development, offers a view of the 

historical curriculum field’s perspective on the 

past, and identifies past curriculum development 

initiatives that may serve as potential research 

topics. 

In perhaps the first such characterization of 

the curriculum field, Kliebard proclaimed, “As a 

field of study, we have been a peculiarly ahistorical 

lot,” and referred to the “ahistorical posture” of the 

field (Kliebard 1968, 69). Echoing Kliebard, 

Bellack suggested that such an “ahistorical stance 

seems to be characteristic not only of the current 

crop of curriculum reformers, most of whom are 

university professors of academic disciplines, but 

also of educationists who claim curriculum 

building as their field of professional 

specialization” (Bellack 1969, 283). Kliebard 

argued that during the 1920s the curriculum field 

was influenced not only by nationalism, 

immigration, “faith in the methods of science, and 

a concern for the uplift of the masses,” but also 

“seems to have been shaped by . . . a reaction 

against what was believed to be a kind of education 

that was static, irrelevant to modern life, and 

nonfunctional” (Kliebard 1970, 31). This 

“tendency to denigrate the past in favor of an 

enlightened and inspired present” led to, among 

other things, “the ahistorical posture in the field of 

curriculum” (Kliebard 1970, 32). Hazlett later 

documented these and other claims about the 

ahistorical nature of the historical curriculum field, 

but he took some issue with them. Hazlett argued 

that rather, “the curriculum field is historically 



 20 

aware” in that proposals for reform typically are 

responsive to current historical contexts, yet he 

admitted that the North American curriculum field 

“is ahistorical in the sense that it lacks a well-

proportioned historiography” (Hazlet 1979, 130).  

Hazlett surmised that “the question of why there 

have not been more historical studies of curriculum 

making still remains” (Hazlet 1979, 131).  Such 

characterizations of the field became so entrenched 

that as late as 1995, Pinar et al. made reference to 

the “ahistorical posture of the traditional field” 

(Pinar et al. 1995, 69). 

An examination of ten significant works 

from the historical field suggests that although the 

curriculum field may not have enjoyed a formal 

historiography, it did have a record not only of 

viewing curriculum change in historical context, 

but also of recounting the history of curriculum 

and curriculum development which, in effect, was 

a history of the field. Granted, many classic 

curriculum development textbooks focused on the 

techniques of curriculum development at the 

neglect of a detailed discussion of the history of 

curriculum (e.g., Bobbitt 1918; Caswell and 

Campbell 1935; Stratemeyer, et al. 1947; Smith, 

Stanley, and Shores 1950; Saylor and Alexander 

1954)—though they did typically couch the 

process of curriculum development in the social 

context of the contemporary historical moment. 

And this neglect could be explained by the fact that 

curriculum texts were written for curriculum 

courses that were component parts of professional 

programs of study that also included foundations 

courses in which a historical perspective on the 

curriculum would be provided. Nevertheless, a 

number of curriculum works expressly examined 

the history of curriculum and of processes of 

curriculum making. 

In Principles of Secondary Education, 

often considered one of four founding publications 

of the US curriculum field (e.g., Kliebard 1968, 

71), Inglis identified three phases in the history of 

secondary education in the US, described 

continuity but especially changes in the control, 

support, aims, and curriculum of secondary 

schools in each phase, explained curriculum 

changes as responses to social change, and even 

reproduced portions of historical documents to 

illustrate his historical analysis. During the Latin 

grammar school phase of the Colonial era the 

secondary school “was almost exclusively 

classical” (Inglis 1918, 164). During the academy 

movement of the late 18th century and the first half 

of the 19th century the secondary school added 

courses to its curriculum beyond the college 

preparatory classical studies, including modern 

academic subjects and courses such as surveying 

and navigation, in response to changing social 

conditions. During the public high school phase 

beginning in the third decade of the 19th century 

and continuing into the early 20th century, 

academic courses continued to be offered 

alongside commercial courses. In the fashion of 

progressive historians (Gaither 2003, 99), Inglis 

used history to illuminate a current social problem 

as a basis for recommending reforms to a social 

institution. 

Similarly, the first volume of the celebrated 

Twenty-Sixth Yearbook of the National Society 

for the Study of Education (Whipple 1926) 

presented a history of curriculum-making in five 

chapters prepared by Harold Rugg in a section 

titled, “A Century of Curriculum-Construction in 

American Schools.” In his first chapter Rugg 

established the dynamic change in American life 

of the previous century and maintained that, 

despite this change, the school curriculum, with its 

emphasis on academic formalism, remained “in 

complacent aloofness” (Rugg 1926, 13). In his 

second chapter Rugg described the curriculum of 

the grammar schools and the academy, explained 

that textbooks came to dominate the curriculum, 

and described how the high school largely 

supplanted the academy by 1890. For Rugg, 



 21 

although commercial courses were added to the 

high school, the curriculum remained a 

“patchwork” of subjects, still largely academically 

narrow and formalistic, and dominated by formal 

discipline. Thus, for Rugg a gap remained between 

the school curriculum and life. 

In his third chapter, Rugg articulated 

examples of “curriculum-making via national 

committees” which he saw as characterizing the 

period 1890 to 1920 (Rugg 1926, 33). By focusing 

on prescribing subject matter, for Rugg these 

committees continued to maintain the gap between 

the school curriculum and American life. (He 

avoided the Cardinal Principles report’s efforts to 

relate the school to life by only discussing the 

CRSE’s subject-focused sub-committees.) In his 

fourth chapter Rugg identified 1910 as a turning 

point away from the previous methods—

curriculum development by textbook and by 

committee—which he characterized as “armchair” 

curriculum making, and toward a period of 

“scientific” curriculum making which he described 

as a “fact-finding era” that employed the 

“quantitative method” in a sort of “educational 

laboratory” (Rugg 1926, 67, 80). He discussed 

studies of society and of the child as two new 

considerations in addition to subject matter. Rugg 

recognized that in its extremes the “quantitative 

method” applied to curriculum making could be 

mechanistic (Rugg 1926, 81). In his fifth chapter 

Rugg distinguished between the old approach to 

education that “concentrates the effort of the 

school in exclusive preparation for adult life” and 

the new approach that centered “on the dynamic 

active growth of the child” (Rugg 1926, 84). He 

described curriculum making in about half a dozen 

laboratory schools, offering in footnotes brief 

biographies of notable curriculum makers. 

Inglis’s and Rugg’s works demonstrate that the US 

curriculum field began with and was established 

upon an examination of the history of curriculum 

and of curriculum making. Subsequently, 

curriculum scholars sustained and expanded this 

historical perspective. 

Norton and Norton noted that between 

1915 and 1935 “not less than 35,000 courses of 

study were issued” (Norton and Norton 1936, 3). 

They argued that broad historical changes, such as 

the rise of the experimental method, acceleration 

of invention, increasing diversity of cultural 

backgrounds, the close of the frontier, and the 

advance of democracy in the US, presented new 

conditions that the schools, as well as other 

institutions, must face. Moreover, they saw recent 

changes in American life, including 

industrialization, “extension of educational 

opportunity,” “expansion and revision of 

knowledge,” and “increase of human 

interdependence,” also placing the onus on the 

school curriculum to respond (Norton and Norton 

1936, 9-17). Although Norton and Norton granted 

that responses could be varied, the fundamental 

point they made was that recent curriculum change 

was a result of both recent and historical social 

changes. Thus, they placed the recent curriculum 

development movement in a long historical view, 

manifesting the historical awareness that Hazlett 

(1979) identified. 

Similarly, The Joint Committee on 

Curriculum opened its report with survey results 

that indicated, “Organized curriculum-

development programs are now under way in well 

over seven tenths of the cities of above 25,00 

population, whereas slightly less than a half and 

exactly a third of the school systems serving 

communities of 5,000 to 25,000 and below 5,000, 

respectively, reported such enterprises” (Joint 

Committee on Curriculum 1937, 1-2). The survey 

found that while only about ten percent of such 

curriculum work predated 1929, over seventy 

percent began after 1932 (Joint Committee on 

Curriculum 1937, 2). Drawing on the NSSE’s 

Twenty-Sixth Yearbook, the Committee 

recognized the growth of curriculum development 



 22 

efforts during the first three decades of the 

twentieth century that led to the explosion in the 

1930s of curriculum making initiatives. 

As the US curriculum field developed over 

time, so did historical accounts of it. In Curriculum 

Principles and Social Trends, Gwynn provided a 

detailed historical overview of the curriculum of 

US schools, organized into four periods according 

to the respective prevailing “motive” of the 

curriculum. During the period 1635 to 1770 the 

“Religious Motive” guided the school curriculum, 

accommodating various Protestant denominations 

as well as Catholicism, with regional variations. 

During the period 1770 to 1860 the “Political 

Motive” guided school curriculum in which 

education served “the preservation of liberty and 

the new democratic form of government” and 

included the development of the common school 

(Gwynn 1943, 10). Gwynn summarized changes in 

patterns of course offerings, drawing from Inglis 

(1918). According to Gwynn during the period 

1860 to 1920, as a response to industrialization, 

immigration, and enhanced transportation, the 

“Utilitarian Motive” was “brought rapidly to the 

front” (Gwynn 1943, 17), at which time the high 

school became gradually accepted, the federal role 

in education increased, the kindergarten was 

introduced, and normal schools were established. 

To illustrate curriculum changes, Gwynn reprinted 

courses of study from this period from high 

schools in Chicago and New York. Gwynn also 

discussed high profile committee efforts to reform 

the curriculum, beginning with the Committee of 

Ten report and concluding with the Cardinal 

Principles report. Gwynn provided a table 

indicating courses that had been dropped from or 

added to the elementary and high school 

curriculums during this period, but observed that 

as enrollments expanded rapidly, especially after 

the turn of the century, it was all school leaders 

could do to construct buildings, find well-trained 

teachers, and secure needed finances, and thus 

attention to systematic curriculum development 

was delayed. In short, Gwynn presented a long 

history of the American curriculum organized 

periodically around characteristic motives, 

explaining historical contexts that conditioned the 

curriculum, and identifying changes as well as 

continuities in the course of study. 

Gwynn identified the “Mass Education 

Motive” as the prevailing guide to curriculum 

since 1920 and devoted an entire chapter to tracing 

the emergence of curriculum development as a 

professional activity, which began in his Utilitarian 

Period and continued into the Mass Education 

period, and which he called the “Modern 

Curriculum Movement” (Gwynn 1943, 36, 137). 

Drawing from Rugg, Gwynn organized the 

development of the curriculum movement since 

1910 into “five stages of growth.” The “aims-and 

objectives stage and activity analysis” (Gwynn 

1943, 138) was characterized by the work of 

Bobbitt, Charters, Harap, and Uhl. The “survey 

movement in curriculum revision” (Gwynn 1943, 

143) included the Classical Investigation, the 

Modern Foreign Language Study, the AHA 

Commission’s work of the 1930s, the National 

Survey of Secondary Education, and other projects 

(Gwynn 1943, 138-150). The “development of the 

unit technique” (Gwynn 1943, 150) Gwynn 

attributed to H. C. Morrison’s 1926 book and 

dedicated a separate chapter to it. The “system-

wide curriculum revision” (Gwynn 1943, 150) 

stage included curriculum work on the system-

level, such as in Winnetka, Denver, Detroit, and 

Los Angeles, and state-level curriculum work 

including in Virginia, Alabama, Georgia, Oregon, 

and California (Gwynn 1943, 151-53). The “core -

curriculum movement and the large unit 

procedure, including the fusion movement” 

(Gwynn 1943, 153) stage included core curriculum 

development conducted in the Eight-Year Study 

and in California schools, large unit and fusion 

development in Alabama, and fused curricula in 



 23 

California, Greenville, South Carolina, and Denver 

(Gwynn 1943, 153-162). We see again in Gwynn’s 

work a historical perspective on both curriculum 

and curriculum making. 

In Curriculum Improvement in Public 

School Systems, Caswell and Associates dedicated 

a chapter, titled, “The Changing Curriculum,” to 

providing a broad-brush perspective on the history 

of curriculum change. They traced the beginnings 

of the American curriculum in transplanted 

European models, identified Franklin’s proposals 

for the academy as the first significant departure 

from European forms of education, described 

generally the values that served as the foundation 

of and found expression in education 

developments during the first half of the nineteenth 

century, and considered the implications of 

industrialization during the second half of the 

nineteenth century for education development 

(Caswell and Associates 1950, 1-8). Caswell 

identified philosophical experimentalism and 

psychological connectionism as significant 

influences on curriculum thought, recognized the 

social role of the school that emerged during the 

early twentieth century, particularly the 1930s, 

and, finally, beginning in the 1930s, the influence 

of Gestalt psychology on curriculum making 

(Caswell and Associates 1950, 8-19). 

Miller, Moyer, and Patrick opened their 

book on Planning Student Activities with a 

historical overview of the co-curriculum that 

referenced precedents in ancient Greece and Rome 

before examining the history of co-curricular 

activities in US education. Drawing from a 1935 

Teachers College dissertation by Galen Jones, 

Miller, Moyer, and Patrick documented the 

expansion of co-curricular activities that occurred 

during the early twentieth century.  They cited 

1920 as a turning point in the development of co-

curricular activities, the decline of such activities 

in schools during the Depression, and their 

expansion following World War II (Miller, Moyer, 

and Patrick 1956, 4-11). 

The Association for Supervision and 

Curriculum Development’s 1957 Yearbook, 

Research for Curriculum Improvement, devoted a 

chapter prepared by Margaret G. McKim to 

“Curriculum Research in Historical Perspective,” 

in which McKim summarized “the trends in 

research in curriculum improvement over the past 

50 years” (McKim 1957, 14) in three periods. 

McKim characterized curriculum work during the 

first quarter of the twentieth century as concerned 

with “objectivity” and “social utility” (McKim 

1957, 16). Major developments in research related 

to curriculum development during this first period 

included the emergence of educational 

psychology, the measurement movement, research 

focused on meeting individual differences, and on 

teaching and learning in school subjects. McKim 

saw this period as characterized by the beginning 

of teacher participation in curriculum making and 

the challenge to traditional subject matter offered 

by progressive education. She noted that, 

nevertheless, the subject organization of the 

curriculum prevailed and that such curriculum 

research sought efficiency and accepted society as 

it was. 

McKim characterized curriculum research 

during the Great Depression as concerned with 

“social analysis and values,” the “dynamic aspects 

of learning,” and expansion of the measurement 

movement (McKim 1957, 21). During this second 

period, McKim saw in the Eight-Year Study and 

state curriculum development programs “increased 

concern with the needs of the learner in his 

society” (McKim 1957, 25), and also saw in the 

Eight-Year Study an attempt to assess 

“experimental high school programs” (McKim 

1957, 26). The third period, from World War II to 

the mid 1950s, McKim saw as occupied “with the 

dynamics of human relationships—as a 

fundamental aspect of democracy, as an essential 



 24 

in good teaching, as a crucial element in 

cooperative curriculum improvement, and as a part 

of the research process itself” (McKim 1957, 27). 

This period included recognition of the importance 

of interpersonal and group relationships 

necessitated by increased participation of teachers 

not only in curriculum development, but also in 

curriculum research. McKim considered these 

historical developments as the basis for new 

research focused on areas such as classroom 

dynamics, curriculum designs, and increased 

teacher engagement in curriculum research. 

In Improving the Quality of Public School 

Programs, McNally and Passow similarly 

prefaced their overview of selected school 

improvement efforts with a brief history of 

curriculum making in the US. They characterized 

curriculum change in US schools from the mid 

nineteenth to the early twentieth century as 

“piecemeal and haphazard” (McNally and Passow 

1960, 29). They identified textbook writers as 

among the most influential curriculum developers 

during the nineteenth century, as textbooks served 

as the dominant source of curriculum content.  

They noted that by the late nineteenth century 

some cities were developing courses of study, and 

that teachers typically played little part in this 

work. They identified the 1890s and 1900s as a 

period of  “curriculum making by national 

committees” (McNally and Passow 1960, 31).  

McNally and Passow provided the following 

summary or early curriculum making: 

 

Until the close of World War I, the major 

influences on curriculum-making were 

largely outside the local school system. 

The national committee, the textbook 

writers, the college professors and 

university researchers, the school survey 

and the laboratory school personnel—all 

made recommendations which 

determined, to a greater or lesser extent, 

local practice. At the local level, the 

courses of study were prepared by a 

select few central office administrators 

or heads of departments; they decided 

what subjects were to be added or 

modified and which textbooks would be 

adopted and used in the classroom. In a 

few exceptional systems instructional 

committees did include classroom 

teachers who were either subject 

specialists or persons who might 

facilitate the use of a committee’s 

finished product. In most instances, a 

product of some kind—syllabus, guide, 

book, report, test—was seen as the end 

goal of curriculum activity. (McNally 

and Passow 1960, 31-32) 

 

McNally and Passow then identified World War I 

as a turning point in curriculum making. 

For McNally and Passow, three forces—

viewing the “school as a whole and as a social 

force,” realizing from research in teaching and 

learning “the need for relating educational ends to 

educational means,” and post-World War I 

reevaluation of educational “tools and stock” 

(McNally and Passow 1960, 33)—combined to 

propel the emergence of comprehensive, system-

wide curriculum development initiatives, which 

they called the “curriculum movement” (McNally 

and Passow 1960, 34). Between the early 1920s 

and the mid 1930s curriculum development efforts 

were characterized by a comprehensive or whole 

school approach, expanded teacher participation, 

the use of committee work, a diversification of 

instructional materials, designated responsibility 

for curriculum development, and approaching 

curriculum improvement on a “broken front” 

(McNally and Passow 1960, 35-36). Despite these 

developments, McNally and Passow recognized 

that in many instances curriculum making 

proceeded as it had for decades, unchanged. 



 25 

Finally, McNally and Passow observed that 

following the first two decades or so of 

comprehensive curriculum making “an 

administrative approach to curriculum building” 

(McNally and Passow 1960, 38) took over, 

comprised of an arrangement of committees 

emanating from the district office. Then, with the 

recognition that “little real curriculum 

improvement occurs without continuous 

professional and personal growth of teachers, 

concern shifted from administrative structure to 

include the complexities of educating the 

professional staff” (McNally and Passow 1960, 

38), which they implied was the approach accepted 

at the time of their writing. They indicated that in 

this approach, “it is the teachers and students who, 

in the last analysis, determine what the curriculum 

actually is” (McNally and Passow 1960, 39)—

something of a far cry from the approach 

dominated by textbook writers and national 

committees of fifty years earlier. 

In his curriculum development textbook, 

Ronald C. Doll included a chapter titled, 

“Historical Foundations of Curriculum Decision-

Making.” After identifying a number of enduring 

curriculum issues that still obtained in the early 

1960s, Doll offered a brief historical overview of 

changes in the curriculum and in the process of 

curriculum change. He identified three types of 

education brought to North America by European 

colonists during the seventeenth and eighteenth 

centuries, the church-state type, the parochial 

school type, and charity education. Despite 

regional variations, Doll noted that, “Education 

everywhere in the colonies was designed chiefly 

for boys, and the chief method of learning was 

memorization” (Doll 1964, 9). Doll discussed the 

subsequent replacement of the Latin grammar 

school with the academy, the spread of public 

schooling with westward expansion, the rise of the 

common school during the mid-nineteenth 

century, and the rise of the high school during the 

late nineteenth century. Doll identified two dozen 

historical events between 1860 and 1960 that 

brought the public school curriculum to where it 

was at the time of his writing, and identified ten 

trends in the development of the American school 

curriculum. 

Doll then provided a brief “history of the 

process of curriculum development,” recognizing 

both change and continuity in the prevalence of 

various approaches to curriculum making (Doll 

1964, 14, emphasis in original). He identified the 

1920s as the period in which in which a more 

systematic, system-wide approach to curriculum 

making began to be described in the professional 

literature, noting, as had McNally and Passow 

(1960), that at that time curriculum development 

was an administrative function that typically gave 

little truck to the teacher‘s perspective. Doll 

identified a change in the conception of curriculum 

since the 1920s from the course of study to “all the 

experiences which are offered to learners under 

the auspices or direction of the school” (Doll 1964, 

15, emphasis in original) and described nearly a 

dozen characteristics of contemporary curriculum 

making. 

Based upon this examination of ten works 

published between 1918 and 1964 that provided 

historical overviews of curriculum and of 

curriculum making in the US, it seems reasonable 

to suggest that a historical perspective ran through 

the historic US curriculum field and that the 

contention that the field was ahistorical was 

premature—and ahistorical in itself. The following 

six findings emerge from the above review of this 

incipient curriculum history literature. 

First, these early curriculum histories 

offered a long view of curriculum history, 

identifying European origins of the American 

curriculum and its modifications during the 

seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries 

(Inglis 1918; Rugg 1926; Gwynn 1943; Caswell 

and Associates 1950; McNally and Passow 1960; 



 26 

Doll 1964). Second, in the process, early 

curriculum histories offered a variety of 

periodizations of phases of the history of 

curriculum (Inglis 1918; Rugg 1926; Gwynn 1943; 

Doll 1964) that may be worth reexamining. Third, 

early curriculum histories consistently 

contextualized both curriculum and curriculum 

making in broad social, economic, and 

professional developments, confirming Hazlet’s 

(1979) observation. Fourth, while in some cases 

the proffered historical perspective served to 

identify past practices that should be abandoned, as 

Kliebard (1970) suggested, this was not always the 

case, particularly after the 1920s when the US 

curriculum field began to chronicle recent 

curriculum making activities, as discussed below. 

Fifth, early curriculum histories attended 

not only to the history of the school curriculum per 

se, usually in terms of subjects added to and 

deleted from the program of studies, but also to the 

history of curriculum making. Indeed, these early 

histories manifested an awareness of the 

“curriculum development movement” that 

occurred during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s as a 

historical phenomenon in and of itself, and even 

organized twentieth century curriculum making 

activities into various periodization schemes 

(Rugg 1926; Gwynn 1943; ASCD 1957; McNally 

and Passow 1960). Sixth, as early curriculum 

histories discussed these changing emphases in 

curriculum making, they tended to depict the brief 

history of the field as one of gradual accumulation 

of effective curriculum development procedures, 

presenting previous curriculum making activities 

not as obsolete practices to replace, but as 

additions to curriculum knowledge that emerged 

from curriculum development practice, and as 

practices to build upon. Early histories recognized 

uneven development and dissemination of such 

procedures and tended to state these developments 

as fact without touting a progress narrative. 

The historical field of curriculum 

development exhibited a persistent historical 

consciousness and perspective on curriculum and 

curriculum making, which may seem to go some 

way toward providing a “well-proportioned 

historiography” that Hazlet (1979) saw lacking. Or 

perhaps not so much. For, despite the existence of 

such historical accounts and perspectives, together 

they do not quite amount to a historiography in the 

formal sense of the term. These accounts were 

rarely, if ever, interpretive, nor did they offer a 

summary of previous historical accounts. When 

previous accounts were referenced, which in these 

works was rare and only of Inglis and Rugg, it was 

for informational, not explanatory, purposes. That 

is, there were no literature reviews, 

historiographical analyses, or debates over 

historical explanations, but rather just 

contextualization and accounts of past practice. 

This is not to say that curriculum historians 

cannot profit from an examination of these early 

histories. They certainly provide past perspectives 

on the curriculum past that may have been lost not 

just to the passage of time, but also in the 

interpretive cacophony of more recent curriculum 

history work. For example, with all of the critique 

of activity analysis as a mechanical expression of 

scientism that served social efficiency and control 

(e.g., Franklin 1986), the consistent representation 

of that movement in the historical accounts of the 

historical curriculum field as a “scientific,” 

quantitative, and objective approach to curriculum 

making can provide a clue to its significance at the 

time not only as a departure from curriculum 

making by textbook and by committee, but also as 

a reflection of the progressive era method of 

reform, which has been overshadowed by the 

social efficiency-control thesis. Progressive era 

historian Richard L. McCormick described this 

method as follows: Reformers “typically began by 

organizing a voluntary association, investigating a 

problem, gathering relevant facts, and analyzing 



 27 

them according to the precepts of one of the newer 

social sciences” (McCormick 1997, 122). Thus, 

from the perspective of the time, the “scientific” 

method of curriculum development championed 

by the likes of Bobbitt, Charters, and others, can be 

understood as reflecting the progressive era faith in 

social science as a promising aspect of reform. 

In another example, we can perhaps gain an 

insight into the historic field’s perspective on its 

past by drawing a composite periodization of 

curriculum making from the works consulted here. 

From the perspective of these works, a history of 

curriculum making in the US could be organized 

according to a chronology of:  in the nineteenth and 

early twentieth centuries, curriculum making by 

textbook and by national committee; and 

subsequently in the twentieth century as 

curriculum making by the “quantitative” or 

“scientific” method (c. 1910 into the 1920s), as a 

comprehensive, system-wide effort (1920s), as an 

administrative function (1930s on), as concerned 

with social analysis (1930s), as concerned with 

dynamics of human relationships (1940s), and as 

curriculum development as teacher development 

(1940s-1950s). This periodization is similar to but 

also departs from and complements the 

chronologies of the historical field that we are 

accustomed to, that is, those provided by Kliebard 

(2004) and Tanner and Tanner (1990). 

These early histories can also bring 

attention to past curriculum making activities that 

present significant topics of curriculum history 

research. For example, do we have good histories 

of the Speyer School, the unit method as originated 

by Morrison (1926), the National Committee on 

Mathematical Requirements (1920-23), The 

Modern Language Study (1924), The National 

Survey of Secondary Education, the interest in 

Gestalt psychology and interpersonal and group 

dynamics as considerations in effective curriculum 

development of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s? 

These initiatives and others identified by this early 

curriculum history literature may present fruitful 

curriculum history research opportunities. 

In conclusion, despite claims by 

curriculum historians that the historical field of 

curriculum development in the US was ahistorical, 

this analysis of curriculum writings from the 

period 1918 to 1964 found that, from the 

beginning, the US field of curriculum development 

exhibited a persistent interest in and sense of the 

past. Perhaps the persistent historical perspective 

on curriculum and on curriculum making manifest 

in the literature of the curriculum field in the US 

can offer useful insights into the curriculum past 

for curriculum historians today. 

 

References 

 

Association for Supervision and Curriculum 

Development. 1957.  Research for curriculum 

improvement.  Washington, DC: ASCD/NEA. 

Bellack, A. A. 1969. History of curriculum thought 

and practice. Review of Educational Research 

39: 283-292. 

Bobbitt, F. 1918. The curriculum.  Boston: 

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