Professional Documents
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10 - The Educational Imagination by Eisner, Elliot W
10 - The Educational Imagination by Eisner, Elliot W
https://archive.org/details/educationalimagiOOOOeisn
THE EDUCATIONAL IMAGINATION
The Educational
Imagination
On the Design and Evaluation
oj School Programs
ELLIOT W. EISNER
Stanford University
Eisner, Elliot W
The educational imagination.
Printing: 7 8 Year: 4
ISBN D-D2-33213D-X
Acknowledgments
Vll
viii Preface
my fellow students, led two lives. We adapted to one mode of life and
thought within the university and led quite another outside of it.
As I have continued to work in the field of education since my graduate
days at the University of Chicago, these two lives have begun to merge.
Increasingly I have begun to see the ways in which artistic forms of under¬
standing and action can be used not just in art education but in all of teach¬
ing and curriculum development. Although I have had occasional glimpses
of that realization since I completed my graduate work—it shows up in
paragraphs and in various articles I have published—it is only within the
last six years that this realization has been a conscious, systematic, and
critical one. It is only during the last four years that I have tried to figure
out what the arts might have to do with the problem of designing educa¬
tional programs and in particular how they might help us evaluate what
goes on in schools.
The significance of the absence of aesthetic theory in the education of
students of education is, I believe, more important than most people realize.
Scientific epistemologies are given attention in courses in the philosophy of
education through analysis of Dewey’s work and that of the neopositivists
and in courses in research methods where the canons of social science re¬
search procedures are taught to aspiring doctoral candidates looking for a
design they can use in their dissertations; however, aesthetic theory is
nowhere to be found. As a result of this absence, such theory does not
become a part of the conversation; it never enters the scene as a way of look¬
ing at things and talking about them. Most of us who have been profes¬
sionally socialized in schools of education or in psychology departments
come to accept a quite limited set of assumptions about what must be done
to conduct meaningful educational research and to acquire knowledge or
understanding. Precisely because alternative epistemologies are so seldom
considered, a critical understanding of the methods we have been taught
cannot be easily achieved. And to talk about art in the contexts of inquiry
and education is to appear softheaded and romantic, not worthy of the
standards of scholarship.
The major task of this book—to adumbrate some of the uses of artistic
forms of understanding and reflection in the design and evaluation of educa¬
tional programs—is an unfinished one. My effort has been more concerned
with opening up attractive vantage points than in arriving at a destination.
To do this I have approached the problem of designing educational pro¬
grams in a manner congenial to the way in which many artists work,
namely, to try to perceive and conceptualize the whole first and then,
gradually, to work on problems of differentiation. The reason for this way of
working, compared to the construction of an edifice brick by brick, is that
the artist finds it useful to carry on a dialectic between whole and part in
order to create some sense of organic quality in a work. One must—I must,
Preface ix
at least—have some sense of the whole in order to know where things belong
and how they function.
I am not making a claim here for a comprehensive theory of curriculum
or evaluation. One never knows whether one has a whole; 1 am trying,
lather, to describe a way of working in order for the reader to have a sense
of how I developed the ideas in this book.
Another characteristic of my work is that it is unabashedly normative.
For that I make no apologies. Education is a normative enterprise, and I
believe that much too much social science attempts to be value neutral in
order to increase scientific objectivity. This aspiration, of course, is hope¬
less. Scientific work in any field is never value neutral. Social scientists select
the problems they will inquire into; in this selection, values are at work.
Social scientists choose the methods they will use; in this choice, values are
expressed. Social scientists interpret the data they secure; here, too, values
are employed. Social scientists assign significance to their findings; to do this
requires one to make value judgments. Indeed, the selection of scientifically
treatable questions is itself an expression of the high value placed on science
as a way of dealing with problems of social significance. To claim that
science is value saturated is not to complain but rather to give scientific
inquiry its due. Its negation is what is worth complaining about.
Because educational practice aims at the realization of certain values, the
educational significance of educational inquiry must be appraised in rela¬
tion to the virtues the enterprise seeks to attain. Indeed, if educational in¬
quiry has any distinctive claim to make, it is in the application of educa¬
tional criteria to the products of such inquiry. In short, the value of what
we do in education must be determined by its relevance and utility to
educational problems and educational aims. Because those problems and
aims are normative, the significance of such inquiry can be appraised only
in relation to the values they help realize.
Several other themes pervade this book. One of them is the need to con¬
sider problems in context. I do not believe that prescriptions for educational
practice or the findings of educational research can be applied to educa¬
tional situations in a straightforward manner. Such prescriptions as might
exist in “well-documented” research conclusions always need to be placed
in the perspective of the context in which they are to be used. To complicate
matters further, the shape of that context, the configurations that it displays,
shift over time. One therefore must be in a position to recognize both the
characteristics of the context and the ways in which that context alters the
appropriateness of the presciptions or findings. The meanings of prescrip¬
tions and findings, I am arguing, are contextual and dynamic.
In this feature, too, educational activity, whether teaching, evaluating, or
curriculum planning, is much like the artistic activity a painter engages in
as he or she copes with emerging visual configurations on a canvas. Each
x Preface
stroke alters the pattern, each new color changes the whole. This dynamic
seeks ultimately a happy resolution: the realization of artistic virtue through
the creation of an organic entity that “works.” As the artist articulates new
problems, new decisions must be made; when old decisions become routine
(a part of the artist’s stock response), new questions must be formulated so
that new solutions can be sought. The joy of the ride, even more than the
arrival, is the motive force behind the artist’s work.
Is the work of educational scholars so different? I think not. The live
organism is moved by the joys of inquiry, the discovery of new terrain, the
fresh perspective, the unique resolution. Such satisfactions make inquiry
itself an aesthetic undertaking.
I would argue that the joys secured from such activity are not the sole
preserve of educational scholars and research scientists but are also ex¬
perienced by children in their quest for competence, exploration, and dis¬
covery. All too often, alas, these satisfactions are found outside, rather than
inside, schools.
To respond to the changing pattern of the context requires, as I have
argued in this book, the ability to appreciate what is occurring. One cannot
make educational judgments about what he cannot see or experience. Thus,
another major theme of this book is in the conceptualization of what I
refer to as educational connoisseurship. Educational connoisseurship is the
art of appreciating what is educationally significant. It is a means through
which the shape of the context and the configurations within it can be
recognized so that intelligent decisions about that context can be made.
This term, connoisseurship, is also relevant in the arts, and I have con¬
sciously chosen to use it as a way of emphasizing the artistic aspects of
educational thought and action. In choosing to use this term and its com¬
plement, educational criticism, I realize that I risk creating culture shock
within the field of education. Terms out of the arts, particularly French
terms, are not familiar ones in educational circles. Yet, culture shock, as the
anthropologists have told us, can be useful. It enables us to become acutely
aware of what we might otherwise fail to see. By pointing out the need for
educational connoisseurship, I hope to persuade readers of the contingent
nature of educational planning and of the hopelessness of seeking the kind
of breakthroughs that are represented by the discovery of nuclear fission
and the invention of radar and (even) the microwave oven. In education,
we deal with a far more complicated set of problems.
In saying that educational criticism is one side of the educational con¬
noisseurship coin I mean that not only can the “perceptive” side of educa¬
tional decision making be regarded as an artistic activity, but the expressive
side can be, as well. We have, of course, been taught to use a language in
education that attempts to emulate the language used by our colleagues in
the natural sciences, on the one hand, and that of those working in the
industrial-military areas, on the othen Our language, we have been told,
Preface xi
Elliot W. Eisner
Contents
Index 289
xv
THE EDUCATIONAL IMAGINATION
The Curriculum Field Today:
Where We Are, Where We Were,
and Where We Are Going
eWs
ah yes,
eWs
WHERE WE ARE
Even if we wanted to, we who work in the field of curriculum could not iso¬
late ourselves from the problems of educational practice. What happens in
the schools is a part of the subject matter we study. It provides incentives
and direction to our work and it forms the field from which are drawn both
our aspirations and our irritations as professional students of education.
In an examination of the current scene in American schooling, a number
of features impose themselves on our consciousness. Perhaps first among
these is the widespread interest in the back-to-basics movement. Through¬
out the country people are expressing their longstanding belief that it is the
1
2 The Educational Imagination
The most important of these principles is that the goals of a grade’s work in a
subject must be absolutely definite, must be known to pupils as well as the
teachers, and must be attainable by the slowest, normal, diligent pupil. The big
goals of the grade must be subdivided so that a child’s progress is obvious to
himself. Goals must be in terms of concrete facts to be known, habits to be ac¬
quired, or skills to be developed. This is in contrast to the usual outline or course
of study in which nothing is set forth but pages to be covered or general aims
to be achieved.
In the second place, the plan requires the establishment of tests which are
complete and diagnostic. These tests must show whether or not a pupil has at¬
tained all of the goals and must show his specific weaknesses. For under the indi¬
vidual system each pupil must achieve 100 per cent efficiency in the work he
undertakes. Eighty per cent on a test does not mean passing; it means that there
is 20 per cent of the work yet to be done before the pupil goes on. The results
of the test must indicate exactly what the pupil has yet to accomplish.1
might conclude that in the past fifty years we have come a long way from
such a simplistic view. But just listen to what a former associate U.S. com¬
missioner of education has to say about the importance of establishing stan¬
dards in order to meet the requirements of educational accountability:
WHERE WE WERE
A complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyone’s intellect
and character and behavior, would tell the cause of every change in human
nature, would tell the result which every educational force—every act of every
The Curriculum Field Today 7
person that changed any other or the agent himself—would have. It would aid
us to use human beings for the world’s welfare with the same surety of the result
that we now have when we use falling bodies or chemical elements. In propor¬
tion as we get such a science we shall become masters of our own souls as we
now are masters of heat and light. Progress toward such a science is being made.
The first line of work concerns the discovery and improvement of means of
measurement of intellectual functions. (The study of means of measuring moral
functions such as prudence, readiness to sacrifice an immediate for a later good,
sympathy, and the like, has only barely begun.) Beginning with easy cases such
as the discrimination of sensory differences, psychology has progressed to meas¬
uring memory and accuracy of movement, fatigue, improvement with practice,
power of observing small details, the quantity, rapidity and usefulness of associ¬
ations, and even to measuring so complex a function as general intelligence and
so subtle a one as suggestibility.6
For Thorndike evidence of progress was in hand and the future looked
bright.
Dewey, too, regarded the optimal model for inquiry to be the scientific
model. Although in his 1929 publication The Sources of a Science of Educa¬
tion' he pointed out that science could not provide prescriptions for practice
because practical problems were always more complex than scientific con¬
clusions could adequately encompass, the tone of his writing and the general
thrust of his views were of means and ends, both linear and rational in
spirit. It wasn’t until he was 74 years old that we find his attention fully
devoted to the arts and to the exercise of intelligence in that realm of human
activity. Even then, in Art As Experience,8 the flavor is one of the theoreti¬
cian rather than of someone passionate about his subject or intimately
informed about its state.
I mention the influence of Thorndike and Dewey because these men, I
believe, set the intellectual tone and direction for inquiry into education
that, in turn, shaped the assumptions and practices of the curriculum field.
Thorndike and Dewey differed in their view of the means and ends of
education but they shared a belief in the potential of scientific inquiries
as a means of informing and guiding educational practice. In this respect
they helped establish and legitimize a tradition that others were to follow.
For example, Franklin Bobbitt’s early published work also focused on the
problem of creating scientifically efficient schools, and his early written
work in curriculum shared the same set of assumptions. He saw curriculum
planning as a species of social engineering. The problems were essentially
to discover the appropriate ends through a type of needs assessment, to
formulate those ends in specific terms, to order them over time in increasing
levels of difficulty, and to help children learn at each level what is laid out.
8 The Educational Imagination
Bobbitt writes: ‘In this analysis, one will first divide his field into a few
rather large units, and then break them up into smaller ones. This process
of division will continue until he [the curriculum worker] has formed the
quite specific activities that are to be performed.” 0
The students of curriculum who followed the tradition initiated by
Thorndike and Dewey did not make any major revisions in the basic
theoretical assumptions that were to be used in the design and evaluation
of curriculum. W. W. Charters, for example, continued the tradition in his
efforts to identify the goals and content of the curriculum by the scientific
analysis of the tasks that were typically performed by adults.10 For Charters,
as for Bobbitt, educational programs were to prepare the student for a
competent life as an adult, and this required knowledge of the particular
activities of which that life consists. Through activity analysis, as he called
it, complex skills could be divided into component parts and then organized
into a cuniculum. The belief was one that grew out of the professional
woild-view that Thorndike advocated: Learning was regarded as the ac¬
cretion of specific units or connections; gradually, as in the building of a
house, the parts were put together to constitute a complex unit of behavior.
These units of behavior eventually formed the architecture of human action.
The major problem for Bobbitt and Charters was to identify what skills
were useful for a productive adult life, to break those complex skills into
simpler ones, and to organize them into a curriculum so that they could be
efficiently learned. The implicit image is that of an assembly line that
eventually pioduces a finished product in which all of the component
parts work together.
By 1932 the curriculum field saw the publication of The Technique of
Curriculum Making by Henry Harap.11 This work, too, like Bobbitt’s, has
a technological flavor. Harap viewed the technique of curriculum making
as a linear systematic activity. One first defines the aims of education and
then the term objective. From these one identifies the major activities of
hfe, consults subject matter specialists, analyzes the activities of children,
determines the child s social needs, and eventually formulates those ac¬
tivities that are instrumental to the achievement of the objectives one has
formulated at the outset.
What is eleai from Harap s work, as well as that of his predecessors in
the curriculum field, is the desire to create a systematic technology of cur¬
riculum development. In 1932, when his book appeared, Harap was able
to write, “The process of systematic curriculum making is still in its infancy
-it is hardly ten years old.” 12 What I think we see in the work of these
early curnculansts is the desire to continue in the scientific tradition ad¬
vanced by men as prestigious as Thorndike and Dewey. I do not believe
that they anticipated that the tradition they embraced and used in their
work would set such an important precedent not only for those in the field
of curriculum, but for those in psychology, as well. Indeed, B. F. Skinner
The Curriculum Field Today 9
himself has said that he regards his work as a footnote to what Thorndike
started.1 2 3 4 * * * * * * * * 13
One cannot give an account of where the curriculum field has been with¬
out attention to the work of Ralph Tyler. Tyler’s Basic Principles of Cur-
riculum and Instruction14 was first published in 1949 and since that time
has undergone over thirty printings. One would be hard pressed to identify
a moie influential piece of writing in the field. In 128 brief pages, Tyler
lays out the basic questions he believes must be answered by anyone inter¬
ested in creating a curriculum for any subject matter field or level of school-
,n§' Tylers work follows the lead first laid down by Thorndike and Dewey
and articulated for the field of curriculum by Bobbitt and Harap. From
Thorndike, Tylers curriculum rationale draws on the need for observable
behavior as evidence of learning. He also shares both Thorndike’s and Judd’s
faith in the educational utility of the social sciences, particularly in psy¬
chology as a source through which curriculum decisions can be “screened.”
From Dewey’s work Tyler extracts a belief in the importance of experi¬
ence as the basic condition influencing what children learn. Tvler’s curricu¬
lum work also shares a family resemblance to that of his predecessors in
the curriculum field, notably Bobbitt and Harap. Bobbitt’s emphasis on the
importance of objectives is echoed in Tyler’s observation that objectives
are the single most important consideration in curriculum planning because,
in Tyler s words, "they are the most critical criterion for guiding all the
other activities of the curriculum maker.” 15 Tyler’s attention to the various
data sources for objectives we find described twenty years earlier by Harap;
the style is different, but the intent is essentially the same.
What Tyler has given the field of curriculum through his monograph is a
powerful, although in my view oversimplified, conception of what considera¬
tions curriculum planning entails. Once learned, Tyler’s four questions are
hard to forget. These questions are:
Once having learned about the need for objectives and the form they should
take, one is hard pressed to neglect them, at least in theory. The Tyler mono¬
graph on curriculum is a model of a rational, systematic approach to cur¬
riculum planning. Although it embraces no particular view of education, the
technical procedures it prescribes are bound to have consequences for what
individuals trained to use this rationale will come to consider professionally
adequate decision making in curriculum. Ends, for example, are always
to precede means, objectives come before activities; not a hint is given in
the monograph that in complex organizations ends can be constructed out
10 The Educational Imagination
that yield predictable forms of student behavior is the desired end in view.
Perhaps the ultimate position that this line of thinking has led to is found
in Bereiter’s argument that schools are misguided in their attempts to
educate students.19 The role of the school, according to Bereiter, is to train
children in the basic skills and to provide child-care services that make no
attempt to educate the young. What schools should do is provide training;
they should not attempt to influence the values or visions that students
hold. That, according to Bereiter, is for the family. Lest you think I over¬
state his position, I quote him here:
The argument of this paper is that schools should drop their educational func¬
tion in order to do a better job of child care and training, and that furthermore
child care and training should be separately carried out by different people ac¬
cording to different styles. Let me try to clarify my use of the terms education,
child care and training . . . Child care is distinguished from education by its rela¬
tive neutrality. It consists of providing resources, services, activities, love, and
attention for children, but no attempt to influence the course of their develop¬
ment .... ‘Training is also directive in its intent. However, its objective is not
to produce a certain kind of child, but merely to produce a certain kind of per¬
formance in the child. What the child does with his acquired skill, how it is inte¬
grated into his personality, is a concern that lies beyond training. It is an edu¬
cational concern. Therefore, to say that schools should abandon education but
continue training children is to say that schools should narrow their teaching
efforts to a simple concern with getting children to perform adequately in read¬
ing, writing, and arithmetic.20
within the field of education in the United States, a status system that re¬
gards conceptual and practical work in education as unscholarly and of
low status. In our professional culture a pound of insight is not worth an
ounce of data. Too many of us are too willing to hop aboard the train,
regardless of whether we believe it is going somewhere. Professional success
has demanded it.
For school administrators, the tendency to acquiesce to demands for the
scientific management of schooling is, I believe, explained adequately by
Callahan’s vulnerability thesis.23 School administrators were vulnerable to
public pressure in 1915, and they are vulnerable today. To keep one’s job
in a complex system, one must do what will look good, what is considered
up to date, and what will be regarded as acceptable. The maintenance
model of educational administration that I believe most school administra¬
tors embrace has as its first principle personal survival in the job. For this,
the most useful tool is a wet finger in the wind.
One might hope that schools of education that prepare school admini¬
strators would provide the kind of professional education that would enable
them to think critically about the virtues toward which education aims. One
might hope that such people would be encouraged to think deeply about
the aims of education and to provide leadership and educational services to
the community on whose support the schools depend. Unfortunately, as
schools become more industrialized, the training programs for administra¬
tors focus more and more on the development of skills of labor negotiation
and on courses offered in business schools, departments of economics, and
the like. Such courses might have utility for some aspects of educational ad¬
ministration, but they are essentially technical studies. Embedded within
technique are implicit visions of what is important, and these visions are
seldom appraised by criteria emanating from a conception of education it¬
self.
For teachers, the buy-in to the technical/business orientation to schooling
is, I believe, another form of self-preservation. Although there are some
teachers who find professional security in an approach to educational prac¬
tice that does not expect professional ingenuity, most teachers, particularly
at the elementary level, regard that accountability movement a gross over¬
simplification of their work. Yet, I believe, we have to face the fact that in
their professional education teachers are not given the kind of conceptual
tools that would enable them to become sophisticated students of one of
the most complex and intellectually challenging fields of study in existence:
education. Although teachers may often feel that a set of prescriptions or
demands is wrongheaded, they frequently find it difficult to say just what
the problem is. They, too, acquiesce, like almost everyone else, to demands
and expectations about which they have deep reservations.
All in all, when one looks back on the consequences the behavioristic, posi-
The Curriculum Field Today 15
tivistic, scientific tradition has had on education in general and the curricu¬
lum field in particular, the following seem to me to be important.
First, the dominance of a scientific epistomology in education has all but
excluded any other view of the way in which inquiry in education can
legitimately be pursued. Scientific assumptions have not only set theoretical
constiaints on the field by prescribing the acceptable criteria for knowledge
about educational problems, they have also defined the parameters within
which those problems can be posed. Problems that do not lend themselves
to measurement or to scientific solutions have been considered intellectually
ill-conceived.
Second, the kind of science that has dominated educational research has,
in my opinion, been preoccupied with control. The goal of the educational
scientist was not only to be able to understand and predict, but also to con¬
trol the phenomena into which he or she inquired. The offshoot of this view
has been to regard educational practice, including curriculum development,
as a technology that uses knowledge provided by the social sciences as the
primary basis for its management and control. The models to be emulated
are medicine, agriculture, and engineering. What has been sought is a set
of procedures derived from social science research that will prescribe meth¬
ods that curriculum developers and teachers can follow. In the field of cur¬
riculum this has found its apotheosis in the aspiration to create teacherproof
curriculum materials. In teaching it has manifested itself in the belief in the
diagnostic-prescriptive model. In school evaluation it has showed up in an
input-output model of productivity. Seldom have the basic assumptions
underlying such beliefs been subject to the kind of critical scrutiny they
deserve.
Third, a consequence of these assumptions has been the preoccupation
with standardized outcomes. The testing movement that has grown out of
the field of educational psychology depends on assumptions that required a
uniform set of test items and a uniform set of methods of test administration
to measure educational achievement. Indeed, until quite recently, the major
function of tests was to differentiate student from student on a common
scale. The statistics used to determine test reliability and test validity re¬
quired that all students be given the identical tasks so that differentiation
among students could be made, variances computed, and reliability de¬
termined. Such practices, built into the technology of test construction, un¬
dermined any educational inclination to cultivate the student’s positive
idiosyncracies or to use forms of assessment that were different for different
students. Under the press of such instruments, a truly individualized form
of teaching could hardly take place.
Fourth, under such assumptions, little or no role can be given to the pupil
for participating in the creation of his or her educational program because
the provision of such opportunities would make the system difficult to con-
16 The Educational Imagination
REFERENCES
I
2
Social Forces Influencing
The Curriculum
For those who have eaten of the tree of knowledge, paradise is lost.
K. R. Popper
In the previous chapter some of the ideas that have historically animated the
field of curriculum were identified. These ideas have served and serve today
as the ideological hubs around which curriculum planning revolves. These
hubs provide a sense of coherence to those that hold them. They confer order
on what would otherwise be a formless array of competing forces. However,
the shape and direction the curriculum of the school takes are not only the
product of the intentions of curriculum planners. The curriculum is also
shaped by an array of social forces over which curriculum planners have no
control. Like a giant gyroscope that strives to maintain its upright position
in a wind-blown sea, the school and the programs it offers attempt to with¬
stand or adapt to outside forces. This shifting set of conditions is one of the
factors that makes educational planning so challenging. It is what differen¬
tiates educational planning from the kind of planning that is possible when
working with materials that are unresponsive to social forces or that respond
identically to identical stimuli. What educational planners have to cope with
is a kind of organism whose contours are influenced by and which in turn in¬
fluence the context in which the organism functions.
Consider the forces that are at present shaping the curriculum of American
schools and giving direction to their aims and priorities. There are six forces
that appear to be of such major importance as to warrant special attention.
Perhaps first among these is the decline in student enrollment. According
to the best projective data available, we can expect the decline in enrollment
at the elementary school level to continue.1 Given 1970 as a baseline, the
21
22 The Educational Imagination
is then shifted to teachers because a school administrator can look good only
if teachers look good. Thus, we have, as a second force in this scenario,
unionization.
We also have a third force, one so ubiquitous that we often fail to recog¬
nize its existence. That force is scientism: the faith in measured performance
and so-called objective procedures for evaluating schooling and appraising
competence. Scientism influences teachers because it influences the criteria
used to determine professional competence. Even if it omits from its purview
the intangibles in education that it is impossible to measure, it at least pro¬
vides some teachers and administrators with the “objectivity” that they be¬
lieve will protect them from capricious supervisors. As a fourth factor, the
public, which demands that schools be held accountable, comes to regard
test scores as a demonstration of such accountability. And even where par¬
ents and others in the community recognize the fact that tests assess only a
slender portion of what children learn and experience, they realize that, re¬
gardless of their limitations, performance on tests will have an important
bearing on the educational and economic mobility of students. Scientism
as well as unionism and declining enrollment are potent forces affecting
schooling.
These are not the only important forces operating, but before the others
are identified it should be made clear that these forces are not necessarily
deleterious.
Consider, for example, the unionization of teachers. Unionization among
teachers is growing in the United States. In 1950 a total of 41,000 teachers
belonged to unions.5 In 1962 there were 71,000.® By 1970 there were 1,735,951
teachers who belonged.' This trend, as far as I can see, is not going to stop.
Twenty years ago there was little a teacher could do to protect himself or
heiself against having classes that were too large or a teaching schedule
that did not provide adequate time for preparation. One could, if one had
the courage, complain to the principal, but if the principal chose to do
nothing, that usually was the end of it. Today classes beyond a certain size
constitute a violation of a contract. Administrators and school boards know
this, and are often reluctant to deal with the grievance that would surely
follow if the contract were violated. In this respect, there is truth in the
assertion that better working conditions for teachers tend to improve the
educational conditions for students. The problems emerge when union de¬
mands are so one-sided that meeting them in fact diminishes the quality of
education children receive. For example, in some schools, even teachers who
elect to teach an extra class or who choose to stay late to work on materials
or projects they need for a class will have a grievance filed by the union
lepresentative in that school. In addition, the union members may make it
difficult for such teachers to put in the extra effort, even if they want to. To
piovide extia seivice without extra pay is regarded as poor professional
Social Forces Influencing the Curriculum 25
judgment: a form of economic liability for other teachers who are not so
inclined.
Thus we do not have a black or white, clear-cut position regarding the
vii tues and liabilities of unionization but rather a picture filled with subtle
complexities. L nions can ensure teachers that their rights as professionals
will be safeguarded, that they will no longer need to occupy the role of a
servant whose position in the community is low and whose prerogatives are
few. Teachers need no longer agree to “carry the coal pail and be off the
street by 9 p.m., as they were once expected to do. Professional affiliation,
whether in formal unions such as the American Federation of Teachers
(AFT) or in unionlike professional organizations such as the National Edu¬
cation Association (NEA), provides a professional solidarity that can protect
decent educational conditions for students as well as for teachers.
At the same time, unions and unionlike organizations can become so pre¬
occupied with the financial well-being of their members that in their efforts
to achieve greater economic benefits the educational well-being of students
suffers.
Similar complexities pervade the situation with respect to declining en¬
rollment. There was a time, not so long ago, when school districts such as
Los Angeles had such a growth in student population that they had to open
the equivalent of a new elementary school every four weeks. In such situa¬
tions, attention to substantive educational improvement is likely to be marg¬
inal because teachers as well as school administrators are simply trying to
keep their heads above water by finding places for new students who are
entering each day. New buildings must be built, movable classrooms must
be set up, new teachers must be hired, and in some cases split shifts must be
instituted to cope with the increasing numbers of students. The major efforts
and energies of the professional staff are devoted to organizational main¬
tenance.
Now, for the first time in many years, school districts do not have these
pressures bearing on them. Now there is time—at least theoretically—for
reflection, for attention to substantive educational matters: what shall be
taught, what ends shall be pursued, what kinds of programs shall be offered?
For the first time, there is space available in schools to offer students oppor¬
tunities to work in areas that previously were unavailable: art studios, sci¬
ence laboratories, teacher curriculum materials centers, photography work¬
shops, and the like. Now there is time to engage in a professional dialogue
on what is genuinely educational for students—and for the professional staff
as well. Yet paradoxically, now that the time is available, the climate is not
right. There are few school administrators who at present are inclined to be
“innovative,” a word overused and often abused in the past. Today the risks
for serious innovation are too great for many school administrators. The cli¬
mate is a conservative one; major concerns are expressed in demands for the
26 The Educational Imagination
who provide the resources and support to make schooling possible in the
first place. Furthermore, I believe that individual teachers and school ad¬
ministrators can make important differences in the educational lives that
students lead. I do not believe that either teachers or school administrators
must take to the streets to bring about improvement in the conditions of
schooling. However, this is not to say that teachers should not be political;
education itself is a political undertaking. It is to say that the larger picture
should be appreciated and that incremental change can be brought about
within the context of the larger views that one holds. In a society such as
ours, there will always be a variety of images of the good educational life.
The task is to understand the range of factors that influence their particular
realization.
The sixth major social force influencing the curriculum and schooling are
those influences emanating from court decisions and state and federal legis¬
lation. Undoubtedly, the most significant of these is 1954s Broton v. the
Topeka Board of Education. The importance of the court’s judgment that
separate schools, defined in terms of legal segregation, could not provide
equal education to children was a landmark in social influence, but not be¬
cause it rapidly desegregated schools; it didn’t. It was a landmark because
it initiated the era in which the legal segregation of school children was
considered a violation of constitutional rights by the highest court in the
land. From this judgment, a host of other legal decisions was rendered that
has served to generate other forces affecting schools and, hence, the pro¬
grams that they provide. For instance, the busing of school children for
purposes of racial desegregation could not have occurred without the Su¬
preme Court s 1954 decision. The decision of the Los Angeles City Schools
to assign teachers to schools on the basis of racial mix stems from the
judgments made first in 1954.
There is little question that the desegregation of schools through busing,
supported by legal decisions of the courts, has increased white flight from
the cities to the suburbs. In 1950 the proportion of whites living in the ten
largest cities in the United States was 86.5 per cent.8 By 1970 it was 56.9
per cent.9 It is as though the effect of the 1954 decision in practice was
contrary to what the court intended. Because of the segregated character
of housing in urban areas, schools have become increasingly segregated.
Busing for purposes of desegregation is seen by the court as a way to remedy
the school segregation created by such housing patterns.
For blacks and for other racial minorities, the creation of all-black schools
in all-black communities in urban areas has meant the opportunity to take
hold of policies determining what such schools teach. In many black com¬
munities, the call for curricular change has been twofold. First, blacks want
programs that help children recognize and appreciate the high achievements
of members of their race; they want their children to know something about
their cultural heritage both in this country and in Africa. The commercial
30 The Educational Imagination
achievements of the Ibo, the art of Benin and Ife, the high cultural achieve¬
ments of ninth-century Africa, as well as the works of Marcus Garvey,
Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr.,
must have a place in the school curriculum. Second, many blacks want
their children to have what they regarded as a solid academic education.
They do not want the school to provide a watered-down or condescending
curriculum. They do not want second-class programs that lead to educa¬
tional dead ends.
I will not attempt to discuss the distinctive aspirations and consequences
of the legal decisions for each racial and ethnic group. I use the preceding
example simply to illustrate how one kind of legal decision, a decision
aimed at the desegregation of schools, had consequences for what schools
teach and how they are staffed. Legal decisions about desegregation are by
no means the only kinds of legal and legislative decisions affecting minorities
and the schools.
Recent legislation that also pertains to minorities deals with the school
districts distinctive legal obligation to offer bilingual forms of instruction.
Describing AB 1329, the Legislative Counsels Digest says:
Therefore, the court held that California’s financing system for public ele¬
mentary and secondary schools, including the changes made by SB 90 and
AB 1267,
The range in pupil expenditure among the one thousand school districts in
California is from $1,030 to $2,874.12 To rectify what the courts regard
as an educational inequity, they have decreed that, after 1977, school dis¬
tricts in California that spent more than 150 per cent of the state-guaranteed
foundation per child must share their locally voted tax increases with lower-
wealth school districts. Equalization of educational opportunity will occur
by diminishing the range and by raising the median levels for each child
attending the public schools.
One potential consequence of this decision may be to motivate parents
who can afford to send their children to private schools to do so. No fiscal
limit is prescribed for such schools. Thus, parents who have the resources
may very well elect to have their children go to schools that can afford to
offer the class size, the curricular scope, and the personal attention that the
public schools cannot afford. Should large numbers of children from affluent
32 The Educational Imagination
families leave the public schools for the anticipated benefits provided by
private schools, important curricular consequences are likely to occur. The
public school will serve the lower, the upper lower, and the lower middle
classes, and the upper middle and upper classes will be elsewhere. Another
form of segregation will have been inadvertently created.
My task here is not to provide a substantive analysis of legal decisions
bearing on education, that would require both another book and a set of
skills I do not possess. I identify these legal decisions for illustrative pur¬
poses. The courts have always influenced educational practice: the laws of
1642 and 1647 in the Massachusetts Bay Colonies mandated reading instruc¬
tion; the Morril Act established land grant colleges; Plessy v. Ferguson
established equal but separate schools; the child labor laws increased
enormously the number of children attending the public schools. But during
the last two decades, the number of significant decisions has increased. As
the attitude of the nation has moved toward a greater concern, at least
judicially, for the rights of individuals and minorities, court decisions sup¬
porting those rights have been rendered. These decisions, in turn, affect the
schools. They influence where people choose to live, what monies will be
made available, what schools are obliged to teach, how schools will be
populated, and where teachers will be asked to work. Clearly, no one con¬
cerned with the planning of school programs or interested in the study of
curriculum decision making can afford to neglect the parameters that court
decisions establish. Combined with state legislation, such decisions consti¬
tute the sixth major social force influencing the character of school programs
today.
I have thus far attempted to identify and describe some of the influences
these six major social forces have on what schools teach and what priorities
and aims they hold. At present these six forces—decreasing enrollment,
unionization, scientism, educational consumerism, textbooks, and court de¬
cisions—are the salient forces. But this does not mean that they are the
forces that will always have a major impact on the content and direction of
schooling. If the Russians land a person on Mars, we might very well have,
as we did in 1957, a deluge of funds and a congressional mandate for more
work in the sciences and mathematics. If drug abuse gets out of control,
we may very well see a new emphasis in school programs dealing with the
effects of drugs on individuals and on society. As an organ within a larger
system, schools can isolate themselves from that system about as much as
the liver can isolate itself from the heart and lungs. We cannot easily or
accurately predict what new developments, crises, and the like will occur,
either within our nation or outside of it; thus there will always be a need
for those planning educational policies and programs to make judgments
in context and to exercise practical wisdom. Such wisdom consists in part in
being able to distinguish between the kind of data and information that one
can get and reasonably depend on and the kind that one is not likely to be
Social Forces Influencing the Curriculum 33
able to secure. The hunt for recipes, rules, formulas, and other nostrums
to solve educational problems is a hopeless one. Contexts change and the
configurations of schooling within those contexts also change. Sophisticated
educational planning needs to consider both and to anticipate that “final”
solutions will always be temporary at best. To say this is not to argue for
slipshod thinking, bootstrap judgments, or seat-of-the-pants analyses. I am not
arguing for innocence on the part of educational scholars or professionals.
I am arguing against unrealistic aspirations, pseudo science, and the host of
other bandwagons, bad analogies, and panaceas that emerge in the field
each year. We need, I believe, to recognize the contingent character of
educational practice, to savor its complexity, and to be not afraid to use
whatever artistry we can muster to deal with its problems. For the cur¬
riculum planner this means a life of continual uncertainty: the contingent
is inherent in educational planning; yet these emerging contingencies need
not provide a sense of discomfort but an array of opportunities to exercise
one s imagination, to cope with new problems, to make qualitative judgments
as well as theoretical ones. What one uses to deal with these contingencies
are not pat procedures, but ideas, concepts, frames of reference. One must
work with such tools as means guided by a flexible form of intelligence.
In the next chapter some of those tools are presented, first by asking what
curriculum means and then by examining some of the assumptions on
which this book is based.
REFERENCES
1. Harriet Fislow, “Demography and Changing Enrollments,” unpublished
manuscript, School Finance and Organization Symposium, 1976.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Time Magazine, October 4, 1976.
5. T. M. Stinnet, Turmoil in Teaching: A History of Organizational Struggle
for America’s Teacher, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New York, 1968.
6. Ibid.
7. Lorraine McDonnell, “Teacher Collective Bargaining and School Govern¬
ance,” working paper for the Rand Corporation, June 1976.
8. Joel S. Berk and Michael Kirst, Federal Aid to Education, Lexington Books,
Toronto, 1972.
9. Ibid.
10. Assembly Bill No. 1329, California, 1976.
11. Thomas A. Shannon, “The Second Serrano Case—Important Implications for
California School Finance,” Special Report, Association of California School
Administrators, Vol. 3, No. 15, n.d., p. 9.
12. Bureau of School Appointments and Reports, California State Board of Edu¬
cation, n.d.
3
Some Concepts,
Distinctions, and Definitions
Just what is the field of curriculum? How wide is its scope? What do its
practitioners do? What kinds of problems do its scholars study? What
methods of inquiry are appropriate to it? And does it claim any special
terrain within education as a whole?
Perhaps the best way to begin is with some concepts and some distinc¬
tions. Take, for example, the concept curriculum. As a term in educational
discourse, curriculum is used in a wide variety of ways. It has a common-
sense meaning as broad as “what schools teach” to as narrow as “a specific
educational activity planned for a particular student at a particular point
in time.” Yet, the term itself warrants analysis. Initially, the word derives
from the Latin word currere, meaning “the course to be run.” This notion
implies a track, a set of obstacles or tasks that an individual is to overcome,
something that has a beginning and an end, something that one aims at
completing. This metaphor of a racetrack is not altogether inappropriate.
Schools have historically established “courses” of study through which a
student is to pass. Successful completion of the course warrants a diploma
or degree certifying competence. In other ways, too, the idea of a curriculum
as a course filled with increasingly difficult obstacles is an appropriate
metaphor. Schools have functioned historically as institutions that serve as
a type of educational sieve, selecting the more from the less able at each
higher level of schooling. Thus at the various levels of schooling there were
—and are—increasingly difficult examinations to pass that open or close the
doors to further schooling. The concept of the curriculum as the course to
be run is one that fits one of the school’s historical functions.
34
Some Concepts, Distinctions, and Definitions 35
Curriculum has also been conceived of and defined as “all of the experi¬
ences the child has under the aegis of the school.’ This conception of cur-
liculum was created by progressive educators during the 1920s to emphasize
several beliefs that they considered central to any adequate conception of
education. First, they wished to remind other educators that the reality of
a curriculum for a child was determined by the quality of the experience
that the child had in the school and was not simply a piece of paper on
which lesson plans were prepared. Although some degree of planning was
considered appropriate and important, the real curriculum for the child,
the one that made a difference in his or her life, was the curriculum that he
or she experienced. Second, because children differ from one another in
background, aptitudes, interests, and the like, the curriculum was never
identical for different children. In a sense, one could have a curriculum
only after it was experienced by a child. The curriculum was, one might
say, to be discovered by looking backward. To their credit, these same
progressive educators recognized that what children learn in school is
wider than what goes on in classrooms and more varied than what teachers
intend to teach. The experiences secured in the hallways and the play¬
grounds of the school were also influential aspects of educational life and
should not, in their view, be separated from the responsibility educators
should assume for guiding the child’s experience in other aspects of school
life. It was educational folly to care about the child’s experience in the
classroom but to disregard it in the playing fields. Indeed, progressive edu¬
cators felt so strongly about the need to focus on the kind of experience the
child had under the aegis of the school that they made a formal distinction
between the curriculum, which was that experience (and hence each child
had a different curriculum because his or her experience was never the
same as another’s), and the course of study, which was a written document
that outlined the content, topics, and goals that a teacher was to use in
planning the curriculum for a class or a child.
Whatever the conception of curriculum—and each of the two conceptions
described has important consequences for the way in which one thinks about
educational planning—it is clear that a school cannot function without some
kind of program that it offers to its students. Whether that program is con¬
ceived as a preplanned series of educational hurdles over which the students
must jump or the entire range of experiences a child has within the school,
the school as an institution has some mission, some set of general aims or
direction, and must provide some activities, programs, or means that engage
those who work and study there. The design and evaluation of those ac¬
tivities and programs are what we are attempting to understand.
In considering such a plan or program, there are some distinctions we
can make regarding the scale or scope of our attention and the location of
our planning over time. In Figure 1 two continua are outlined, one dealing
with scale and scope, the other dealing with time.
36 The Educational Imagination
MOLAR
Example:
The time at which and General policy decisions regarding what
for which curriculum shall be taught in elementary schools of
decisions are made a particular state
PRESENT FUTURE
Figure 1
MOLECULAR
a curriculum of an excellent sort, but because the plans are not public, they
can neither be shifted about, inspected, nor shared with others. The only
way to appraise the quality of the curriculum is to watch the teacher and
the students in the class. One must attend to the attributes as they unfold,
make judgments about the significance of the content as it is revealed, and
appraise the quality of the resources as they are used. One must make one’s
judgment by observing the curriculum in use. For the teacher who does not
make extensive or long-term plans, even of a mental sort, the curriculum
may in fact be planned in process. In this situation, it is not simply that plans
have been made but have not been written down, in this situation the
teacher plans in process. What the teacher uses are initiating activities, but
such activities are employed simply to get the ball rolling, to begin a process
whose course is shaped in the conduct of teaching.
It is in this model of curriculum planning that the distinction between
curriculum planning and teaching is particularly difficult to draw. What
constitutes a teaching decision and what constitutes a decision about cur¬
riculum becomes very difficult to identify. Nevertheless, the general distinc¬
tion between curriculum and teaching is useful, as I will discuss later in this
book, even though there are cases in which the distinction between the
two is not clear.
It might be noted that the planning of a curriculum on a long-term basis
with clear specifications regarding its use can be compared to the creation
of a score written by a composer or the plans prepared by an architect. Al¬
though these two examples are much more specific and detailed than what
most curricula provide, the relationship between the composer and the pian¬
ist or the architect and the builder has similarities to that between the cur¬
riculum planner and the teacher. In each case the planner designs, and the
performance is executed within the constraints of the design. And in each
case the performers have degrees of freedom with which to interpret the
plans that have been made. One can inspect the score, the architectural
specifications, and the curriculum as planned and assess the ways in which
those plans have been executed.
For those using a more emergent model of curriculum planning, that
model in which plans are created in process, activities are much closer to
the work of the painter or poet. In this model, decisions to do one thing
rather than another are decisions that can be made only by considering
options as they develop, by “reading” the situation, by exploiting the ad¬
ventitious, and by allowing intentions to grow out of action rather than
requiring them to precede it. This is the way a great many artists as well
as teachers work. To work this way is not necessarily a mark of incompetence
but could be the result of a preference for a particular way of working,
the result of a considered view of one’s professional role, a sign of commit¬
ment to a particular image of education. In such a model of curriculum
planning one must place a good deal of faith in the ability of the teacher.
42 The Educational Imagination
because what a person learns might have negative consequences for his or
her development. What makes experience educational is its participation
in a set of values. To the extent to which those experiences participate in
those values, they are educational. To the extent to which they contradict
those values, they are miseducational.
For the planning of curricula, normative commitments are also crucial.
Such commitments, or images of educational virtue, influence what is re¬
garded as relevant in planning and what data are considered important in
making curriculum decisions. Without such values, neither education nor
curriculum has a rudder. Now it should be noted that “theoretical” in the
context of normative theory is not the same as a bald statement of values
or belief: it is the coherent articulation of a view and a presentation of the
grounds for holding it. Such theory is not necessarily predictive and need
not employ scientifically verified facts to sustain it. What one looks for is
coherence. The value orientations to curriculum that will be presented in
the next chapter are examples of such theoretical views.
In saying that normative theory is not simply a bald statement of what
someone values, I am not implying that there are necessary and sufficent
conditions that can be used as criteria for determining whether a statement
is theoretical. Normative theory extends from general statements and be¬
liefs to highly elaborate efforts to justify a view of what is good or beautiful.
Thus, the roots of such theory begin as humans speculate on what is good
in life and worth achieving. Commonsensically, we call such speculation
philosophies of life, and although few philosophers would consider such
commonsense speculation philosophical in the technical or professional
sense, the difference is one of degree rather than kind.
To say this is not to equate the commonsense theorizing that all of us do
with the heady work of a Paul Tillich, Plato, Boyde Bode, or John Dewey.
It is to recognize that the theoretical construction of value is not tire sole
province of those who are professional philosophers but is a part of the
intellectual activity of ordinary men and women. The differences between
the two reside in consistency, subtlety, scope, and coherence. These are
differences that distinguish levels of quality rather than differences in kind.
I said earlier that normative theory is critical for education, and this
point is worth emphasizing. Education is not the same as schooling, nor is it
the same as learning. One can learn many things that are personally and
socially dysfunctional: to become neurotic, fearful of people, a torturer, a
racist, and the like. In each case, learning has taken place, but whether one
considers such learning an instance of education depends on a normative
theory of education. The claim that some groups or individuals do or would
regard such learning as educational is not in dispute. This might be true,
but to make such a claim is not to make a value statement but to describe
a social fact. The question is whether one ought to regard such forms of
learning as educational. Would you, given your normative theory of edu-
44 The Educational Imagination
Social scientists are rightly proud of the discipline we draw from the natural
science side of our ancestry. Scientific discipline is what we uniquely add to the
time-honored ways of studying man. Too narrow an identification with science,
however, has fixed our eyes upon an inappropriate goal. The goal of our work, I
have argued here, is not to amass generalizations atop which a theoretical tower
can someday he erected (cf. Scriven, 1959b, p. 471). The special task of the
social scientist in each generation is to pin down the contemporary facts. Beyond
that, he shares with the humanistic scholar and the artist in the effort to gain
46 The Educational Imagination
insight into contemporary relationships and to realign the culture’s view of man
with present realities. To know man as he is is no mean aspiration.5
CURRICULUM DIFFUSION
Once curricula have been designed and the materials embodying them
produced, the problem of their diffusion to schools still exists. Curriculum
diffusion is the process of moving curriculum material into the purview of
teachers. There are many routes that one can take. One can attempt to de¬
sign materials that need little or no form of inservice education, materials
that move toward the teacherproof ’ end of the spectrum. One can design
materials and then work with supervisors or consultants within the school
distiict to provide workshops or institutes to help teachers use the materials.
One can establish teacher centers, as some educational laboratories have,
that piovide inservice education for teachers in the use of new curriculum
materials (one can use materials as prototypes for teachers to develop their
own materials).
Tire dissemination stage of the process is not a marginal one. It is sim¬
plistic to assume that teachers will adopt materials that they have been
inadequately exposed to and which, initially at least, make demands on them
that familiar materials do not. Quite often, new curriculum materials also
require the use of new teaching skills. Curricula that are discovery oriented
suffer from didactic teaching methods. Curricula that engage students in the
examination of controversial issues need teachers who can guide rather
than dominate discussions. Inappropriate teaching can scuttle the most well-
intentioned and handsomely designed curriculum materials.
The need for the interpretation of new curricula has been recognized not
only by educational laboratories, but by county education offices, among
whose major functions is the diffusion of such material and the provision of
inservice education. It is also recognized by commercial companies that
produce and market such materials. Most of the larger companies have a
cadre of former teachers and curriculum specialists who provide in-service
programs to school districts that purchase their products.
The dissemination or diffusion of curriculum materials is a crucial step
Some Concepts, Distinctions, and Definitions 49
charactei of this process might initiate with a vague image of a new way of
teaching biology or art or the study of American political behavior. That
image might eventually get transformed into a body of handsome resources,
well-written prose, and imaginatively conceived opportunities for learning.
But such materials, like a brilliantly composed musical score, need skillful
and sensitive interpretation and a group of people who can interact mean¬
ingfully with what has been created. If any of these components is missing,
the process fails. If the score is poor, it is not worth playing. If the per¬
formance is poor, it will be poorly received. If the audience is ill-prepared
to deal with it, it will fall on deaf ears. Composers need competent per¬
formers and performers need an appreciative audience. In education, similar
relationships hold. The teacher might be, in some models of education, his
or her own composer, but the need for competent performance, if not an
artistic one, still exists. And the fit between the teacher’s "score” and the
students remains as critical in the classroom as it is in the concert hall—
probably even more so.
REFERENCES
The subject which involves all other subjects, and therefore the subject
in which education shoidd culminate, is the Theory and Practice of
Education.
Herbert Spencer
The content and aims of school programs have long been the subject of de¬
bate. In these debates, differences seldom emerge in the form of abstract
issues or bald-face confrontations of competing ideologies. Most often they
emerge in the form of differences about specific practical matters: Should
children be given letter grades? Should children be assigned to tracks ac¬
cording to their ability in school subjects? Should corporal punishment
be used or threatened in school? Should the three R’s be emphasized,
and should children be kept back if they do not achieve grade-level
standards?
Although the arguments that these questions elicit seldom broaden into
an examination of principles, it is important for those concerned with design¬
ing educational programs to see behind the issues, to go beyond the immed-
ate controversy, to penetrate the current debate in order to locate the values
and premises behind the questions.
It is my contention that through such analysis the contending parties will
have a clearer and more adequate basis for dealing with what is at issue.
Furthermore, an awareness of the various orientations to schooling expands
one’s options in curriculum planning and thus contributes to one’s degree of
piofessional freedom. In this chapter, a framework is presented for the de¬
scription of five important curriculum orientations. In addition, it provides ex¬
amples to indicate how these orientations manifest themselves in the class¬
room.
50
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 51
DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE
PROCESSES
One major orientation to schooling emphasizes the belief that the curriculum
provided and the teaching strategies used should foster the development of
the students cognitive processes. In this view, the major functions of the
school are (1) to help children learn how to learn and (2) to provide them
with the opportunities to use and strengthen the variety of intellectual
faculties that they possess.
In this view, the mind is conceived of as a collection of relatively inde¬
pendent faculties or aptitudes: the ability to infer, to speculate, to locate and
solve problems, to remember, to visualize, to extrapolate, and so on. It is
these faculties that must come into play in order to adequately deal with
the problems that individuals inevitably have to cope with during the course
of a lifetime. For the school to emphasize the mere acquisition of informa¬
tion, the accumulation of fact, or even the dissemination of theory is not in
the long run useful, for surely both facts and theories change, and at an
alarming rate. If what is already known is emphasized; the student is in
a poor position to deal with problems and issues that will inevitably arise in
the future, many of which cannot at present even be envisioned. The most
effective way to deal with such problems is not by storing bodies of knowl¬
edge in one’s memory but rather by strengthening those cognitive processes
that can be used later to deal with them. For this to occur, the curriculum
used in the school and the forms of teaching employed are crucial. The cur¬
riculum is not to emphasize content, but process. Teaching is not to impart,
but to help students learn to inquire.
The roots of this orientation to curriculum go back to the work of the
phrenologists and faculty psychologists of the nineteenth century and to the
progressive era in American education, particularly during the 1920s. For the
phrenologists, the mind consisted of a collection of thirty-seven muscles that
were located in different parts of the brain. Each section of the skull showed
the location of these intellectual muscles. Following the phrenologists’ lead,
the faculty psychologists emphasized the importance of strengthening these
mental faculties through practice, especially practice that was tough and
demanding. Their slogan might be said to have been, “It doesn’t matter
much what a student studies in school, as long as he doesn’t like it.” In short,
what was important was that the tasks encountered exercise the relevant
faculties so that through exercise they became “strong.”
Although it was believed that content, per se, was not the crucial issue
in building a curriculum, it was believed that some subject matters were
particularly useful for the development of specific faculties. Mathematics,
for example—subjects such as algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus
—was justified not because it imparted content but rather because it fostered
52 The Educational Imagination
ACADEMIC RATIONALISM
One of the oldest and most basic orientations to curriculum goals and con¬
tent may be called academic rationalism. This orientation argues that the
major function of the school is to foster the intellectual growth of the
student in those subject matters most worthy of study. The argument pro¬
ceeds that schools are special places; their mission as social institutions
should not be subverted by attempting to meet every social need or personal
whim that might arise. Schools that devote their time and resources to
problems of social adjustment, driver training, and drug education are
depriving students of the intellectual tools they need to cope with life’s
most pressing problems—justice, wisdom, duty—as well as of the concepts
and techniques that careful study in academic disciplines provides.
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 55
But what are the subjects most worthy of study? Who is to determine
which subjects are best? Are there intrinsic differences in the value of
various academic disciplines? The answers to these questions for those
holding an academic rationalistic position are clear: not all disciplines are
created equal. Some disciplines—biology, for example—deal with processes
that inform one about the nature of life, a topic so important that the
achievements in biological inquiry should be a part of the intellectual
repertoire of all educated people. Furthermore, if biology or the sciences
more generally are not taught in school, it is not likely that their ideas
will be learned. Unlike driver training or home economics, education in
the sciences is the special province of the school.
This position is argued in several ways. First, it is argued that biology (I
use biology only as an example) as a branch of science not only represents
a particular discipline having its own content, concepts, and patterns of
inquiry, but it also represents a special mode of thought—science. Science
is a fundamental form of human understanding and as such should be made
available to students. In this argument, biology is a special case of a more
general and powerful paradigm of human understanding that the school
should foster, especially because an understanding of its concepts and
procedures requires specialized forms of instruction. If it is not fostered
by the curriculum, it is not likely to be learned.
The second ground on which academic rationalists argue is that all chil¬
dren should be introduced to basic fields of study because it is only in this
way that they can discover if they have any interest in or aptitude for an
area. It is through contact with the various disciplines that interests and
aptitudes are stimulated. Part of the task of the school is to enable students
to discover these interests and aptitudes.
It is clear that the latter argument is not as strong as the former. The
number of subjects within the various modes through which humans come
to know are extremely large. If biology should be taught, why not paleon¬
tology or meteorology? Interests and aptitudes could be revealed by those
areas of study, as well. The school must make certain choices; it cannot
teach everything. But if that is true—and it certainly seems true—what is
the basis on which choices are to be made? The academic rationalist be¬
lieves that the basic fields in the arts and sciences are important because they
best exemplify and exercise the human’s rational abilities. Their study is
what education is basically about. Furthermore, within the various fields
to be taught, the very best content, the most intellectually significant ideas,
should be what students encounter. The greatest ideas created by the
greatest writers, exemplified by the greatest works humans have produced,
are the proper objects of educational attention.
An academic rationalist view of the curriculum has been admirably
argued by one of its chief proponents, Robert Maynard Hutchins. When
he was chancellor of the University of Chicago he established an under-
56 The Educational Imagination
graduate program that emphasized the study of the great books, the use
of primary source materials, and the tradition of teaching in the context of
small-group discussion. Hutchins was interested in helping students secure
what he regarded as a basic liberal education, a form of education that
enables students to ask basic questions about life, truth, justice, and
knowledge and to read the works of individuals who have provided power¬
ful and lasting answers to such questions. Of this form of education,
Hutchins writes:
PERSONAL RELEVANCE
must have some hand in its development—and that without actual partici¬
pation or the availability of real choices within the curriculum schooling
is likely to be little more than a series of meaningless routines, tasks under¬
taken to please someone else’s conception of what is important.
For a meaningful form of educational experience to occur it is critical
that teachers regard children as individuals and not as mere members of
a class or a group. Furthermore, the teacher must be able to establish
rapport with students; he or she must understand how the child actually
feels when engaged in activities in school. Without rapport it is not likely
that the teacher will be in a position to understand the character of the
child’s experience, and unless this occurs both student and teacher are
likely to deal with each other as role incumbents rather than as living
creatures attempting to broaden and deepen the quality of their experience.
Another major argument underlying this view of the curriculum is that
human beings from birth on are stimulus-seeking organisms, not stimulus-
reducing organisms. The task of the school is to provide a resource-rich
environment so that the child will, without coercion, find what he or she
needs in order to grow. The metaphor is biological: growth is the aim of life.
In developing this view further, it is argued that organisms develop not
so much from the outside in as they do from the inside out. Education is
regarded as a process of leading forth from the native ability that the child
possesses; thus, the image of the teacher is not so much that of a sculptor,
someone who gives shape to formless clay, but rather that of a good
gardener who cannot change the basic endowment children possess but
who can provide the kind of environment that can nurture whatever apti¬
tudes they bring with them into the world. Out of the interaction of ap¬
titudes and environment, interests and intelligence develop. Once having
discovered such interests, the teacher is to foster them by the artful con¬
struction of educational situations in which those interests can deepen and
expand. Another way of identifying interests is to talk to children about
their interests and thus to be in a position to provide for their development
through the curriculum.
The admonition to build on the child’s interest is often made as a cor¬
rective for educational programs that neglect them as sources of curriculum
aims and content. Traditional educational programs are developed out of
principles that identify educational value within particular subject matters
or disciplines. Becoming educated means learning how to use the ideas
within these disciplines. This approach, it is argued, has two educationally
devastating consequences. First, it is often irrelevant to the child. Second,
it fails to cultivate the child’s idiosyncracy by providing few opportunities
that are of particular importance to the individual child.
In the last decade or so, A. S. Neills has been a leading advocate of the
philosophy that the child should play a major role in determining what he
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 59
or she shall study. In the United States, the emergence of “free schools”
represents a similar orientation; the child is to be given the “freedom” to
choose. The teacher’s responsibility is not to coerce but to facilitate. John
Holt, a leading and articulate spokesman for this view of curriculum makes
the case this way:
as a friend of mine put it, we teachers can see ourselves as travel agents. When
we go to a travel agent, he does not tell us where to go. He finds out first what
we are looking for. Do we care most about climate or scenery, or about museums
and entertainment? Do we want to travel alone or with others? Do we like crowds
or want to stay away from them? How much time and money do we want to
spend? And so on. Given some idea of what we are looking for, he makes some
suggestions. Here is this trip, which will take so long and cost so much; here is
this one, here is that. Eventually, we choose, not he. Then, he helps us with our
travel and hotel arrangements, gets us what tickets and information we need,
and we are ready to start. His job is done. He does not have to take the trip with
us. Least of all does he have to give us a little quiz when we get back to make
sure we went where we said we would go or got out of the trip what we hoped
to get. If anything went wrong he will want to hear about it, to help us and other
clients plan better in the future. Otherwise, what we got out of the trip and how
much we enjoyed it is our business.9
What one senses from the metaphor of teacher as travel agent is a con¬
ception of the teacher’s role and of curriculum that values above all else
the child’s freedom to choose, and thus the opportunity to learn how to
choose as a central aim of educational programs. Holt and others who share
this view believe that in the process the child’s talents will be cultivated;
such a school allows the child to become his or her own person.
One can, of course, question the premise that the greatest of all educa¬
tional goals resides in allowing children to choose what they think best.
For one, choice is possible only when one has options and knows of their
existence. Do children have the experience that will enable them to consider
alternatives? If experience is limited, won’t choice be limited? How can
children follow their interests if they haven’t had an opportunity to learn
about possibilities, ideas, skills, and materials they have never dreamed of?
Do children of eight, ten, twelve, or fifteen really know what’s in their best
interest in the long run?
What is it that children need? And who should decide? It can be and
has been argued that “needs” are products of adult judgments of the gap
existing between the ideals that adults hold and the state at which children
are during their schooling. Schooling as an institutionalized form of educa¬
tion is intended to eliminate or at least reduce that gap. Furthermore, the
belief that each child is so different that there can be no common educational
program suitable for the vast majority is wrong to begin with. And so the
counterarguments proceed. Boyd Bode, an influential American philosopher
60 The Educational Imagination
The point is far more than the verbal question of how the term “need” is to be
employed. It concerns the question of what education should be primarily con¬
cerned to achieve. The failure to emancipate ourselves completely from Rous¬
seauism and the instinct psychology is responsible for most, if not all, the weak¬
nesses of the Progressive movement in education. The attitude of superstitious
reverence for childhood is still with us. The insistence that we must stick like a
leech at all times to the “needs” of childhood has bred a spirit of anti-intellec-
tualism, which is reflected in the reliance on improvising instead of long-range
organization, in the over-emphasis of the here and now, in the indiscriminate
tirades against “subjects,” in the absurdities of project planning, and in the lack
of continuity in the educational program. It has frequently resulted in an un¬
healthy attitude towards children, an attitude which suggests that there is no
such thing as a normal child, and that we must be everlastingly exploring his
insides, like a Calvinist taking himself apart day after day to discover evidence
of sin.10
A fourth orientation to curriculum is one that derives its aims and content
from an analysis of the society the school is designed to serve. In this
orientation it is argued that schools are essentially institutions created to
serve the interests of the society. As such their mission is to locate social
needs, or at least to be sensitive to those needs, and to provide the kinds
of programs that are relevant for meeting the needs that have been
identified.
It is precisely in the identification of social needs that differences among
various groups become most acute. One segment of the society regards the
manpower needs of society as most salient, another segment the need for
conformity to existing values, still another the need for children to take
their place in the social order. The conception of needs among all such
groups is essentially conservative; the role of the school is to maintain the
status quo. If the society needs more engineers, doctors, physicists, skilled
blue-collar workers, the school is regarded as the agency through which
they will be provided.
Perhaps the classic case of using schools to meet social needs was the
response made by Americans to Sputnik I. When on October 4, 1957, the
Russians sent an unmanned satellite circling the earth, critics lambasted
American schools for being lax, for failing to provide rigorous programs in
mathematics and science, and even for being the prime cause of our second
place in space technology. The schools were urged to remedy these defi¬
ciencies by emphasizing the teaching of mathematics and the sciences in the
curriculum. The National Science Foundation, whose attention to education
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 63
First a few general remarks about tire form of peace education. It has to be
compatible with the idea of peace, i.e., it has in itself to exclude not only direct
violence, but also structural violence. Only rarely is education nowadays sold with
direct violence; the days of colonialism and corporal punishment are more or less
gone. But the structural violence is there, and it takes the usual forms: a highly
vertical division of labor which in this case expresses itself iir one-way communi¬
cation; fragmentation of the receivers of that communication so that they cannot
develop horizontal interaction and organize and eventually turn the communica¬
tion flow the other way; absence of true multilaterality in the education endeavor.
All this relates to form; and if in addition the content of education is included,
the structural violence becomes even more apparent.12
focusing on its problems but rather at helping students acquire the skills
needed to fit into the society, largely as it is. Thus, social reconstructionism
and social relevance are at opposite poles, but what they have in common is
that both look to the society to decide what the aims of the school’s program
should be. The social reconstructionist looks at the society to locate its diffi¬
culties. Once they have been found, the program of the school is designed to
help children understand these difficulties and to be able to cope with them.
The person concerned with social relevance looks to society to find out what
students need in order to get ahead and builds a curriculum that aims to
achieve that goal.
The analysis of society as a basis for the formulation of curriculum content
and goals is not as modern as one might believe. Its first formal use in Ameri¬
can education was in the school survey movement initiated in around 1910.
The major effort here was to use scientific methods to identify the strengths
and weaknesses of school programs. The field of education during that time
was in the process of establishing and testing its new-found scientific
approach to education. University professors such as Elwood Cubberley and
Jesse B. Sears were called on to provide services to schools while refining the
methodology used in such work. Sear’s book The School Survey 13 described
the theory and methods of such work and appeared in 1928.
But in the field of curriculum the seminal work was done by Franklin
Bobbitt, who argued that education should prepare for the fifty years of
adult life the child eventually would lead and not merely be concerned with
childhood, per se. To prepare for this life, “the curriculum discoverer,” to
use Bobbitt’s term, was to identify the various areas of life for which schools
should prepare the young. Bobbitt identified ten such areas. The next step,
according to Bobbitt, was to identify those people in the community who
displayed excellence in each of the ten areas. Their behavior, their under¬
standing, and their attitudes, once analyzed by curriculum specialists, would
constitute the goals of curriculum:
The central theory is simple. Human life, however varied, consists in its per¬
formance of specific activities. Education that prepares for life is one that pre¬
pared definitely and adequately for these specific activities. However numerous
and diverse they may be for any social class, they can be discovered. This re¬
quires that one go out into the world of affairs and discover the particulars of
which these affairs consist. These will show the abilities, habits, appreciations,
and forms of knowledge that men need. These will be the objectives of the cur¬
riculum. They will be numerous, definite and particularized. The curriculum will
then be that series of experiences which childhood and youth must have by way
of attaining those objectives.14
Bobbitt s view was a conservative one. But the point of his work was nei¬
ther the virtue nor the vice of being conservative, it was his assumption that
goals for education reside in the society and that the analysis of that society
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 67
(in his case, successful adults) would provide the basis for the curriculum.
Those who aim at social relevance of an adaptive variety as well as those
seeking to reconstruct the social order share with Bobbitt the inclination to
look to the world to find out what schools should teach. This aim they share;
the images of the world that they see and the aims that they espouse, how¬
ever, could not be farther apart.
CURRICULUM AS TECHNOLOGY
Again, what we find is that the dominant framework for viewing curriculum
has consequences for the practical operation of schools; each orientation
harbors an implicit conception of educational virtue. Furthermore, each orien¬
tation serves both to legitimize certain educational practices and to nega¬
tively sanction others. It also functions as an ideological center around which
political support can be gathered.
It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of the various orientations
to curriculum that have been described. Rather than being “mere abstract”
philosophies that have little bearing on the conduct of educational practice,
these orientations are permeated through and through with values that shape
one’s conception of major aspects of practice. What the teacher’s role is to be
is not separable from what one believes the content of the curriculum to be.
If one views optimal educational practice as the form that yields predictable
and measurable consequences, the teacher’s’ role and the character of the
curriculum are partly defined. It’s no good talking about nonempirical out¬
comes to be realized long after a course is completed if results are to be
demonstrated in June. If one believes that the problems of the society should
be the focus for identifying the contents of the curriculum, the likelihood of
classical studies being important is remote. If one believes that the major
function of the school is to ensure acquisition of the three R’s, it is not likely
that inductive or discovery learning will be given high priority as techniques
for instruction.
Furthermore, each of the five basic orientations has specific implications
for the goals and content of specific subject matter curricula. For example,
Science: A Process Approach, a science curriculum for elementary-age chil¬
dren, was developed to foster certain cognitive process skills. Each unit of
this curriculum is designed to sharpen children’s ability to classify, to ob¬
serve, to measure, and so forth. Cognitive processes play a critical role in
determining what counts in scientific learning. The evaluation of the units
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 71
that are taught is intended to determine whether children can employ these
processes.
The significance of each of the five orientations to curriculum also be¬
comes apparent if one considers the importance of content inclusion-content
exclusion as an influence on what students learn in school. Each of the orien¬
tations emphasizes a particular conception of educational priorities. Each
set of priorities defines the content and influences the climate within which
students and teachers work. Thus the formulation of these priorities has a
direct bearing on the kinds of opportunities for learning that students are
provided. If one believes that students should learn to form their own pur¬
poses, to seek the resources with which they will work, to speculate on and
consider alternative routes to an end-in-view, the ability to perform these
functions and to use the modes of thought that they require is enhanced if
the curriculum provides students with a climate and content to practice such
skills and attitudes. A process-oriented curriculum establishes the bound¬
aries within which such learning opportunities will be made available to
students.
If one believes that students need to learn how to cope with the political
system used in the community and that the best way to learn how to cope
with it is to focus on real social problems, then it becomes important for the
curriculum to provide those opportunities to students. A social reconstruc¬
tionist view of the curriculum influences what shall be made available to
students and what shall be regarded as of marginal educational worth.
The same ramifications exist for each of the other orientations to curricu¬
lum. Each has a consequential effect on what is included in and what is ex¬
cluded from school programs as those programs operate both informally and
formally. The general environment and educational climate as well as the
specific content as such are influenced by the orientation to curriculum that
one embraces. Because the provision of learning opportunities is probably
the single most important factor influencing the content of learning in school,
the importance of an orientation to curriculum can hardly be underestimated.
We make a major decision about what shall be taught when we decide what
image of education is most appealing.
What stance with respect to these orientations should the student of edu¬
cation take? Is one orientation better than the other? Are some orientations
unjustifiable? There are two caveats that must be entered with respect to
each of the orientations. One is the fact that they have been described in¬
dependently of the context in which they are to function. They have been
described as models or paradigms of educational virtue. In practice they
are seldom encountered in their pure form, although in many forms of edu¬
cational practice one of the five views dominates. Furthermore, because they
have been described without reference to context, it is extremely difficult to
determine which view is most appropriate to a particular population of chil¬
dren. Thus, although in general one might find one orientation closer to one’s
72 The Educational Imagination
REFERENCES
1. Edward L. Thorndike and Robert S. Woodward, “The Influence of Improve¬
ment in One Mental Function Upon the Efficiency of Other Functions ” Psy¬
chological Review, Vol. 8, 1901.
Five Basic Orientations to the Curriculum 73
In the preceding chapter five basic ways were described in which the goals,
content, and methods of curriculum have been conceived. These five orien¬
tations provide a way of rationalizing what schools teach. But schools teach
much more—and much less—than they intend to teach. Although much of
what is taught is explicit and public, a great deal is not. Indeed, it is my
claim that schools provide not one curriculum to students, but three, regard¬
less of which of the five curriculum orientations a school follows. The aim
in this chapter is to examine those three curriculums in order to find out
how they function.
One of the most important facts about schooling is that children spend a
major portion of their childhood in school. By the time the student has grad¬
uated from secondary school, he or she has spent approximately 480 weeks
or 12,000 hours, in school. During this time the student has been immersed
in a culture that is so natural a part of our way of life that it is almost taken
for granted. In that culture called schooling there are certain publicly ex¬
plicit goals: teaching children to read and write, to figure, and to learn some¬
thing about the history of the country, among them. There are, of course,
other aims, many of which are associated with the explicit curriculum that
the school offers to the students. There are goals and objectives for the sci¬
ences, the arts, physical education, social studies, and foreign language in¬
struction. Not only do these goals appear in school district curriculum guides
and the course-planning materials that teachers are asked to prepare, the
public also knows that these courses are offered and that students in the dis-
74
The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach 75
trict will have the opportunity to achieve these aims, at least to some degree,
should they want to do so. In short, the school offers to the community an ed¬
ucational menu of sorts; it advertises what it is prepared to provide. From
this advertised list, students have, at least in principle, an array of options
from which to choose.
But is this all that schools offer? Does this advertised menu exhaust what
schools teach? The answer to these questions is clear: no. Work by Dreeben 1,
Jackson2, Sarason,3 and others provides an extensive analysis of what has
come to be known as the “hidden curriculum.” Dreeben focuses on the
sociological dimensions of the hidden curriculum, whereas Jackson and Sara¬
son attend largely to its psychological aspects. Schools socialize children to
a set of expectations that some argue are profoundly more powerful and
longer-lasting that what is intentionally taught or what the explicit curricu¬
lum of the school publicly provides. Take, for example, that form of human
behavior called initiative. It is possible to create a school environment in
which the taking of initiative becomes an increasingly important expecta¬
tion as children mature. In such an environment, as children got older they
would be expected to assume greater responsibility for their planning; they
would be expected increasingly to define their goals and determine the
kinds of resources that they will need to pursue the ends they have formu¬
lated. One general goal of such an institution would be to enable children to
become the mappers of their educational journey, so that when they leave
school they are in a position to pursue goals and interests that are import¬
ant to them. If this were an important aspiration of schools, schools would
make it possible in dozens of ways for initiative to be developed; it would be
a part of the culture of schooling.
Critics of schooling point out, however, that rather than cultivate initia¬
tive, schools foster compliant behavior. One of the first things a student
learns—and the lesson is taught throughout his or her school career—is to pro¬
vide the teacher with what the teacher wants or expects. The most important
means for doing this is for the student to study the teacher, to learn just how
much effort must be expended for an A, a B, or a C grade. How long should
the term paper be is a question heard not only in secondary school, it is
heard in graduate school, as well. Of course, such a request for information
is not entirely unreasonable; one does want to know something about the
general expectations. Yet, too often, the issue becomes the expectation and
the need to meet it in the most expeditious way possible. This tendency to
foster compliant forms of behavior is often exacerbated by programs that
use behavior modification techniques. I was in one third-grade classroom in
a wealthy San Francisco suburb where I noticed that on the wall of the
room there was a chart on which each student’s name was listed. Next to
each name was a set of twenty boxes and in every fifth box was a picture of
a smiling face. I asked one of the children what the chart was for, and he
replied that after they completed reading a book they colored in one of the
76 The Educational Imagination
boxes. I then asked what the smiling faces were for. He replied that when
they had read five books and therefore reached a smiling face, they got a
goldenrod ticket, three of which were good for leave to go to lunch five min¬
utes early.
There are a host of educational issues that could be identified and dis¬
cussed concerning the use of such a reward system, but for now the point
will remain with the fostering of compliant behavior. Such a reward system
holds out to children something they apparently want and fosters a willing¬
ness to perform. In using such a system, the teacher or the school can, of
course, increase or decrease the size or attractiveness of the reward to bring
out the desired behavior at the lowest cost. Regardless of the type or size
of the reward, the point remains the same: the school seeks to modify the
child’s behavior to comply with goals that the child had no hand in formu¬
lating and that might not have any intrinsic meaning.
Now, in some respects, the use of rewards to reinforce or control behavior
is a ubiquitous part of our culture, indeed of all cultures. Insofar as there
are conventions, mores, customs, sanctions, and the like in culture, there will
be forms of behavior that are positively rewarded and others that are sanc¬
tioned negatively. The question is not whether there should or could be a
cultural institution without procedures for monitoring, rewarding, and pun¬
ishing those who are a part of that institution. The major question deals with
the pervasiveness of such conditions and their appropriateness, given the
institution’s explicit mission. If an institution utilizes expedient means for the
management of students that, while doing so, interferes with the realization
of some of its primary purposes, there is reason for questioning such “ex¬
pedient” means.
I would not like to give the impression that the use of such rewards is the
primary way in which compliant behavior is elicited and sustained. The fac¬
tors that sustain such behavior are in a significant sense built into the ways
in which roles are defined in schools. Take, for example, the expectation that
students must not speak unless called on, or the expectation that virtually all
of the activities within a course shall be determined by the teacher, or the
fact that schools are organized hierarchically, with the student at the bot¬
tom rung of the ladder, or that communication proceeds largely from the top
down. What does such a system teach the young, who must spend up to 480
weeks of their childhood there? What does it mean to children to engage in
a wide array of tasks that often have little or no intrinsic meaning to them in
order to cope with the school successfully?
For those who have analyzed the implicit curriculum of the school and
what it teaches, these lessons are among the most important ones that child¬
ren learn. It is pointed out that most children will not have jobs in adult life
that are intrinsically interesting. Most jobs do not afford an individual the
opportunity to define his or her purposes. Most jobs depend on the use of
extrinsic motivation to sustain interest. Most jobs do not provide for high
The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach 77
being good is of long standing. Thus, combined with the Calvinist tradition
of associating failure with sin and success with goodness, it is not surprising
that quicker students are honored by being assigned to honors classes.
Consider as still another example of the implicit curriculum the impact
of time on the students’ perception of what counts in school. In planning
school programs one of the decisions that must be made is when various sub-
ects will be taught and how much time will be devoted to them. Although
such decisions are not intended to reflect to students’ value judgments about
the significance of various subject areas, in fact, they do. Students learn in
school to read the value code that pervades it. One of these coded qualities
is the use and location of time. Take as a specific example the location and
amount of time devoted to the arts in school programs. Virtually all ele¬
mentary school programs devote some attention to the arts. But if one asks
about how much and compares it to the amount of time devoted to, say,
social studies, reading, mathematics, or the sciences, the proportion is quite
small. But if one looks further to determine when the arts are taught, one
will find that they are generally taught in the afternoon rather than in the
morning and often on Friday afternoon.
What this conveys to the student is that the arts are'essentially forms of
play that one can engage in only after the real work of schooling has been
finished. In the morning, students are fresh; they can cope at this time with
the rigors of reading and mathematics. In the afternoon, the arts can be
used as a reward, as a break from the demands of thinking. This reinforces
the belief that the arts do not require rigorous and demanding thought and
that they are really unimportant aspects of the school program. The idea
that the arts deal with feeling and that reading and arithmetic deal with
thinking is a part of the intellectual belief structure that separates cognition
from affect, a structure whose consequences are as deleterious for educa¬
tional theory as they are for psychology.
The major point I am trying to make here is one of illustrating the fact
that schools teach far more than they advertise. Function follows form. Fur¬
thermore, it is important to realize that what schools teach is not simply a
function of covert intentions; it is largely unintentional. What schools teach
they teach in the fashion that the culture itself teaches, because schools are
the kinds of places they are.
The recognition of the impact of the hidden, implicit curriculum is rela¬
tively new. Aside from Willard Waller’s The Sociology of the School, there
was little interest in the educational consequences of schooling, per se, until
the 1960s. It was during that decade that work by Dreeben, Jackson, and Sar-
ason was first published. What students of education began to recognize was
what Lewis Mumford was talking about in 1934 in his Technics and Civiliza¬
tion. At that time Mumford wrote:
One may define this aspect of the machine as “purposeless materialism.” Its
particular defect is that it casts a shadow of reproach upon all the non-material
The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach 79
Mumford was concerned with the quality of life that technologically ad¬
vanced societies were rapidly developing and believed that technology
would get out of hand, become master rather than servant to man. Forty
years later we find Ivan Illich expressing a similar concern.
Speaking of the distinction between convivial and anticonvivial tools,
Illich holds that most tools used in industrial societies restrict rather than
expand human freedom. He believes their impact on society to be socially
devastating and calls therefore for a reconstruction of society in a form that
would make convivial life possible:
A convivial society should be designed to allow all its members the most
autonomous action by means of tools least controlled by others. People feel joy,
as opposed to mere pleasure, to the extent that their activities are creative; while
the growth of tools beyond a certain point increases regimentation, dependence,
exploitation, and impotence. I use the term “tool” broadly enough to include not
only simple hardware such as drills, pots, syringes, brooms, building elements,
or motors, and not just large machines like cars or power stations; I also include
among tools productive institutions such as factories that produce tangible com¬
modities such as those which produce “education,” “health,” “knowledge,” or
“decisions.” I use this term because it allows me to subsume into one category all
rationally designed devices, be they artifacts or rules, codes or operators, and
to distinguish all these planned and engineered instrumentalities from other
80 The Educational Imagination
things such as basic food or implements, which in a given culture are not deemed
to be subject to rationalization. School curricula or marriage laws are no less
purposely shaped social devices than road networks.5
fifth grade, but the impact of school structure does not cease until one leaves
graduate school.
It is trendy, or at least it has been, to consider the implicit curriculum as
having an entirely negative impact as far as education is concerned. But this
is not necessarily true. The implicit curriculum of the school can teach a host
of intellectual and social virtues: punctuality, a willingness to work hard on
tasks that are not immediately enjoyable, and the ability to defer immediate
gi atification in order to work for distant goals can legitimately be viewed as
positive attributes of schooling. They form no formal part of the curriculum,
yet they are taught in school. Indeed, I believe that parents know they are
taught, not perhaps at a critically conscious level, but more or less intuitively.
This is perhaps best illustrated by two examples: the attractiveness of pres¬
tigious universities and the recent interest in more structured forms of ele¬
mentary education.
What is it that makes Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Swarthmore,
Smith, and Radcliffe attractive places for so many aspiring middle-class stu¬
dents? A part of the reason is undoubtedly the excellence of the faculties at
such institutions. The extensiveness of the libraries might also play a role.
But one cannot easily discount the tacit appreciation of the general culture
that pervades these schools. Colleges and universities with lesser reputations
also teach most of the courses offered at these institutions. Indeed, the ex¬
plicit curricula across universities in the United States are very much the
same. But what does differ is the recognition that universities also present
students with a way of life, a set of standards, a distribution of students com¬
ing from particular social classes, and levels of academic achievement that
will have an important impact on entering students. If one visits university
campuses across the country, one is struck by both their sameness and their
differences. Some universities monitor or attempt to monitor students’ be¬
havior in much the same way as some high schools. Others give the impres¬
sion that within their hallowed walls reside the seeds of social revolution.
Still others have a kind of cool intellectual pride, a sense of scholarly self¬
esteem that sets the institution aside from the more prosaic forms of cultural
life. Such environments, developed through tradition, have selection pro¬
cedures for staff as well as students that provide an implicit curriculum
whose specific goals are not articulated and might not even be consciously
recognized. It is something one senses. Many parents as well as students
recognize such qualities and guide their children to places whose implicit
curriculum is compatible with their values and with the levels of social,
economic, and academic achievements to which they aspire.
Similar factors are at work in the motivation among parents to create
within school districts more structured forms of elementary education. Al¬
though the return to the so-called basics movement is a part of this motiva¬
tion, the back-to-basics movement cannot be easily separated from larger,
82 The Educational Imagination
the story goes, deals with thinking, affect with feeling, and psychomotor
activity with acting or skill performance. Once these distinctions are made,
they tend to become reified, a process that is encouraged by the use of tax¬
onomies for the formulation of behavioral objectives within each of the
three “domains”: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. Aside from the prob¬
lems inherent in the reification of distinctions among thinking, feeling, and
acting, cognition itself has come to mean thinking with words or numbers by
using logical procedures for their organization and manipulation and not
thinking in its broadest sense. The term cognitive originally meant the pro¬
cess through which the organism becomes aware of the environment. The
Dictionary of Psychology offers this definition: “a generic term used to des¬
ignate all processes involved in knowing. It begins with immediate aware¬
ness of objects in perception and extends to all forms of reasoning.” 6 Yet, in
the literature of education the term has been impoverished, and in the process
what we consider to be thinking has also been diminished. Thus there is the
irony of cognition becoming increasingly important in educational discourse
while it is being robbed of its scope and richness.
What school programs tend to emphasize is the development of a re-
stiicted conception of thinking. Not all thinking is mediated by word or num¬
bers, nor is all thinking rule abiding.
Many of the most productive modes of thought are nonverbal and alogical.
These modes operate in visual, auditory, metaphoric, synesthetic ways and
utilize forms of conception and expression that far exceed the limits of log¬
ically prescribed criteria or discursive or mathematical forms of thinking.
When attention to such intellectual processes, or forms, of thinking is absent
or marginal, they are not likely to be developed within school programs, al¬
though their development might take place outside of school. But the conse¬
quences within schools for students when such modes of thought and expres¬
sion are absent or given low priority are significant. The criteria that are em¬
ployed for assessing intellectual competence must of necessity focus on the
forms of thinking and experience that are available and salient. Thus, not only
does the neglect or absence from school programs of nondiscursive forms of
knowing skew what can be known and expressed in schools, it also biases the
criteria through which human competence and intelligence are appraised.
When we look at school curricula with an eye toward the full range of in¬
tellectual processes that human beings can exercise, it quickly becomes ap¬
parent that only a slender range of those processes is emphasized. When one
also considers the fact that some of the most interesting work going on in the
field of brain physiology is pointing out that the hemispheres of the brain are
specialized, that the right and left hemispheres perform different intellectual
functions, and that those functions can atrophy or strengthen with use or
disuse, the neglect of what are erroneously referred to as affective processes is
paiticularly significant. Researchers studying brain functions have demon¬
strated that the left hemisphere is the seat of speech-a fact known since the
The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach 85
nineteenth century. But they have more recently demonstrated that what in
previous years has been regarded as the minor hemisphere is not minor at
all. The right hemisphere provides the location for much of the visualization
processes, it is the seat of metaphoric and poetic thought, and it is where
structure-seeking forms of intellectual activity have their home. Writing
cogently about research on hemispheric specialization, Gabrielle Rico says:
These findings bespeak a partial redundancy in the two halves of the brain,
operating to prevent the individual from being totally incapacitated should dis¬
aster strike one or the other hemisphere. But beyond redundancy of function, such
evidence lends credence to Bogen’s suggestion that a more fundamental distinc¬
tion between the two hemispheres is not so much a distinction between material
or content specificity (speech or faces) as between process specificity. How, then,
can these differing processing capacities best be characterized? A question cer¬
tainly far from resolved. But there are signs pointing the way:
1. If the left hemisphere is better able to process sequentially ordered informa¬
tion, the right is better at simultaneous patterning. Special tests by Levy Agresti
(1968) show a right hemisphere superiority for matching spatial forms, suggest¬
ing to her that it is a synthesis in dealing with information. Furthermore, one of
the most obvious symptoms to follow right hemisphere damage is the patient’s
inability to copy block designs (Bogen, 1970) or to arrange blocks in a required
pattern. There is also evidence that the left hempisphere tends to classify objects
according to related linguistic categories, whereas the right tends to connect
objects which are structurally isomorphic. Nebes (1975) writes, “the left hemis¬
phere tends to choose items which are similar in their use—i.e,, if shown a cake
on a plate it might pick out a fork and spoon, while the right selects objects
unrelated in use but structurally similar—a round straw hat with a brim” (p. 16).
2. If the left is better able to cope with familiar, learned, habitual configura¬
tions, the right is better able to handle unfamiliar configurations: in tests those
which were unfamiliar and therefore not susceptible to verbal labels—random
shapes, unusual textures—were processed by the right hemisphere, totally baffling
the left. Furthermore, shapes easily categorized by language, such as or —>
were readily processed by the left (Nebes, 1975, p. 14).
In addition, the right hemisphere is better able to reconstitute the whole of a
figure after being exposed to only a small number of its elements (Bogen, 1972,
p. 52).
3. If the left hemisphere is better able to handle time-ordered stimulus se¬
quences, the right is superior for processing time-independent stimulus configura¬
tions (Gordon and Bogen, 1975). Carotid amytal injection is a method in which
a drug is injected into one or the other hemisphere to immobilize it for 3-5
minutes. This method has confirmed that the left is specialized for time-ordered
sentences, paragraphs, phrases which were retrieved according to grammatical
rules and ordered into a specific temporal arrangement. In contrast, the right
hemisphere was better able to retrieve songs and melodies which are remembered
and produced as intact wholes (presentationally), not as units pieced together
tone by tone, word by word. Gordan and Bogen suggests that the ability to store
and recall intact such large units may be an important aspect of those tasks for
which the right hemisphere of most individuals is dominant.7
What Rico is pointing out are some of the major conclusions of a body of
research on the functions of the brain that has been going on over the last
86 The Educational Imagination
stein, or Marx, or Darwin, but from a bird. And what would he rather learn:
to understand the universe, to be able to turn dross into gold, to be able to
create atomic fission? No. He’d rather learn to sing. He’d rather learn to do
something that gives joy to life from one of the most fragile of God’s crea¬
tures than to teach the largest bodies of our universe itself how not to dance.
But who teaches stars not to dance? How does one teach stars not to do
something. Astronomers do. Astronomers teach us that stars do not dance.
What we see are simply the light waves that flicker as they traverse the at¬
mosphere. The poet E. E. Cummings chooses joy over knowledge. But to
know that, no literal reading will do. An ability to allow one’s imagination
to grasp and play with the qualitative aspects of Cummings’s impression is
a necessary condition for recovering the meaning the poet has created.
Schools have a role, it seems to me, to offer the young an opportunity to
develop the kinds of intellectual processes that will be useful for dealing
with the likes of E. E. Cummings and other poets who have given the world
its poetry.
Such processes are not restricted to poetry; they function in any sphere of
human activity in which new patterns must be perceived, where literal per¬
ception will not do, when multiple meanings must be understood, where
intimation, nuance, and analogy are at work. Consider the following passage
from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago:
Spring promises everyone happiness—and tenfold to the prisoner. Oh, April sky!
It didn’t matter that I was in prison. Evidently, they were not going to shoot
me. And in the end I would become wiser here. I would come to understand
many things here, Heaven! I would correct my mistakes yet, O Heaven, not for
them but for you, Heaven! I had come to understand those mistakes here, and
I would correct them!
As if from a pit, from the far-off lower reaches, from Szerzhinsky Square, the
hoarse earthly singing of the automobile horns rose to us in a constant refrain.
To those who were dashing along to the tune of those honkings, they seemed
the trumpets of creation, but from here their insignificance was very clear.
In the first place, it was very interesting to try to figure out the layout of the
entire prison while they were taking you there and back, and to calculate where
those tiny hanging courtyards were, so that at some later date, out in freedom,
one could walk along the square and spot their location. We made many turns
on the way there, and I invented the following system: Starting from the cell
itself, I would count every turn to the right as plus one, and every turn to the
left as minus one. And, no matter how quickly they made us turn, the idea was
not to try to picture it hastily to oneself, but to count up the total. If, in addition,
through some staircase window, you could catch a glimpse of the backs of the
Lubyanks water nymphs, half-reclining against the pillared turret which hovered
over the square itself, and you could remember the exact point in your count
when this happened, then back in the cell you could orient yourself and figure
out what your window looked out on.9
ing life, and to appreciate how the experience of an April sky can be caught
in “Oh, April sky!”—the tempo of the passage, the contrast of life and death,
of heaven and prison, of the cacophony and the din of motor cars outside
where life bustles and the cool systematic efforts to sustain that life in one¬
self by counting the turns en route to one’s cell. An educational program that
provides little or no opportunity for students to refine the processes that
make such understanding possible is likely to yield a population ill prepared
to read the world’s great literature. But, perhaps even more importantly, it
is likely to withhold from students the joys of intellectual discovery.
The major point I have been trying to make thus far is that schools have
consequences not only by virtue of what they do teach, but also by virtue
of what they neglect to teach. What students cannot consider, what they
don t know, processes they are unable to use, have consequences for the
kinds of lives they lead. I have directed my attention in the preceding sec¬
tion to the school’s general neglect of particular intellectual processes. Let
me now turn to the content or subject matter side of the coin.
Why is it that the vast majority of schools in the United States at both the
elementary and secondary levels teach virtually the same subject matters?
Let us assume for the moment that basic reading skills, basic arithmetic
skills, and basic skills of writing, including spelling, grammar, and punctua¬
tion, are necessary parts of virtually all elementary school programs. But
even given this assumption, why are time, space, and energy given over to
advanced forms of mathematics, history, the sciences, and physical educa¬
tion? Why do most secondary schools require three years of English, two
yeais of mathematics, and one or two years of science? Why do they require
two or three years of U.S. history or social studies? Why is it that law, ec¬
onomics, anthropology, psychology, dance, the visual arts, and music are
fiequently not offered or are not required parts of secondary school pro¬
grams? Why do so few schools offer work in filmmaking, in the study of com¬
munication, in the study of war and revolution? In raising these questions I
am not now making a brief that these particular subject matters replace
those that now occupy a secure place in school programs. I am trying to
point out that certain subject matters have been traditionally taught in
schools not because of a careful analysis of the range of other alternatives
that could be offered but rather because they have traditionally been taught.
We teach what we teach largely out of habit, and in the process neglect
areas of study that could prove to be exceedingly useful to students. Take,
as an example, economics.
Economics is presently taught in less than 10 per cent of all secondary
schools in the United States. Now economic theory is not something one is
likely to learn simply through the process of socialization. One does not en¬
counter economic theory as one might encounter various forms of social
behavior. Yet economics provides one of the frames of reference that enables
one to understand how our social system operates. Indeed, to take advantage
The Three Curricula That All Schools Teach 89
popular images are, there are hardly any schools in the country that pay
serious attention to them or help students learn to read the messages they
carry at a level that subjects them to critical scrutiny. Writing about these
images, Edmund Feldman says:
One reason for this difference between the perception of visual and verbal
imagery lies in the fundamentally sequential structure of speech and writing as
opposed to the almost simultaneous perception of visual forms. Second, because
of our phylogenetic heritage, the visual image established connection with dif¬
ferent—one might say “older”—portions of the brain than verbal structures. The
feelings experienced in the presence of visual images are more difficult to control
or resist than those dependent on language. Because language (especially the
complex linguistic forms of modern man) evolved after the development of visual
perception in the phylogeny of our species, we are equipped with older, possibly
less sophisticated, biological equipment for the apprehension of images. We can¬
not so readily defend against what a picture seems to tell us to do or feel. Third,
our knowledge systems and our educational institutions have been organized
almost exclusively for the transmissions and reception of linear structures. It is
obvious that these institutions find themselves in crisis when nonlinear, that is,
visual, sources of imagery are perfected and made cheaply and instantly available.
To complicate the problem further, it is possible that the most technically sophisti¬
cated mental operations on which an advanced civilization depends cannot be
learned execept through linear, sequentially organized meaning structures. But
for the engineering of public assent, the encouragement of nonreflective behavior,
visual imagery is ideal.
If visual images are relatively invulverable to logical and semantic scrutiny,
how can we account for the extraordinary influence of verbal slogans in religion,
politics, and advertising? The explanation is simple, and it reinforces our argu¬
ment concerning the compelling power of the visual image: the effectiveness of
a slogan depends on repetition, and the function of repetition is to convert a
logical sequence into an image. In fact, the repeated slogan becomes a motor
image—one that we find difficult to forget, like the lyrics of a bad song or a fre¬
quently heard advertising jingle. So long as a slogan can be analyzed semantically
it can be resisted. But once it has been drilled into the popular consciousness in
the form of a patterned reenactment, there is no way to prevent many compelling
transactions, that is, automatic acquiescence, from taking place. Thus the slogan
becomes part of our involuntary behavior.10
The strategy that we finally elected was chosen because it looked as though
it might work, because it was consistent with our definition of the faults of the
traditional social studies, and because it made sense in terms of what anthro-
pology as a discipline had to offer. We decided to subvert a course very com¬
monly taught in the ninth or tenth grade—the world history course. More spe¬
cifically, we intended to offer materials that could be rationalized as world history
and which would, in effect substitute for a substantial segment of the traditional
course. Many supporters of anthropology in the high schools urged us to design
a high school level anthropology course. We resisted this advice; we knew that
such a program would never become a required course and we knew what hap¬
pened to elective courses. The elective route was no way to bring large numbers
of students into a meaningful encounter with anthropology.11
Take as still another example the general neglect of the arts in elementary
and secondary schools. Although elementary schools are generally supposed
to provide programs in the arts, few well-thought-out and competently
taught art programs exist at this level. Elementary school teachers have little
background in the arts and, in general, are not well prepared to teach them.
At the secondary level, where there are arts specialists, the arts are taught
in about half of all secondary schools and only 20 per cent of the school pop¬
ulation enrolls for as little as one year. This neglect of the arts, compared to,
say, the sciences, leaves students unable, by and large, to deal meaningfully
with sophisticated forms of the serious arts. One need not have special tui¬
tion to appreciate Gunsmoke,” “Maude,” or “Truth or Consequences.” When
it comes to the music of Stravinsky, the films of Bergman, the paintings of
Matisse, the architecture of Corbusier, the sculpture of Brancusi, the dance
of Cunningham, tuition is needed. Yet, schools do not provide programs that
develop such abilities, and, because such abilities do not develop on then-
own, millions of students leave schools each year without access to what
such artists have contributed to the world. If in hundreds of years some ar¬
cheologist wanted to understand something of the aesthetic level our culture
had achieved, no more representative artifacts could be dug up than the
Sears Roebuck catalogue and the TV Guide.
Law, anthropology, the arts, communication, economics, these are just a
few of the fields that constitute the null curriculum. I am not here making a
brief for these particular fields or subject matters, for in fact I believe that
there can be no adequate conception of appropriate curriculum content
without consideration of the context in which it is to be provided and the
students for whom it is intended. I identify these fields and subject matters
for purposes of exemplification and to highlight the point that what we offer
the young in schools is largely bound by tradition. One could hope for more.
When we ask, therefore, about the means through which schools teach,
we can recognize that one of the major means is through the explicit curricu¬
lum that is offered to students. But that is not all. Schools also teach through
the implicit curriculum, that pervasive and ubiquitous set of expectations
and rules that defines schooling as a cultural system that itself teaches im-
92 The Educational Imagination
portant lessons. And we can identify the null curriculum—the options stu¬
dents are not afforded, the perspectives they may never know about, much
less be able to use, the concepts and skills that are not a part of their intel¬
lectual repertoire. Surely, in the deliberations that constitute the course of
living, their absence will have important consequences on the kind of life
that students can choose to lead.
Thus far we have examined not only the major orientations that have
guided thinking about what shall be taught in school, but we have also
examined what schools teach that teachers do not realize they are teaching
and what they neglect teaching, as well. The consequences of school pro¬
grams emanate from values that are explicit and operational as well as those
that are tacit and covert.
In the following chapter, we will deal with the problem of how curricu¬
lum objectives can be formulated, a problem that has been the center of great
controversy during the last fifteen years.
REFERENCES
1. Robert Dreeben, On What Is Learned in School, Addison-Wesley Publishing
Co., Reading, Mass., 1968.
2. Phillip Jackson, Life in Classrooms, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc. New
York, 1968.
3. Seymore Sarason, The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change,
Allyn and Bacon, Boston, 1971.
4. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, Harcourt, Brace and Co. New
York, 1938.
20-21.
5. Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, Harper & Row, 1973, pp. 20-21.
6. The Dictionary of Psychology (Warren, Howard, and Crosby, eds.), Hough¬
ton Mifflin, Boston, 1934.
7. Gabiielle Rico, Metaphors and Knowing: Analysis, Synthesis, Rationale, Doc¬
toral Dissertation, Stanford University, 1976, pp. 41—44.
8. E. E. Cummings, Collected Poems, Harcourt, Brace and Co. New York
1926, p. 315.
9. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, trans. by Thomas P. Whitney,
Harper & Row, New York, 1973, p. 212.
10. Edmund Feldman, Art, Education and the Consumption of Images,” in The
Arts,Human Development and Education (Elliot W. Eisner, ed.), McCutchan
Publishing Co., Berkeley, Calif., 1976, pp. 137-148.
11. Robert Hanvey, “The Social Studies, the Educational Culture, the State ” in
Confronting Curriculum Reform (Elliot W. Eisner, ed.), Little, Brown’and
Co., Boston, 1971, pp. 143-153.
6
Educational A bus. Objectives,
and Other Aspirations
Finally, there should grow the most austere of all mental qualities; I
mean the sense for style. It is an aesthetic sense, based on admiration
for the direct attainment of a foreseen end, simply and without waste.
Style in art, style in literature, style in science, style in logic, style in
practical execution have fundamentally the same aesthetic qualities,
namely, attainment arid restraint. The love of a subject in itself and for
itself, where it is not the sleepy pleasure of pacing a mental quarter¬
deck, is the love of style as manifested in that study.
Alfred N. Whitehead
93
94 The Educational Imagination
structor will function in a fog of his own making until he knows just what he
wants his students to be able to do at the end of the instruction.1
What Mager and others holding this view are trying to do is to develop a
highly precise technology for statements of objectives that they believe will
improve the quality of teaching and learning. For many behaviorists, one of
the major problems of goal statements is that they are vague, and because
they are vague they tend to be educationally meaningless. To have a mean¬
ingful objective, and by inference a useful one, one should be able to deter¬
mine, usually through measurement, whether it has been achieved. To the
extent that there is ambiguity in the statement, its meaningfulness and utility
are diminished. Furthermore, if a curriculum planner knows exactly what
kind of behavior he or she wants students to display, it is easier to select
content and formulate activities that are instrumental to the desired end.
The tendency toward high levels of behavioral specificity is, of course, not
new in American educational planning. Franklin Bobbitt, whose ideas we
encountered earlier, listed ten areas for such objectives in his book How to
Make a Curriculum, which was published in 1922. Although Bobbitt’s ob¬
jectives, too, are vague by today’s standards, the spirit of behavioral spe¬
cificity is the same. Indeed, the general thrust toward the study of behavior
rather than experience has been characteristic of American educational psy¬
chology since the turn of the century. Thorndike, Watson, Hull, and Skinner
participate in that tradition, and it provides the theoretical backdrop for this
approach to the formulation of behavioral objectives.
There are two other traditions associated with the behavioral specification
approach to objectives; one of these is found in industry, the other in mili¬
tary training. They have two features in common: the characteristics of the
performance to be produced are known in advance, and, ideally, the speci¬
fications of the objectives and characteristics of the individual performance
are isomorphic—i.e., a perfect match between objective and behavior is de¬
sired. In industrial settings, such as in automobile production, the same con¬
ditions hold. A prototypical form is created for the cars to be assembled. This
form is described both physically and mechanically for each model. Sub¬
sequently, a component analysis is made of the prototype, a task analysis
follows that prescribes the steps to be taken in production and their se¬
quence, and production begins. The manager of the assembly line has the
task of ensuring that all operations are performed in the order specified.
The goal to be achieved is the creation of an isomorphic relationship be¬
tween the original prototype and each car coming off the line. If these cars
do not match, there is a call-back, and the problem is identified and re¬
adjustments are made. An efficient and effective assembly line produces iden¬
tical cars day after day that in every aspect match the model that was orig¬
inally created.
Military training programs have similar features. New recruits are proc-
96 The Educational Imagination
One may easily trace an analogy between these fundamentals of the science of
industrial management and the organization of a public school system. For ex¬
ample: (1) The state as employer must cooperate with the teacher as employee,
for the latter does not always understand the science of education; (2) the state
provides experts who supervise the teacher and suggest the processes that are
most efficacious and economical; (3) the task system obtains in the school as well
as in the shop, each grade being a measured quantity of work to be accomplished
in a given term; (4) every teacher who accomplishes the task receives a bonus,
not in money, but in the form of a rating which may have have money value;
(5) those who are unable to do the work are eliminated, either through the de¬
vice of a temporary license or of a temporary employment; (6) the differential
rate is applied to the teacher, quantity and quality of service being considered
in the rating; (7) the result ought to be a maximum output at a low relative cost,
since every repeater costs as much as a new pupil; (8) the teacher thus receives
better wages, but only after demonstrated fitness for high position; (9) hence we
ought to have the most desirable combination of an educational system—relative
cheapness of operation and high salaries.4
It is, I think, particularly important to take note of the language that was
used during this period. The society was viewed as the consumer of the
school’s products. The children were the raw material to be processed
according to specifications laid down by the consumer. And the teachers
were the workers who were to be overseen by supervisors. All of this was to
take place under a superintendent. Although the modern concepts of quality
assurance and quality control were not used then, a similar spirit was at
work in those “good” old days.
The analogy between industrial processes and educational processes is a
deceptive one. When one is working with inert material for ends that are
uniform and prespecified, the task of determining effectiveness and locating
inefficiency or ineffectiveness is comparatively simple. After all, when one
thousand pounds of pressure is placed on thirty-gauge steel within a one-
inch diameter, the reaction of the steel to the pressure is quite predictable.
As long as there is no human error or mechanical failure, the results will be
the same time and time again. Industrial managers bank on it. Such condi¬
tions, however, seldom obtain in the classroom. Children are far from inert,
so are teachers. They respond differently to the “same” stimuli, because how
the stimuli are perceived—indeed, whether they in fact stimulate—depends
as much on the characteristics of the student as it does on the objective
characteristics of the stimuli themselves. Furthermore, the realization of
outcomes that are common to all students, the production of educational
98 The Educational Imagination
products all having identical features, at best suits only a small array of
those aims that most educators seek in the course of teaching. One major
problem I see in the admonition to teachers and curriculum planners to
specify their aims in behavioral terms is that the limitations of such ob¬
jectives are seldom acknowledged. They are offered as though one were not
really professionally competent without a list of objectives that one could
pull out for each set of curriculum activities formulated.
In identifying what I believe to be an oversimplified view of the character
of educational aims, I am not taking the position that there is no place for
clearly defined behavioral objectives in a school curriculum. When specific
skills or competencies are appropriate, such objectives can be formulated,
but one should not feel compelled to abandon educational aims that cannot
be reduced to measurable forms of predictable performance. Conceptions
of method should serve as tools and as heuristic devices for improving the
quality of educational experience, not as constraints on teachers, teaching,
or what students have an opportunity to learn.
Let me provide a description of some other limitations behaviorially de¬
fined objectives have in the design of educational programs. I identify these
limitations not as a wholesale condemnation of their use but as an attempt
to increase the sophistication of the dialogue about them.
One limitation of discursively defined behavioral objectives deals with the
limits of discourse itself. Much, perhaps most, of what we aspire to and
cherish is not amenable to discursive formulation. Take, for example, our
image of human sensitivity. Although we could describe discrete behaviors
that were intended to characterize a sensitive human being—say, one who
was responsive to the feelings of others and compassionate—discrete forms
of human performance would ultimately fail to capture what we are able
to recognize in others. Language is, after all, a surrogate for experience. We
try to aiticulate in words what we know in nonlinguistic ways. For much of
our experience, discursive language performs rather well. But for the
subtleties of human experience, for our knowledge of human feeling, for
modes of conception and understanding that are qualitative, discourse falls
far short. How many words would it take to describe insight, perceptivity,
integrity, self-esteem? How would one describe how water tastes? How
would one describe the qualities of a late Beethoven quartet in precise, un¬
ambiguous, measurable terms?
The point here is not an effort to inject the mystical into educational
planning but rather to avoid reductionistic thinking that impoverishes our
view of what is possible. To expect all of our educational aspirations to be
either verbally describable or measurable is to expect too little.
A second problem with the use of specific behavioral objectives is that
those who evaluate them often fail to distinguish between the application
of a standard and the making of a judgment. Dewey makes this distinction
quite clear when he says,
Educational Aims, Objectives, and Other Aspirations 99
Standards are crisp, unambiguous, and precise. A person can swim five
lengths of the pool or cannot. Someone can spell aardvaark or cannot. Some¬
one knows who the twenty-seventh president of the United States was or
does not. Someone can multiply two sets of three-digit figures correctly or
cannot. For such performances, standards are specifiable and applicable by
anyone or by any machine that “knows” the rules through which the stand¬
ards are to be applied. But what about the rhetorical force of a student’s
essay? What about the aesthetic quality of her painting? What about the
cogency of his verbal argumentation? What about her intellectual style, the
ways she interprets the evidence in a science experiment, the way in which
historical material is analyzed? Are these subject to standards? I think not.
But to say that such qualities cannot be measured by standards is not to
say that judgments cannot be made about them. It is not to say that one
can have no criteria through which to appraise them. Judgments can say
much about such qualities, not by the mechanical application of prespecified
standards, but by comparison of the qualities in question to a whole range
of criteria that teachers or others making the judgment already possess. How
much weight does one give to insight and how much to logical argument?
How does one compare this essay, or this statement, or this project, or this
painting, to the one or ones the student did before? Judgments about such
qualities are not will-of-the-wisp, cavalier, irresponsible conclusions, they
are complex appraisals that use an extraordinarily wide range of knowledge
to arrive at what, on balance, is a warranted human judgment. The multiple-
choice test is simply not adequate for everything.
A third problem with the demand that all objectives be behavioral and
defined in advance deals with the assumption that the prespecification of
100 The Educational Imagination
goals is the rational way in which one must always proceed in curriculum
planning. This assumption is rooted in the kind of rationality that has guided
much of Western technology. The means-ends model of thinking has for so
long dominated our thinking that we have come to believe that not to have
clearly defined purposes for our activities is to court irrationality or, at the
least, to be professionally irresponsible. Yet, life in classrooms, like that out¬
side them, is seldom neat or linear. Although it may be a shock to some,
goals are not always clear. Purposes are not always precise. As a matter of
fact, there is much that we do, and need to do, without a clear sense of what
the objective is. Many of our most productive activities take the form of
exploration or play. In such activities, the task is not one of arriving at a
preformed objective but rather to act, often with a sense of abandon, won¬
der, curiosity. Out of such activity rules may be formed and objectives may
be created.
The relationship between action and the formation of purpose is well
known to artists. In a particularly telling passage describing the work of the
abstract expressionists, Harold Rosenberg, one of America’s leading art
critics, writes:
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after
another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce,
re-design, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on
the canvas was not a picture but an event.
The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he
went up to it with material in front of him. The image would be the result of
this encounter.6
Figure 2
102 The Educational Imagination
Mopping-up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers.
They constitute what I am here calling normal science. Closely examined, whether
historically or in the contemporary laboratory, that enterprise seems an attempt
to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm
supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phe¬
nomena; indeed those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do
scientists normally aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of
those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the
aiticulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies.7
Like the architect, the scientist tends not to redefine the givens, in this case
the basic theoretical premises by which he or she has been professionally
socialized and that serve to define not only the problem, but also the scien¬
tist’s expertise.
One very important difference between the problem-solving objective and
the behavioral objective is that the solution to the problem in problem¬
solving objectives is not definite. The problem is, in a significant sense, a
genuine one. Behavioral objectives have both the form and the content de¬
fined in advance. There is, after all, only one way to spell aardvaark. Given
the same set of behavioral objectives for a class of students, the successful
teacher elicits homogeneous behavior at the end of an instructional period
that is isomorphic with the objective. This is not the case with a problem¬
solving objective. The solutions individual students or groups of students
reach may be just as much a surprise for the teacher as they are for the stu¬
dents who created them.
The issue concerning the form statements of objectives are to take is far
Educational Aims, Objectives, and Other Aspirations 103
wider than the character of the forms themselves. Although it is said that
form follows function, the opposite is equally true: function follows form.
The form, in large measure, reflects an underlying set of assumptions that
might not themselves have been examined. The idea that goals should be
specifiable in advance and that success in teaching consists primarily of
bringing about predictable outcomes are themselves what is at issue. Such a
set of beliefs, fostered not through an explicit educational rationale but
rather embedded in the very techniques that one is encouraged to use, can
have significant effects on the way the teacher’s role is conceived and what
educators believe they are after. Surreptitiously but inexorably, techniques
that go unexamined with respect to the ideology that they reflect can be de¬
bilitating. Training comes to be substituted for education.
The use of problem-solving objectives places a premium on cognitive
flexibility, on intellectual exploration, on the higher mental processes. It
tends toward the formulation of curriculum activities that are likely to be
taken seriously by scholars. The reason I make these claims is that not only
have I seen this happen in classes where students had such objectives, but
also it is reasonable to expect that when students have a set of clear criteria
and are free to meet those criteria in ways that require ingenuity, they will
take a deeper interest in coping with the problem. The opportunity to use
ingenuity breeds interest.
EXPRESSIVE OUTCOMES
A third type of educational aim is what I have called, in previous writing,
expressive objectives.8 Because I now see that the term objective implies a
preformulated goal, something out of reach but to be attained, I think it
desirable to change the term to expressive outcomes. Outcomes are essen¬
tially what one ends up with, intended or not, after some form of engage¬
ment. Expressive outcomes are the consequences of curriculum activities
that are intentionally planned to provide a fertile field for personal purpos¬
ing and experience. Take, for example, much of our ordinary activity—say,
going to the movies. There is no one I know who formulates specific be¬
havioral objectives before going to a movie. Nor do I know anyone who
formulates a problem-solving objective. Most of us go to the movies because
we think something interesting or exciting will happen to us there. We do
not formulate specific goals that describe what our behavior will be after
we leave. We do not establish criteria that the director and actors will have
to meet in order to be successful. The fact of the matter is that we already
have such criteria in ample abundance and retrospectively select from the
ones we have those that appear appropriate for the particular movie we
have just seen. If the movie is a comedy, we apply comedic criteria, if an
adventure, dramatic criteria, and so forth.
104 The Educational Imagination
cational objective. Later the term was shifted by other writers to instruc¬
tional. Still later the word became behavioral, and even later it was a per¬
formance objective that was to be formulated.
This shift in modifier is not an accident, it reflects an increased emphasis
on the manifest behavior of the student and on discrete forms of student
activity. It gradually moves from the general to the specific. But it is sig¬
nificant in other ways, as well. An educational objective supposedly has
something to do with educational outcomes. An instructional objective, al¬
though not strongly normative, still participates in the context of education.
But behavioral or performance objectives may or may not be educational;
the normative aspect of education no longer is a part of the term. One can
have a behavioral objective that aims at creating racists or paranoids. Such
an aim could hardly be regarded as educational, unless, of course, racism
and paranoia were a part of one’s conception of education.
These shifts in language are, in my opinion, no mere minor modifications.
Words, of course, have connotations as well as denotations, and it is often
the connotative meanings that influence significantly the way we come to
think about things. For new students of education, students who do not
have the benefit of perspective, the new term, normatively void as it is,
might appear as a natural entity. History sustains our memory and provides
for depth of field.
It would be erroneous to assume that some fields, such as the fine arts,
have a monopoly on the use of expressive activities. This is not the case.
Any activity—indeed, at their very best, activities that are engaged in to
court surprise, to cultivate discovery, to find new forms of experience—is
expressive in character. Nothing in the sciences, the home or mechanical
arts, or in social relationships prohibits or diminishes the possibility of en¬
gaging in expressive activities and in the process of achieving expressive
outcomes. The educational problem is to be sufficiently imaginative in the
design of educational programs so that such outcomes will occur and their
educational value will be high.
After all of the analyses of the various types of objectives and the criteria
that each should meet, one is still left with some basic questions about their
utility in curriculum development and teaching. One of the questions deals
with the matter of specificity and the educational “unit” for which they are
appropriate or necessary. How specific should objectives be? Should they be
formulated for the entire course, for parts of a course, for each curriculum
106 The Educational Imagination
REFERENCES
1. Robert Mager, Preparing Instructional Objectives, Fearon Publishers, Palo
Alto, Calif., 1962, p. 31.
2. See Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962.
3. Ibid., p. 28.
4. Ibid., pp. 103-104.
5. John Dewey, Art As Experience, Minton, Balch and Co., New York, 1934, pp.
307-308.
6. Harold Rosenberg, American Painting Today, Horizon Press, New York, 1965,
p. 25.
7. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1962, p. 24.
8. Elliot W. Eisner, “Instructional and Expressive Objectives: Their Formulation
and Use in Curriculum,” in AERA Monograph on Curriculum Evaluation:
Instructional Objectives (W. James Popham, ed.), Rand McNally, Chicago,
1969, pp. 1-18.
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning
We need, that is, both a way of passing from naked propositions and
their logical connections to the human activities that give them their
sense, and beyond those activities to the features of the world and
human life within which they are at home; and also a reverse road,
back from forms of life in the world to the specific activities in ques¬
tion, and so eventually to the original propositions again.
Stephen Toulmin
Thus far, a variety of ideas, concepts, and theories have been discussed
pertaining to the design and evaluation of educational programs. The
ultimate test of these ideas is determined by the extent to which they make
educational planning more intelligent. As I have already indicated, educa¬
tion is not a field that will yield to simple prescriptions or recipes. Each
situation in which educational decisions are made is significantly unique,
not simply unique in the sense of time and place—all situations are unique
in that sense—but unique in the sense that the goals, methods, people, and
context differ from each other in important ways and must be treated with
respect to those differences if decision making is to be effective. What we
can expect of ideas about curriculum planning is not that these ideas pro¬
vide formulas, but that they sophisticate our deliberations in planning pro¬
grams and, hence, contribute to educationally richer programs than might
otherwise be provided. In short, we ought to view ideas as tools, not as blue¬
prints; they are things to use, not things to follow.
There are four basic questions that we can ask about the process of cur¬
riculum development. What is it? When is it done? Where is it done? How
is it done?
Curriculum development is the process of transforming images and as¬
pirations about education into programs that will effectively realize the
visions that initiated the process. I use the term images and aspirations
intentionally. The initiating conditions of curriculum development are sel¬
dom clear-cut, specific objectives; they are, rather, conceptions that are
general, visions that are vague, aspirations that are fleeting. Much of what
108
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 109
we value, aspire to, and cherish is ineffable; even if we wanted to, we could
not adequately describe it. Furthermore, what we value and seek is often
riddled with contradictions—even within the context of schooling—and must
be compromised or negotiated in context. We want children to master “the
basic skills ; we would like them to be supportive and cooperative with
their peers and with adults, yet we also would like them to take initiative,
to be able to compete and not feel bound by rules that might stifle their
imagination, curiosity, or creativity. Our images of virtue are in flux; be¬
cause images can never be translated wholly into discourse, to that degree
they are always beyond the grasp of written or verbal expression.
Curriculum development in the context of education is, in this sense, a
process that seeks the realization of certain ineffables. It is a process that
is engaged in by anyone who attempts to make that translation. One group
continually engaged in that process are teachers. Teachers inevitably have
a range of options that they can exercise in the selection, emphasis, and
timing of curricular events. Even when they are expected to follow certain
guides or books in which activities and content have already been deter¬
mined, there are still options to be considered and choices to be made by
teachers with respect to how those materials will be used and the ways in
which what is done in one particular area of study will or will not be related
to what is done in other areas of the curriculum. These decisions are, of
course, decisions bearing on the curriculum; they influence the kind of
opportunities for learning and experience that children will have.
But more typically the scope of teachers’ freedom regarding what skills
are to be taught, when, in what order, and how is far wider than what the
most highly structured programs provide for. Typically, the teacher will
have a general guide of topics in a subject field, a sequence among topics,
a general set of aims, textbooks, and other instructional resources. With
these materials and within the constraints set by time, school culture, and
the characteristics of the students, the teacher builds an educational pro¬
gram. The decision making for that program may be a species of long-term,
highly systematic planning; a teacher might try to develop a calendar of
topics and activities that extend throughout the year, or the teacher might
plan on a week-to-week basis, without making any attempt to follow a
specified timetable. The extent to which one or the other plan is selected
can depend on the teacher’s need for order and predictability and on the
teacher’s view of the educational process. For example, if a teacher believes
that students should play a central role in the development of curriculum,
that they should have significant opportunities to decide what they study
and what ends they seek, then it is not so likely that it will be possible to
predict where a class or an individual student is likely to be a month or two
in the future. The point in such a view of educational planning is to encour¬
age the student to develop increasing amounts of competence, and initiative
and thus to assume greater responsibility for planning his or her educational
110 The Educational Imagination
the case, it can take the form of curriculum outlines that can be used as
guides by local school districts. In California, for example, the state super¬
intendent of schools appoints committees to develop new state guidelines,
or, as they are called in California, State Curriculum Frameworks, for the
teaching of particular subject areas prescribed in the state education code.
These committees, made up of representatives from professional groups in
education and lay people, might be appointed for a one- to three-year period
to meet, say, monthly, and to carry out the deliberations, consultations, and
preparation of a new framework for teaching mathematics, social studies,
art, music, the humanities, and so on.
The function of such statewide curriculum committees is to make use of
knowledgeable people in the subject field in order to upgrade the quality
of educational programs in the various fields of study. It provides an oppor¬
tunity for the state to update what it offers school districts and in the
process be instrumental in guiding the direction of educational change.
In developing a statewide framework for a field, a curriculum committee
is faced with a variety of difficult decisions. How specific should the ma¬
terials be? If they are highly specific, they might be inappropriate for par¬
ticular populations within the state. If they are very general, the translation
from the guidelines to practice might be very difficult. Who should be con¬
sulted in preparing such guidelines? In a statewide framework committee
on which I served, a circuit of hearings was held throughout the state with
relevant professional groups. We wanted reactions to the ideas we as a
committee had created and we wanted the groups to feel that they, too,
participated in the process of planning the framework they would even¬
tually use. As it turned out, this process was a form of in-service education
for those of us on the committee as well as for those who participated in
twenty-odd meetings that were held throughout the state. We learned a
great deal about what teachers and university professors regard as appro¬
priate goals and content, and they had the opportunity to reflect on some
ideas about the content and goals of curriculum that they might not have
otherwise considered.
This planning process lasted about three years, at the end of which a
statewide framework for the visual arts was published by the state depart¬
ment of education and disseminated to all public schools and colleges in
California. In addition, the work of the state curriculum framework com¬
mittee was given a central place in regional and statewide conventions in
art education. What occurred was a spinoff whose effects were much wider
than the work that the committee did on the written document itself. The
position the committee developed with respect to the curriculum for teach¬
ing art in the state had an intellectual set of consequences for the way in
which art education was conceptualized.
One should not underestimate the importance of state-endorsed programs
or curi iculum materials. The ultimate legal responsibility for education
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 113
belongs not to the local school district but rather to the state. The consti¬
tutions of the various states assign that responsibility to the state board of
education, which in turn develops a state education code that provides the
guidelines, standards, and mandates for local school districts. The state
superintendent of schools, through his or her staff, and with the assistance
of the county school superintendent, is responsible for monitoring local
school districts to assure that the requirements of the state education code
are met. Although relatively few county superintendents execute primarily
a monitorial function, the authority of the office and that of the state depart¬
ment of education carry weight. In many states, the withholding of funds
to local school districts is possible if the mandates provided in the state
education code are not heeded.
The point of all of this is to underscore the importance of state sanctions
in the area of curriculum policy, particularly when a statewide educational
policy is backed up by funding options that the state department of
education holds.
It should be noted also that the state board of education is in some degree
guided by the advice of the state superintendent of public instruction,
particularly with respect to matters dealing with what should be taught and
for what amount of time. In some states, the education code specifies which
subjects will be taught at each grade level and how many minutes of in¬
struction will be provided for these subjects each week. In addition, the
state prepares a list of acceptable textbooks or provides state-adopted text¬
books for the local school districts. Because many teachers build their pro¬
grams around them, these resources have a great impact on the content
with which students come into contact. If a textbook in science devotes
three chapters to ichthyology, students using that textbook study ichthyology.
If a textbook on the social studies presents a black perspective on the civil
rights movement, students study that material. Because access to content
is a condition to learning that content, questions of content inclusion-content
exclusion are extremely important. In effect, they define much of the oppor¬
tunity students will have within the school to deal with certain topics and
ideas.
A fourth group that engages in curriculum development are those work¬
ing in university research and development (R&D) centers and in regional
educational laboratories supported by the National Institute of Education.
Research and development centers, all of which are affiliated with universi¬
ties, conceive of their mission as conducting research and facilitating edu¬
cational development by devising products and programs that are primarily
experimental and, in principle, related to ongoing research. Educational
laboratories do, however, engage in the creation and testing of curriculum
materials, the marketing of which is handled by commercial publishers.
Educational laboratories such as CEMREL engage in the development
of curriculum materials in mathematics and in the area of aesthetic educa-
114 The Educational Imagination
What are the factors that one might consider in the design of an educational
program? What can one take into account in curriculum planning? As I
have already indicated, I do not believe it possible in the field of education
to prescribe formulas that one is to follow, but it is possible to provide
concepts and generalizations that can heighten one’s sensitivity to issues,
problems, and possibilities to which one might attend. What follows is the
identification and discussion of some dimensions of curriculum planning
that can be considered by those attempting to design educational programs.
The sequence of these dimensions is, to a large degree, arbitrary. One need
not begin or end with the factors or aspects as they appear here. Because
for the purposes of writing some ordering is necessary, the sequence that
follows seems to me to be reasonable, but one may proceed in curriculum
development with a very different order.
It should be noted at the outset that the study of the processes of cur-
116 The Educational Imagination
Perhaps the area in curriculum planning that has received the most atten¬
tion in the literature is that of how objectives should be formulated. If one
looks into the literature in curriculum, one will find distinctions that are
made among aims, goals, and objectives. Aims are the most general state¬
ments that proclaim to the world the values that some group holds for an
educational program. The aim of this school is to help students learn to
participate effectively in the democratic way of life. From aims we sense
a direction, a point of view, a set of values, to which the community or
group subscribes. These statements form a kind of educational manifesto
of cherished values, and, although such statements have been regarded by
many as meaningless, if one were to contrast the statement of aims made in
school districts in the United States with those found in the written material
produced in China, Cuba, or the Soviet Union, one would note significant
differences in the spirit and outlook of what has been written. What such
statements provide is an articulation of educational faith, in a sense in the
way in which the Preamble of the Constitution or the Declaration of Inde¬
pendence expresses general but still meaningful beliefs about the individual
and his or her relationship to the society.
A second kind of aim is referred to as a goal. Goals are statements of
intent, midway in generality between aims and objectives. Goals describe
the purposes held for a course or school program. "The goal of this course
is to help students understand the causes of social revolution.” “The goal of
the course is to develop skills in copper enamel jewelry making.” These
statements are considerably more specific than aims, but insufficiently
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 117
Because goals seldom prescribe the content that can be used in their reali¬
zation, attention to the selection of content is always an important curricu¬
lum consideration. If a curriculum development group working on the
development of a curriculum in, say, biology agrees that the major aims of
the program are to help students understand (1) that scientific inquiry
always yields conclusions that are tentative and (2) that living organisms
depend on the environment to survive, the specific content as well as the
teaching methods that may be instrumental to such purposes is still not yet
given. What the group must do is to identify the variety of potential content
areas within biology or within the students’ experience outside of biology
that will help them grasp these ideas. A curriculum development group
might, for example, choose a variety of content ranging from simple forms
of plant life to complex forms of human behavior for exemplifying the
relationship between organism and environment. Or the group might decide
to create some analogies to nonbiological entities such as cities or nations
in order to illustrate how similar principles operate in “nonliving phenom¬
ena.”
The point here is that groups concerned with curriculum planning have
options in content selection. The problem is one of deciding which of the
possible content options should be selected. One possible criterion for con¬
tent inclusion, in addition to whether there is some relationship between
the content and the aim, is whether the content is likely to be meaningful
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 119
to the children for whom the program is intended. Children bring to school
a wide variety of experience that originate from the homes and communities
in which they live. The kind of biological content that children living in a
rural area might find meaningful can differ significantly from that which
inner-city urban youngsters might find meaningful. One way of dealing
with such diversity is to include in one’s curriculum material options from
which teachers and students can themselves choose. In other words, by pro¬
viding different kinds of content to make the same point, the flexibility of
the materials is increased.
There are, of course, limitations on the number of options that can be
provided. The physical size of the syllabus, for example, is not a trivial
consideration—nor is the amount of materials teachers should be asked to
read. More will be said about these considerations later; for now, the major
point to be made is that goals do not prescribe content. Content selection,
like goals, can be considered against a backdrop of options. Furthermore,
curriculum developers, within the limits that seem reasonable, can provide
teachers with the content of options that are related to the aims of the
curriculum.
Goals and content are necessary but not sufficient for the development of a
curriculum. The educational imagination must come into play in order to
transform goals and content to the kinds of events that will have educational
consequences for students. This transformation requires that an event be
conceptualized and have sufficient educational promise for students to be
used in an educational program. I say that the educational imagination
comes into play because it is this task—educational transformation—that
draws most heavily on the expertise of the teacher or curriculum designer.
If a group of citizens wanted to know what the most significant concepts
and generalizations were in some branch of biology, the individuals most
likely to provide such information would be biologists who knew their field
well and who were aware of the most recent developments within it. But
to acquire such information from biologists is not sufficient for the creation
of an educational program. Some educationally appropriate means must be
created to enable students to interact with problems or situations that will
yield an understanding of these concepts and generalizations. A biologist
who has not worked with adolescents, who does not understand what
teachers are able to do in a secondary school classroom, is not necessarily
the best person to make such a transformation. It is here that curriculum
expertise is crucial. For it is here that educational events must be planned
and curriculum materials prepared to enable teachers and students to grasp
those concepts and generalizations and to do it in a form that is consistent
120 The Educational Imagination
with one’s view of education. For example, if one believes that the major
mission of the school is to introduce students to the products of the best
inquiry in the arts and the sciences, one might decide to use a moderately
didactic approach to instruction in, for example, the biological sciences.
Such an approach would emphasize the big ideas and theories that biologi¬
cal greats have created. In such a view, the work of Mendel, Darwin, Wall,
Muller and Dobzhansky would play a prominent role in content selection.
The thrust of the curriculum would be to help students understand the
theories and concepts these biologists created, say, within the context of
their time. To do this one might provide lectures and films, and perhaps
have students read excerpts from primary source material. But if one were
interested in having students understand the relationship between biological
ideas and the methods through which those ideas were created, if one
wanted to help students appreciate the tentativeness of scientific conclu¬
sions, then the type of learning opportunities one might use would give
students experience in the conduct of biological experiments. The trans¬
formation of the “same” content would take different forms because the
basic orientation to education would differ significantly.
The options available to the curriculum designer are numerous with
virtually any body of content, and in the curriculum field, as in education
at large, there has been a longstanding controversy on the relative im¬
portance of process as compared to product. Those who emphasize the
importance of process tend to formulate learning opportunities that stimu¬
late children to active inquiry. Such individuals want the student to inquire,
to think, to act, and in the process to learn. The outcomes of the process
are what children learn from the engagement. It is to be hoped that the
product of such activity will be consistent with valid substantive knowledge
in the field in which the inquiry occurred. But that is not necessarily the
major aim. The main aim is to teach children to think, to act, and to learn
from the consequences of one’s action.
Those who emphasize the product are more interested in what children
learn of the conclusions of mature inquiry in specialized fields. Does the
student understand the relationship between random mutation and natural
selection? Does the student grasp the concept of dominant and recessive
genes?
These views of what counts educationally have an extraordinarily im¬
portant bearing on the kinds of learning opportunities that are created in
the curriculum. The advocate, for example, of learning by discovery will
frequently be interested in helping children “learn to think like scientists.”
For such people the curriculum should be built around problems. The task
of the curriculum designer is to create activities that help children either
formulate problems or try to resolve the problems posed within the ma¬
terials.
Although I have emphasized the relationship between one’s orientation
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 121
taxonomies, theoretical models, and the like. Such conceptual devices can
be extremely useful for helping one differentiate and classify. In perform¬
ing this function, they increase intellectual precision by helping us bracket
the world in useful ways, but one must not forget that such bracketing is a
construction of mind, that there are other ways to classify, and that one
should take care not to reify concepts into realities that eventually constrain
our understanding. Some of this has already occurred in the case of the
taxonomy of educational objectives. These taxonomies differentiate the
cognitive from the affective, the affective from the psychomotor, and the
psychomotor from the cognitive. Although these distinctions were originally
considered nominal in their ontological status, individuals in education and
psychology sometimes conclude that so-called cognitive activities are inde¬
pendent of affective ones, or that psychomotor activities are neither cogni¬
tive nor affective. In actual experience, there is no clear line between cog¬
nition and affect, except within the definitions of the taxonomy. For ex¬
ample, to have a feeling and not to know it, is not to have it. To think about
a feeling is to know it. In short, the affective and cognitive pervade each
other. Although in our culture we do find it useful to talk about our thoughts
and our feelings, in education such talk can lead to theoretically devastating
ideas and to practically questionable results. Some schools, for example,
teach “cognitive” subjects in the morning and “affective” ones in the after¬
noons. My point here is not to argue that conceptual devices should not be
used in the formulation of types of learning opportunities but rather to state
that unless they are treated as limited tools such devices can interfere with
the ways in which aims and activities are conceptualized.
All educational programs occur over time. How events are planned within
a period of time is one of the decisions curriculum planners can make.
There are two images of curricular sequences that it may be useful to
distinguish between. One of these is the “staircase” model already men¬
tioned, the other is a “spiderweb” model.
The staircase model conjures up the image of a series of independent
steps that lead to a platform from which one exits. This conception is one
that conceives of curriculum activities as building on what preceded them,
preparing for what is to come. The movement, as is true in the climbing of
a staircase, is always upward.
This conception is metaphorically consistent with terms such as entry
skills and exit competencies. The route is well defined, mechanical in con¬
struction, and efficient. There is little room for wasted motion or exploratory
adventures. Perhaps the most pristine example of such a model in curricu-
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 123
Subdivide each topic into studies; each study into lessons; each lesson into
specific facts and formulae. Let the child proceed step by step to master each one
of these separate parts, and at last he will have covered the entire ground. The
road which looks so long when viewed in its entirety, is easily traveled, considered
as a series of particular steps. Thus emphasis is put upon the logical subdivisions
and consecutions of the subject-matter. Problems of instruction are problems of
procuring texts giving logical parts and sequences, and of presenting these portions
in class in a similar definite and graded way. Subject-matter furnishes the end, and
it determines method. The child is simply the immature being who is to be
matured; he is the superficial being who is to be deepened; his is narrow ex¬
perience which is to be widened. It is his to receive, to accept. His part is fulfilled
when he is ductile and docile.
Not so, says the other sect. The child is the starting-point, the center, and the
end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard. To
the growth of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as
they serve the needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-
matter. Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal. To possess
all the world of knowledge and lose one’s one self is as awful a fate in education
as in religion. Moreover, subject-matter never can be got into the child from
without. Learning is active. It involves reaching out of the mind. It involves
organic assimilation starting from within. Literally, we must take or stand with
the child and our departure from him. It is he and not the subject-matter which
determines both quality and quantity of learning.3
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 125
Classification, here, does not refer to what is classified, but to the relationships
between contents. Classification refers to the nature of the differentiation between
contents. Where classification is strong, contents are well insulated from each
other by strong boundaries. Where classification is weak, there is reduced insula¬
tion between contents for the boundaries between contents are weak or blurred.
Classification thus refers to the degree of boundary maintenance between contents.
Classification focuses our attention upon boundary strength as the critical dis¬
tinguishing feature of the division of labour of educational knowledge.5
If the model from which the curriculum is drawn is what is usually found
among academic disciplines that occupy so central a place in the university,
then it is likely that its classification will have strong boundary strength.6
Discrete subject matters will constitute the content and organization of the
curriculum. But if the curriculum of the secondary school is considered not
126 The Educational Imagination
represents one secondary school s effort to offer courses that traverse disci¬
plinary lines:
Courses in the upper two years are generally available to both junior and
seniors. Very few requirements are placed upon upper class students since they
are expected to exercise mature judgment in choosing their areas of specialization.
Students are expected to sign up for approximately 30 units of courss per year,
except by special permission with the faculty scheduling committee.
Science
Students will teach science classes in consultation with science teachers. Credit for
mini-teaching. 2 units per trimester
An inquiry into life and a study of the basic structures and functions of micro¬
organism, plants, and animals with emphasis on evolutionary steps, patterns of
heredity, animal behavior, and ecosystems. 4 units
306 TBT II
An advanced continuation of TBT I 4 units
Social Sciences
310 Rebel
A study of the rebel in contemporary society—his reasons and his strategies.
4 units
311 Survival
Practical ways of understanding and surviving in the modern city. 2 units
from 1900 to the present, oral interpretation of recent Black writing in America
and the African nations. (Course design could be a project of the interested stu¬
dents and faculty.) A Black teacher is being sought for this course. 2 units
have learned; curriculum designers need not use verbal or written forms of
expression as the only means of presenting ideas to students.
When one also recognizes that there are aptitude differences among
students with respect to the knowledge and performance systems they use
best, the grounds for using diverse modes of presentation and reponse be¬
come even stronger. One could argue that by withholding such opportuni¬
ties from students a significant proportion of them are denied equal educa¬
tional opportunity and that certain modes of presentation and forms of
response deny them the opportunity to display what they have learned in
the forms that most suits their aptitudes.
Although this might seem farfetched, I do not believe it is. We have
created a culture in schooling that is so heavily pervaded by verbal and
written performance systems that we take such performance systems for
granted. In the process we forget that the culture at large depends on a
much wider array of human competencies. We regard alternatives that are
nondiscursive as enrichment activities.” We assign them to the margins of
our concerns; they are events that are “nice to have” but not really of edu¬
cational significance. Furthermore, we do not often recognize the unique
epistimological functions that different expressive forms make possible.
The appreciation of this epistemological diversity allows the curriculum
designer to create activities that may be experienced in one mode and
expressed by the student in another. For example, a student might read a
short story and express what she has learned or experienced from it in a
painting, film, or poem. Or, conversely, a student might see a film and
express his reaction in a short story. Although such activities do occur at
present, they are seldom created intentionally and are seldom based on
a realization of the interaction between knowledge and performance sys¬
tems. What I am suggesting here is that curriculum designers can inten¬
tionally exploit the variety of modalities humans use to conceptualize and
experience the world and to express what they have learned about it.
It is true, of course, that fields do have indigenous expressive modalities.
Historians write prose, physicists express what they have learned in equa¬
tions, musicians perform with voice or instrument, painters create visual
images. To know whether someone knows history, we ask the the person
to speak or write. To determine whether someone knows physics, we ask
the person to explain physical theory or to do a physics experiment. To the
extent to which we would like students to express themselves within the
mode that is indigenous to the discipline, that mode should dominate. But
ideas secured from a discipline need not necessarily be limited to the mode
indigenous to it. A study of history can lead to ideas that are best expressed
by some students within the context of poetry rather than prose or within
film or music. Ideas dealing with historical phenomena can be expressed in
modes that are nonverbal. In addition, ideas that are not historical, per se,
can be stimulated by the study of history, and, of course, these too can be
130 The Educational Imagination
of schools around the laboratory that have agreed to cooperate with the
laboratory in testing new material. For the school, such cooperation pro¬
vides stimulation to teachers and creates a form of in-service education. In
addition, some laboratories give cooperating schools free materials after they
have been tested. For the laboratories, the schools provide the field site
that they need to reality-test the materials. A network of schools with which
the laboratory has a good relationship diminishes the need to locate and
contact new schools each time materials have to be tested. Thus, the rela¬
tionship can be viewed as a kind of symbiotic one: all concerned appear
to benefit by meeting the needs of the others.
The evaluator attached to the curriculum development group observes
the materials being used in the hothouse trial. The evaluator’s function is
to locate difficulties that the teacher might not recognize and to feed back
such information to the curriculum development team. Sometimes a member
of the curriculum development team will actually teach with the materials
in order to get a firsthand view of how the materials function, but even
when this occurs, the evaluator may still be present to observe what the
teacher might not see.
The function of the hothouse trials is to permit the curriculum team the
closest possible scrutiny of how materials function in classrooms. The rap¬
port between the member of the team and the teachers of the schools
should be good: ideally they should see each other as colleagues. Although
this rapport and relationship do not typify the field at large—teachers and
curriculum developers are seldom seen as colleagues and they typically have
no rapport—such a relationship is helpful for purposes of formative evalua¬
tion.
After hothouse trials have been completed and the necessary revisions
made, the materials are then offered to a limited number of school districts
for field testing. Field testing is done on a larger scale and is more imper¬
sonal in character than hothouse trials. In this stage of evaluations school
districts agree to return to the laboratory their appraisal of the materials
after they have had the opportunity to use them. Such appraisals might con¬
sist of evaluations that teachers complete or instruments that measure
students’ performance on achievement tests that the laboratory supplies.
The function of the field testing is to approximate more closely the condi¬
tions under which the materials will be used but still to be in a position to
modify the materials prior to their publication and dissemination. The ma¬
terials at the field trial stage of development are often in a mimeographed
or offset-printed form: they lack the kind of finished quality that they will
receive when they are to be marketed.
As a result of field testing, final modifications of the material are done,
and subsequently the materials are sent to a publisher who then mounts an
advertising program to make their purchase possible by the 17,000 school
districts in this country. This advertising program includes display of the
Dimensions of Curriculum Planning 133
REFERENCES
1. This point has been made with particular force by James McDonald. See his
article, “Myths about Instruction,” Educational Leadership, Vol. 22, No. 7,
May 1965, pp. 613-614.
2. Alfred North Whithead, “The Rhythm of Education,” in The Aims of Education
and Other Essays, Macmillan Co., New York, 1929, p. 29.
3. John Dewey, “The Child and the Curriculum,” in Dewey on Education (Martin
S. Dworkin, ed), Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia Uni¬
versity, New York, 1959, p. 95.
4. For a discussion of the differences among educative, noneducative, and mis-
educative experiences, see John Dewey, Experience and Education, Macmillan
Co., New York, 1938.
5. Basil Bernstein, “On the Classification and Framing of Educational Knowl¬
edge,” in Knowledge and Control (Michael Young, ed.), Collier-Macmillan
Publishers, Eondon, 1971.
6. Ibid., p. 49.
7. Joseph J. Schwab, “The Concept of the Structure of the Discipline,” Educa¬
tional Record, Vol. 43, July 1962, pp. 197-205.
8
Some Observations on a Curriculum
Development Project
135
136 The Educational hnagination
section the theories and beliefs that gave direction to the curriculum devel¬
opment work are addressed and the limitations of theoretical ideas in the
practical context of curriculum development are pointed out. Finally, the
potential virtues of alternative approaches to the curriculum development
process are discussed.
Because the grant for the project covered a two-year period, it was within
that period of time that a number of tasks had to be undertaken and com¬
pleted. These included refining the ideas presented in the proposal, creating
a structure for writing the syllabus, appointing a staff, creating and field
testing lessons, constructing the visual materials to accompany the lessons,
138 The Educational Imagination
evaluating and revising both written and visual materials on the basis of
field testing, locating schools wishing to participate in the project, construct¬
ing evaluation instruments, and preparing a final report to the foundation.
Had I, as project director, fully appreciated the complexity and magnitude
of the curriculum development task, I would have requested funds to cover
a five- rather than a two-year period. At that time, I did not, and it was with
the two-year time frame that work was planned.
The first thing I did after being notified that support would be forth¬
coming was to select eight doctoral students, five in the field of art educa¬
tion and three in general curriculum at Stanford University, who were to
work on the project during the two-year period. These students were joined
by a student in product design who was to provide some of the artistic
expertise for the construction of visual materials. The doctoral students
and I formed the primary core responsible for the major decisions during
the life of the project. This group of nine people would meet regularly each
week to consider, for example, the way in which the curriculum would be
structured, to write lessons, and to critique what each had created. I tried,
during the two-year period, to fulfill two responsibilities: first to provide the
leadership necessary for the project to succeed; second, to make the project
one that could contribute to the education of graduate students. This meant
that decisions I might have made on an arbitrary basis were made less
efficiently with respect to action but more effectively in relation to the
contributions that group deliberation made to the education of the students
who worked with me. Furthermore, I wanted the students to feel that this
was our project, not simply my project; hence, collective decision making
was something that I encouraged. Only when perseveration became acutely
frustrating or grossly unproductive did I attempt arbitrarily to resolve an
issue being discussed.
Once the core group had been formed, I shared with each member of
the group the proposal that was submitted to the foundation and I described
in detail the rationale for the project and some of the goals I hoped an
effective curriculum would achieve. These sessions were used to orient
members of the group to the kind of work that was ahead of us and to
reemphasize and clarify through discussion the leading ideas constituting
my thinking about the teaching of art at the elementary school level. It
became clear to me that the kind of understanding I wanted the core group
to secure could not be compressed and secured within three or four staff
meetings. Such understanding needs time to grow and would, I hoped,
occur during the course of the curriculum development work. Yet, I did
want to lay enough groundwork concerning what the project was after and
why, so that members of the group would feel intellectually secure in what
they were trying to accomplish.
The work for the project was divided in two phases. Phase I was devoted
Some Observations on a Curriculum Development Project 139
categories that would constitute the format for our work. The categories for
this format are as follows;
1. Concept
2. Principle
3. Objective
4. Rationale
5. Introductory motivating activity
6. Learning activity 1, 2, 3
7. Evaluation procedures
8. Materials needed
Concept refers to an idea, such as color or line, that was to be the focus
of a unit. A unit consisted of seven to ten lessons. Principle refers to a
general proposition about the concept that the curriculum was designed to
help children understand in some way. Thus, “Color can express feeling” is
a principle in which the concept color is embedded. Objective refers to in¬
structional objectives that the children were intended to attain. Rationale
provides the teachers with reasons that justify the importance of the con¬
cept, principle, and objective we had formulated.
The introductory motivating activity was a procedure we suggested could
be used by the teacher to help the students get ready for the lesson. Learn¬
ing activity 1, 2, 3 refers to the fact that each lesson contained one to three
learning activities, each of which we believed was instrumental in achieving
the objective for that lesson. The availability of diree learning activities
was intended to provide teachers with choices regarding the learning ac¬
tivity that seemed most suitable for their particular class. Evaluation pro¬
cedures describes how the effectiveness of the lesson or unit could be
evaluated, whereas materials needed was a list of materials that we provided
and those that the teacher needed to provide for use in the particular lesson.
As I have already indicated, each unit consisted of seven to ten lessons.
This meant that once a teacher chose a unit he or she was committed to
staying with it—to its culmination, we hoped. We did not want to encourage
teachers to shift from lesson to lesson in different units, because we believed
that this would vitiate any continuity that we were able to build into our
materials. The organization of lessons into a unit is schematically illustrated
in Figure 3.
By use of this curriculum format, seven units were selected for the devel¬
opment of lessons. In the productive realm, units focused on drawing,
graphics, and painting. In the critcial realm, units dealt with line, color, and
composition. In the historical realm, they focused on the general features of
art history. Using these units, the core group of project staff produced
sixty-seven lessons and about seven hundred pieces of specifically designed
instructional materials that accompanied the lessons in the units. These
Some Observations on a Curriculum Development Project 141
Lesson Lesson
Lesson 4
3
2
Figure 3
V
UNIT
materials, both written and visual, are sufficient for over two years ot art
instruction assuming that a teacher allocates about two hours per week to
the study or creation of art.
At the time the project was undertaken, I was very intent an specifying
goals or objectives so that teachers would know where they were heading.
I was also intent on developing a structured sequence among lessons to
counteract the fact that most elementary classrooms had no sequentially
organized art programs. Although the objectives that were formulated were
more general than formal instructional objectives, I would today provide a
much more open-ended approach to objectives, using instructional objec¬
tives much more sparingly and placing more emphasis on problem-solving
objectives and expressive outcomes. Similarly, I would not attempt to pro¬
vide a sequence longer than three lessons; we used sequences of from seven
to ten lessons in our work.
As already indicated, the teams that wrote curriculum were also responsi¬
ble for conceptualizing the instructional support materials to accompany
their written work. In most cases, members of the team also constructed
these materials and made seven copies of each of them so that eight com¬
plete sets of materials were available for testing in classrooms. When the
materials were especially complex or could not be efficiently fabricated by
a team member, the student who served as our product designer undertook
the responsibility for production. As I have already indicated, the project
produced about seven hundred pieces of visual instructional materials, each
having a code number corresponding to a number found within a lesson in
a particular unit.
Phase I of the project, which extended from October 1, 1968, to August
1, 1969, culminated with the production of two large syllabi containing the
units for each of the three realms of artistic learning that the project was
interested in fostering. Also produced were eight pairs of “Kettering Boxes,
which contained sets of instructional support materials. These materials,
both written and visual, had been revised at least twice, and most of the
lessons had been tried in the classroom by teacher-consultants or by mem¬
bers of the team who developed the material.
Phase II, the second year of the project, was one in which the tryout of
the materials expanded from four teachers to twenty teachers working in
five schools in two school districts near Stanford University. During this
phase of the project, units that were not completed during phase I were
brought to completion and observations of the use of the curriculum and
instructional resource materials were continued.
Because it was my aspiration as project director to develop materials that
did not require extensive in-service education, only one formal in-service
session was held for the twenty elementary school teachers who participated
in the project during the second year. Whatever additional in-service edu¬
cation occurred was provided informally by the core staff as they observed
teachers and students when they were using the materials in class.
This aspiration also reflected naivete on my part. I had hoped to create
material that needed little pedagogical expertise, but in retrospect—particu¬
larly in art—the need for in-service education in the use of the material
cannot be circumvented. The teacher plays a crucial role in the ways in
which materials are employed in the classroom.
In addition to the expanded field testing of the curriculum materials,
phase II became the period in which evaluation procedures and instruments
needed to be developed. With the bulk of the curriculum development
work completed by March 1968, the attention of the staff shifted to the
conceptualization of aspects of artistic learning that were to be evaluated in
ways not provided for in the evaluation procedures suggested at the end
of each lesson. This effort required for its successful completion as much
time and support as went into the development of the curriculum itself. The
Some Observations on a Curriculum Development Project 143
project staff obviously had neither the same amount of time nor the kinds
of resources that would have been optimal. Nevertheless, the types of
competencies the staff sought to assess and the procedures that were con¬
ceptualized were, in my opinion, promising and ambitious. These materials
included the appraisal of the visual products that children in the classes
produced, interviews with teachers, and analyses of the written comments
they made in the curriculum syllabus they were using. Evaluation pro¬
cedures also employed tests of comprehension that had been especially
prepared. The staff of the project made every effort within the time con¬
straints to secure a wide variety of evaluative information that would be
useful in determining the effects of the projects on the students as well as
those aspects of the curriculum that needed further revision. The data from
these procedures and instruments were collected in May and June of 1969
and analyzed during July and August.
As the final formal task of the project, a final report was prepared for the
foundation. This report was divided into eight sections and each member
of the core staff was asked to prepare a chapter or portion of the report. As
project director, I prepared both the introductory and concluding chapters
of the report and reviewed all of the material prepared by the staff. In addi¬
tion to the final report that describes the project in detail and presents a
critical analysis of its strengths and weaknesses, a collection of sample les¬
sons was prepared that was intended to provide those interested in the
project with material necessary for understanding the format of the lessons
and the level of detail with which they were written. Thus, two final written
products were prepared during the summer and fall of 1969, a final report
and a collection of sample lessons from each of the units that had been
written.
One might ask, after a substantial fiscal investment,5 not to mention the in¬
vestment in time and energy, how the results of the project were dissemi¬
nated to the field of art education, aside from the information provided in
the final report and sample lessons. To disseminate information about the
project to the field, a wide variety of channels became available, most of
which were neither consciously sought nor anticipated. These channels
emerged in part because there was a growing interest in the work we had
done and in part because the ideas in the project were a “natural” part of
ideas I had worked with professionally in the field. For example, I prepared
two articles for two major art education journals.6 7 One of these was
published when the project was initiated and described its goals and
rationale; the other was published after the project had been completed and
provided a description of what we had learned. Other channels for dissemi-
144 The Educational Imagination
Thus far I have described the goals of the Kettering Project and the kinds
of tasks that were undertaken in phases I and II of its life, in order to
clarify how the project was organized. It is to the theories used in its devel¬
opment that we now turn.
When one talks about theories underlying or guiding curriculum develop¬
ment work, there are at least two aspects of the term theory that need
clarification. If by theory is meant a systematic set of interrelated statements
Some Observations on a Curriculum Development Project 145
educational point of view that the student have sufficient time and oppor¬
tunity to acquire, practice, and refine the necessary skills. In the language
of curriculum discourse, both continuity and sequence should be provided
for in the materials developed. In practical terms, these ideas about the
meaning of expression and the conditions necessary for its achievement
function as the intellectual justification for the development of units as com¬
pared with a grab-bag or an ad hoc approach to the development of learn¬
ing activities.
The significance of these theoretical beliefs in our curriculum develop¬
ment work can perhaps be better appreciated if some theoretical ideas that
we did not employ are mentioned. The concept of reinforcement, a central
idea in behaviorism, was nowhere purposefully employed in the preparation
of written materials. We did not want teachers to use, for example, secon¬
dary reinforcers to sustain interest or to motivate children. The idea of
giving “brownie points” for work completed would have been abhorrent to
the group, and at no time did it emerge as an idea for consideration. An¬
other idea not employed was that of using immediate as compared to
delayed feedback to guide or reinforce the students’ learning. This psycho¬
logical idea simply was not a part of the intellectual body of beliefs that
gave direction to our efforts.
In identifying the theoretical ideas that were central to and those that
were absent from the project, I do not want to imply that ideas about
visual differentiation and those dealing with continuity and sequence pro¬
vided recipelike prescriptions that were to be followed assiduously. Al¬
though some ideas were of greater significance than others, it is more
accurate to say that these ideas were embedded in a constellation of more
general ideas about art, education, and artistic learning that had permeated
my writing for about a decade. These ideas formed what Decker Walker 14
has called a platform. They constituted a body of beliefs that were shared
by members of the project staff and provided an almost unarticulated cove¬
nant that gave direction for our work.
It is both of interest and of significance to note that the beliefs that be¬
come a shared aspect of group endeavors often seem to be internalized by
group members in a covert way, much in the way that social habits are
learned during childhood. The language that becomes salient in a group,
the way in which values are communicated, and the general intellectual
style of the leading group members seem to create a climate—or a culture—
to which group members adapt. In our case, there was no manifesto that
presented the values and beliefs the group came to share. In the first place,
an important characteristic of deeply held beliefs and values is their
ineffable quality. Yet, this does not mean that they are not communicable,
and I believe the total configuration of decisions within a group expresses
and at the same time reinforces such beliefs and values.
Curriculum development on the scale with which we worked is inevitably
Some Observations on a Curriculum Development Project 147
a group enterprise; yet, despite this obvious feature, there is little in the
literature that discusses curriculum development from the standpoint of
group processes. In the types of theory that guide curriculum work, ideas
about how people learn and about the nature of the subject to be learned
often are prominent. For example, Science: A Process Approach is struc¬
tured largely by ideas about the nature of cognitive operations and the
conditions that will refine them, whereas Man: A Course of Study is based
largely on certain large ideas believed important for children to learn and
understand. These teaching ideas reflect the orientations to curriculum that
each project embraces. When it comes to ideas that can be used to structure
curriculum development groups in order to maximize their ideational
fluency, social compatibility, or morale, little is available in the published
material in the field of curriculum. Yet, for groups who organize their work
as ours did, the importance of group process is enormous. We found that
whereas psychological ideas, for example, could provide some general
guidance when it came to making specific concrete decisions concerning a
particular lesson or instructional support material, psychological ideas were
too general to be of much use. Although we used such ideas as a general
intellectual backdrop, sustained deliberation was required among members
of the core group to arrive at a decision with which we could feel com¬
fortable. There are several good reasons why these deliberations required
so much time. First, we were trying to anticipate the likely effects of taking
one course of action rather than another. Because theoretical ideas are by
definition general, and because we were dealing with a specific instance, we
could not confidently extrapolate from the theory to the consequence of the
action we were considering. Consequently, we felt compelled to explore a
wide range of possible consequences flowing from a particular action in
order to avoid miseducational side effects. Blind alleys as well as direct routes
need to be identified, and group deliberation is one way of doing this.
Joseph Schwab s conception of the “practical is, from our experience both
accurate and apt as a way of characterizing the process of curriculum
planning.15
Second, through group deliberation, a variety of perspectives are pre¬
sented. This variety makes it possible to see the problem from different
angles, and hence the decision reached is much more likely to arise from
the comparison of a host of alternatives. Paradoxically, “inefficiency” in
group deliberation can be more efficient than efficiency.
Third, it is often the case, as revealed in group deliberation, that more
than one educational value attends to a variety of decisions being considered.
In a sense, the decision finally reached is partly a matter of which group
member has been most persuasive in the decision-making process. For ex¬
ample, there are assets and liabilities attached to the use of, say, cardboard
reproductions of works of art as compared to colored slides. The former
are easily movable, and there is no need to turn down the lights. However,
148 The Educational Imagination
the quality of such reproductions leaves much to be desired, and some might
not possess the very qualities that one hopes children will learn to experi¬
ence. Slides, although often of high visual quality, require a darkened room,
a screen, and a projector. In addition, teachers might not want to take the
time to set up this equipment if only a few slides are to be shown.
What happens in group deliberation is that the pros and cons, from an
educational, practical, psychological, and social point of view, are discussed.
The decision the group finally makes will depend not only on the “objective
evidence but also on the persuasiveness of a member who feels deeply and
argues cogently about either slides or reproductions.
Because the actors in this drama are human, all of the human emotions
come into play. Group members gradually learn how to couch their criticism
in forms that are not so abrasive. There are times when someone’s ego must
be the primary consideration. In short, the viability of the group as a group
is not a trivial consideration when curriculum development is undertaken
as a group effort.
In an interesting way, the process of group deliberation in curriculum
development has certain similarities to the kind of deliberation that goes on
when juries decide the disposition of a case they have heard. In both situa¬
tions, the evidence is weighed. And the metaphor weigh is a telling one.
What is being considered and compared is not qualities or anticipations that
can be put on a common yardstick and measured. Rather, it is more a
comparison of incomparables. There are few curriculum problems that have
one solution. For any problem there are usually several credible solutions;
hence, the problem for the curriculum group is to weigh the various putative
virtues and costs of each and finally to arrive at a decision that is then
subjected to empirical test. This process includes not simply securing the
facts—which are probably more difficult to secure in curriculum planning
than in jurisprudence—it also includes assigning values to these facts. In
both situations, the absence of recipelike solutions is notable.
The various rationales and concepts that are found in the literature of
curriculum and the empirical generalizations that are produced in the be¬
havioral sciences should not, as I have said so often, be considered blue¬
prints for curriculum construction but rather as devices that enable a cur¬
riculum construction group in its more passive and reflective moments to
remember what might be an important consideration. The concepts of
objectives, continuity, sequence, integration, and formative and summative
evaluation and the categories describing the changing cognitive structure
of the child provide only the most general criteria against which decisions
about the curriculum can be appraised. And none by itself is adequate to
resolve the range of diverse and at times competing values that can be
justly claimed for different courses of action. There is not now, and I do not
believe there can be, a single theory of curriculum capable of resolving
Some Observations on a Curriculum Development Project 149
and integrating the conflicts in interpretation, fact, and value emerging from
different theories within the several social sciences. Theoretical consistency
in curriculum development, even if it could be achieved, might in fact be
an educational pyrrhic victory.
If one uses three commonplaces in the curriculum literature-the student,
the society, and the subject matter—as criteria with which to identify what
considerations were most prominent in our own curriculum development, in
retrospect it appears that attention to the subject matter was easily the
most prominent of the three. The student, although important, was simply
too remote during the course of curriculum development to play a really
central role in our work. In addition, we believed—or took comfort in the
thought—that the classroom teacher would make whatever adaptations of
our material that were necessary to suit the particular child or class or situa¬
tion in which the curriculum would be used.
As for the society, it simply never appeared in our deliberations, perhaps
because our value commitment toward the visual arts already implicitly
embraced the belief that the development of children’s artistic abilities
would be important for the improvement of society. Whatever the reason,
once the group was launched into the process of curriculum development,
focused attention to the needs of society did not seem productive for meet¬
ing our immediate need: that of creating learning activities and instructional
support materials that would teach nontrivial artistic content to elementary
school children.
materials and develop their visual support devices with the criterion in mind
that other people will need to be able to use such materials without direct
consultation with the person who made them. Such a criterion provides a
new frame of reference for teachers to use in curriculum writing.
This procedure for curriculum developments has, I believe, an important
contribution to make to the in-service education of teachers. It has the virtue
of being practical and concrete while asking teachers to consider concepts
such as continuity and sequence as well as other matters that so often
appear to teachers to be little more than educational slogans. In identifying
this way of going about curriculum development as an alternative to the
way our group worked, I am not suggesting that it is without liabilities.
Our problems in education are not to be characterized as having ideal solu¬
tions. They are, rather, problems whose solutions are always imperfect and
need to be weighed with respect to competing strengths and weaknesses.
For example, although broadening the responsibility for curriculum writing
is likely to yield products whose quality is uneven, at the same time, it is
likely to increase motivation and comprehension of the project’s objectives.
What kind of tradeoff is most beneficial from an educational point of view?
As far as I know, there is no metric that can be confidently applied to re¬
solve such a problem: it s a matter of making a judgment rather than apply¬
ing a standard. In making such a judgment, the image one holds of teachers
and of schools comes sharply into play. If schooling is seen as a quasi¬
industrial venture and teachers as a workforce to be directed by manage¬
ment, the likelihood of being sympathetic toward a program that is “teacher-
proof,” one in which the teacher functions as a conduit for a totally pre¬
packaged program, is higher than if one conceives of teachers as profes¬
sionals who, with students and other teachers, jointly plan the educational
program.
The work that we did in curriculum development was instructive because
it provided an arena in which theoretical ideas could be employed and
through use their utility and limitations appreciated. Some of the ideas that
were embraced at the outset of the work were reaffirmed, whereas others
were discarded. We erred in attempting to develop materials that needed
little or no in-service education, that overemphasized instructional objec¬
tives, that payed too much attention to the development of technical skills
and provided too little opportunity for the exercise of imagination, that
were too prescriptive regarding sequence, and that underestimated the need
for a syllabus to be attractively illustrated and printed. We also severely
underestimated the amount of time needed to do work on the scale we
aspired to reach. Yet, to be able to learn these things required the invest¬
ment of time and energy that all those affiliated with the project expended.
All in all, I believe that what we learned was worth the investment we
made.
152 The Educational Imagination
REFERENCES
1. A modified verson of this chapter appears in Strategies for Curriculum De¬
velopment, (Jon Schaffarzick and David Hampson, eds.), McCutchcon Pub-
lising, Co., Berkeley, 1975.
2. The final report of the Project is entitled Teaching Art to the Young: A Cur¬
riculum Development Project in Art Education, Stanford University, School of
Education, 1969.
3. Elliot Eisner, “Curriculum Ideas in a Time of Crisis,” Art Education, Vol.
18, No. 7, October 1965.
4. Elliot Eisner, “The Development of Information and Attitude Toward Art
at the Secondary and College Level,” Studies in Art Education, Vol. 8, No. 1,
Autumn 1966.
5. The amount allocated to the project by the Kettering Foundation for the two-
year period was approximately $70,000.
6. Elliot Eisner, “Curriculum Making for the Wee Folk: Stanford University’s
Kettering Project,” Studies in Art Education, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1968.
7. Elliot Eisner, “Stanford’s Kettering Project: An Appraisal of Two Years
Work,” Art Education, Vol. 23, No. 8, 1970.
8. Elliot Eisner, “Stanford’s Kettering Project: A Radical Alternative in Art
Education,” in Programs of Promise, A1 Hurwitz (ed.), Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, New York, 1972.
9. Elliot Eisner, Educating Artistic Vision, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New
York, 1972.
10. California State Framework for the Visual Arts, State Department of Educa¬
tion, State of California, Sacramento, 1971.
11. For this distinction, I am indebted to the work of Gilbert Ryle, The Concept
of Mind, Barnes and Noble, London, 1949.
12. This distinction grows out of John Dewey’s writing, especially Chapter 13 of
Art As Experience, Minton, Balch and Co., New York, 1934.
13. Ibid.
14. See the following by Decker Walker, Strategies of Deliberation in Three Cur¬
riculum Development Projects, Ph.D. Thesis, School of Education, Stanford
University, 1971.
15. Joseph Schwab, “The Practical: A Language for Curriculum,” School Review,
Vol. 78, November 1969. No. 19.
On the A rt of Teaching
eWs
First we see the hills in the painting, then we see the painting in the
hills.
Li Li Weng
In the previous chapter and in those that preceded it, I have focused mainly
on the problems of curriculum planning. In this chapter I wish to address
myself to another central aspect of the educational process: teaching. It is
my thesis that teaching is an art guided by educational values, personal
needs, and by a variety of beliefs or generalizations that the teacher holds
to be true.
To argue as I will that teaching is an art is something of a paradox. We
live at a time when virtually the entire effort of those who have attempted
to study teaching has been devoted to the creation of a science of teaching.1
Yet, most of those who teach—indeed, even those who study teaching
scientifically—often regard their own teaching as an artistic activity. For
some, to say that teaching is an art is to say that it is poorly understood and
that when it is understood a science of teaching will have been developed.2
I will have more to say about this issue a bit later, but for the present let us
think about what it means to say that teaching is an art.
There are at least four senses in which teaching can be considered an art.
It is an art in the sense that teaching can be performed with such skill and
grace that, for the student as well as for the teacher, the experience can be
justifiably characterized as aesthetic.3 There are classrooms in which what
the teacher does—the way in which activities are orchestrated, questions
asked, lectures given—constitutes a form of artistic expression. What occurs
is a performance that provides intrinsic forms of satisfaction, so much so
that we use the adjectives and accolades usually applied to the formal arts
to describe what the teacher does while teaching.
153
154 The Educational Imagination
least in part, use such a model to guide their activities, not as a function of
professional incompetence, but as a way of keeping their pedagogical in¬
telligence from freezing into mechanical routine.
It is in these four senses—teaching as a source of aesthetic experience, as
dependent on the perception and control of qualities, as a heuristic or ad¬
ventitious activity, and as seeking emergent ends—that teaching can be re¬
garded as an art.
Because teaching can be engaged in as an art is not to suggest that all
teaching can be characterized as such. Teaching can be done as badly as
anything else. It can be wooden, mechanical, mindless, and wholly un¬
imaginative. But when it it is sensitive, intelligent, and creative—those
qualites that confer upon it the status of an art—it should, in my view not
be regarded, as it so often is by some, as an expression of unfathomable
talent or luck but as an example of humans exercising the highest levels of
their intelligence.6 As Phillip Jackson has said, rather than complain about
the art of teaching, we should try to try to foster whatever artistry the
teacher can provide.7
The reason this view of teaching was embraced was because the term
teach implied an end-in-view namely, learning. Teaching was goal-directed
and represented, in Gilbert Ryle’s terms, an achievement, not merely
the performance of a task.12 For example, to say that someone has run is to
describe an activity—it is a task term. But to say that someone has won is to
describe an achievement, it is an achievement term for Ryle. Thus, if a
teacher attempts to teach but does not succeed in helping the student learn,
then he or she may be said to have lectured, conducted a discussion, demon¬
strated, explained but not to have taught. To teach, in this sense, is known
by its effects. Those effects are learning. Just as one could not be said to
have sold something unless another bought, so too, one could not have been
said to have taught unless another had learned.
When the study of teaching became a major interest among researchers
in the early part of the 1950s, the view that teaching should be concep¬
tualized in terms of its consequences presented something of a difficulty. To
subscribe to this view of teaching means that one could study teaching only
by first determining its effects on students, particularly with respect to the
achievement of specified goals. This posed formidable problems in the
study of teaching because it required that one must study two things: what
teachers do and what students learn.
To simplify the research task, teaching was reconceptualized as a variety
of acts performed by individuals called teachers as they work in classrooms
with the intention of promoting learning. Whether they were successful was
a matter to be studied separately. Thus, using this conception, it became
possible to ask what teachers did in the classroom' and to establish criteria,
independent of their effects, that could be used to appraise the quality of
what they did. Teachers, for example, lectured, demonstrated, explained,
led discussions, introduced materials, and brought lessons to closure. All of
these activities, regardless of their effects, could be evaluated by using cri¬
teria appropriate for each act. For example, the logic of lectures, the vivid¬
ness of the examples provided, the coherence of expression, such considera¬
tions could be used to evaluate aspects of teaching. The ability to ask ques¬
tions in a discussion, to help the discussion move forward, to engage many
participants, and to foster critical and analytical skills could be applied as
criteria to appraise the teacher’s skills as a discussion leader. It was believed
to be too much to expect that both the quality of the acts of teaching and
their consequences be studied simultaneously in a field just beginning to
study teaching scientifically.
What we see here are two radically different conceptions of teaching.
One regards teaching as a form of achievement directly related to learning.
The other regards it as a set of acts performed by people we call teachers as
they attempt to foster learning. To which of these conceptions shall we
subscribe? Which one is “correct?”
It is both interesting and important to recognize that if we consider how
158 The Educational Imagination
we use the term selling it becomes clear that we do in fact use it not in one
way but in two ways. Nel Noddings has pointed out that when we talk
about someone engaged in selling, we describe a series of acts and not
necessarily a series of achievements.13 Someone is a salesman, is in the
selling game, is selling cars. We use such phrases without necessarily im¬
plying that the individuals so engaged are successful. One is selling even
though one might not have sold any cars today or even this week. Selling
here designates a variety of actions that are guided by a set of intentions,
not by a set of achievements. Similarly, we can talk about teaching as a set
of acts guided by intentions, not as representing achievements.
At the same time, we also talk about teaching in the sense that someone
has fulfilled an intention. Teaching also refers to the achievement of in¬
tended learning. We say, for example, “I taught you or I failed to teach
you,” implying that if one had not succeeded, teaching did not occur.
What can we do about this duality? I suggest that we can appropriately
conceptualize teaching both ways. We do at present and have in the past
used both conceptions of teaching, and I believe that they have served us
well. We discern the meaning of the term teach not by referring to some
operational or stipulated definition, but by recognizing how it functions in a
context of other meanings. Much of our language functions in the same way.
If under certain circumstances the context is insufficient to provide clarity of
meaning, we can then stipulate what we mean by teaching so that others
will know how we intend to use the term. In most cases, I believe, we can
use the term teach in both ways—as an achievement term and as a task
term—without a serious problem in communication.
There is, however, a tendency in our discussions to use the teaching and
instruction interchangeably. These terms, I would suggest, are not inter¬
changeable. Their connotative meanings are sufficiently distinctive to war¬
rant attention because what they connote can lead to different conceptions
of education and educational practice.
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the differences between teaching and
instructio7i is to relate an episode that occurred to me in 1972 14 when I was
studying English primary schools. I was having tea in a common room of a
London primary school with a group of primary school teachers. We were
talking about how the school day was organized and in the course of the
conversation I said that I was interested in the way in which they provided
instruction. A group of incredulous expressions appeared on their faces.
Instruction? they asked. I said yes, I was interested in how they provided
instruction to the pupils. One of them said, “We don’t provide instruction in
this school, we teach. Instruction is provided in the church and in the army,
but in this school we teach.”
What they were conveying to me, and it was the first time I had reflected
on the distinction, was that instruction was concerned with forms of train¬
ing; it was harsher, less organic, more mechanical than teaching. To “teach”
On the Art of Teaching 159
is softer than to “instruct. ’ Perhaps this is why the term instruction is more
likely to be used by those whose orientation to curriculum is technological
and who want to maximize effective control over the content and form of
what children learn in school. Instruction is a term more suited to a manual
than is the term teach. Instruction is less apt to be associated with the
adventitious, with what is flexible and emergent, in short, with what is
artistic, than is teaching.
Now this difference between terms might seem like quibbling, but it is
not. It is precisely because we do not have clear-cut, stipulated definitions
of these terms that their connotative meanings take on such importance.
When terms are not formally differentiated, context and connotation sig¬
nificantly influence the kinds of meanings that individuals are likely to
construe. To use the term instruction as an equivalent to the term teach is
not to have an equivalent at all; each term carries its own conceptual bag¬
gage, and although there is some overlap, the significance of the terms re¬
side in their differences because each implies a different image of what
teachers should do.
It is significant, also, I believe, that the terms we use in educational
discourse not only reflect different assumptions about the means and ends of
education, but that terms cluster—that is, individual terms tend to have
conceptual links to other terms. In combination, they generate a view of
what is educationally desirable. Consider, for example, the term individual¬
ized instruction. Contrast this with personalized teaching. The term in¬
dividualized is harsher and more bureaucratic in character than personal¬
ized. The latter is softer and more intimate. When combined with instruc¬
tion, individualized instruction takes on a connotation that is more tech¬
nological than personalized teaching.
Consider the following: “In this school system, individualized instruction
is provided to learners after first having measured a learner’s entry skills.
Once these entry skills have been determined, appropriate exit skills are
specified and measured at the end of the instructional period.” Language of
this sort communicates not only because of the specific denotations of the
language used but because of the images that the language conveys. Entry
and exit conjure up something of an assembly line in which products are
processed according to specifications. Education in this context is something
that one does to another through a process called instruction. When such
terms permeate our discourse they shape our view of the character and aims
of education.
When it comes to discourse about teaching, perhaps no concept has had
greater currency than the concept of individualized instruction. I have al¬
ready pointed out that the concept itself participates in a tradition that is
more mechanical than organic. If we were to study the ways in which in¬
dividualization is provided in classrooms, we would find that in many class¬
rooms the variable that is individualized for students is time. Individualized
160 The Educational Imagination
syntax, each its own form and rules, they share the need for play as a source
of invention and discovery. But for such a disposition to be cultivated,
teachers themselves need to feel free to innovate, to explore, and to play.
Teaching is not an act modeled after the sequences of a highly efficient
assembly line. Teaching is more like what occurs on a basketball court or on
a soccer field. Let me develop this analogy.
Basketball is a game defined by certain rules in which its players seek an
unambiguous outcome: to end the game with more points than their op¬
ponents. In the former characteristic, basketball and teaching are similar:
both have rules that define the activities of their respective games. How¬
ever, in the latter characteristic, having unambiguous goals, the teacher is
generally unlike the basketball player. Goals change in teaching, they are
not without ambiguity, and they are certainly not the same for all students.
Still, basketball and teaching are alike in many ways. A basketball player
must watch the court and understand emerging configurations: so must a
teacher. A player must recognize productive possibilities and must know
how to pass as well as to shoot: so must a teacher. The basketball player
must also know how to slow down the pace, when to speed it up, and even
when to stall for time: so must a teacher. He needs to know when to cut,
how to slow down a pass, how to talk to his opponent, and how to provide
support for his teammates: so must a teacher. The skills that he must have
to play the game well require intellectual flexibility. Although good teams
have a set of preplanned patterns, once they get on the floor they need to
know both how to improvise within those patterns and when to give them
up at a second’s notice in order to exploit other options. Flexible purposing,
Dewey calls it,15 knowing when to alter the goal, when to explore new in¬
teractions and when to shift strategies. In this sense, neither basketball nor
teaching is optimized by chaotic abandon or rigid adherence to prespecified
plans. Fluid intelligence, intelligence in process, is the hallmark of effective¬
ness in both arenas. Unlike the automobile assembly line where systemiza-
tion, orderliness, predictability, and control serve the goals of efficiency,
effective teaching, like effective basketball, profits from flexibility, in¬
genuity, and personal creativity, the last things desired on the assembly line.
To say that excellence in teaching requires artistry implies that the
teacher is able to exploit opportunities as they occur. It implies that goals
and intentions be fluid. But in many ways this is contrary to the belief that
single-mindedness and clarity of one’s ends-in-view are required for ra¬
tionally guided activity. To be rational, one must be intentional. But what is
not adequately appreciated is the limitation that such a conception of ra¬
tionality places on the ways in which teaching can be undertaken. If teach¬
ing is regarded—at least in part-as a form of inquiry, as a process of ex¬
ploring problems that one cannot always define or predict-problems of a
pedagogical and substantive variety-the limitations of such a conception of
rationality begin to become apparent.
162 The Educational Imagination
school and the factory, between the algorithms and the heuristics of teach¬
ing accounts for the simplistic nostrums that are promulgated as ways of
improving education. Intentions need not be statable to be held. Intentions
need not precede action, they can grow out of action. Rationality includes
the capacity to play, to explore, to search for surprise and effective novelty.
Such activities are not necessarily contrary to the exercise of human ra¬
tionality, they may be its most compelling exemplification. What diminishes
human rationality is the thwarting of flexible human intelligence by pre¬
scriptions that shackle the educational imagination.
Teaching
Curriculum
In this model, intentions are formed that set the direction and the con¬
straints for curriculum planning. Once the curriculum is planned, it pro¬
vides the aims, the content, and the resources that the teacher uses in order
to teach. Teaching is that array of activities the teacher employs to trans¬
form intentions and curriculum materials into classroom conditions that
promote learning. Although much pedagogical activity takes this route, not
all of it does. Consider the diagram in Figure 5.
In this model, teaching, which always has a content because it is logically
impossible to teach or to try to teach someone nothing, interacts with cur¬
riculum. One engages in teaching some content and out of action intentions
develop that are then used as a basis for planning curriculum. In this model,
action is the initiating agent that leads to the formation of intentions, which
in turn leads to curriculum planning.
Both of the models presented here are unidirectional. One starts with in¬
tentions and terminates with teaching. The other starts with teaching and
terminates with curriculum planning. Perhaps a more adequate representa¬
tion of the process is found in Figure 6.
In this model, the process is circular—that is, one can enter the circle at
any point in the model. Intentions lead to curriculum planning, which in
Teaching
▼
Curriculum
On the Art, of Teaching 165
Intentions
Figure 6
turn provides the content and structure for teaching, which through the
course of action leads to the formation of new intentions. One might start
widi curriculum planning and through it provide the content and structure
for teaching, which in turn leads to intentions; or one might start with
teaching and through action formulate intentions, which in turn lead to
curriculum planning.
With such a model, one can begin to study the sources of intentionality
in teaching and speculate on the kinds of value orientations that are more
likely than others to encourage teachers to use teaching to formulate in¬
tentions and vice versa.
There is another comment worth making about the relationship of cur¬
riculum to teaching that has to do with primacy of curriculum in this rela¬
tionship. By this I mean that it is no virtue to teach well what should not be
taught at all. Put another way, what is not worth teaching is not worth
teaching well. Thus, if the content to be taught is without redeeming
features, it makes little sense to worry about how well it is being taught;
teaching matters, so to speak, when what is taught is worth the student’s
time.
Looking at it from another angle, a curriculum composed of high-quality
content and imaginative activities and materials can be scuttled by poor
teaching. If the teacher is unable to effectively use materials in the class¬
room, regardless of how well planned they are, the virtues of the materials
as far as the students are concerned go unrealized. But if the curriculum
materials are without intellectual virtue, effectively teaching them con¬
stitutes a vice.
The virtues and vices of teaching are not only related to the quality of
what is taught, but are also determined by criteria that are appropriate to
the form of teaching that is provided. For example, the kinds of skills one
needs to be able to give a lucid and coherent lecture are not the same as
those needed to conduct a discussion. A teacher who is good at the former
may be poor at the latter. To attempt to apply a single set of criteria to a
wide variety of types and forms of teaching is to overlook what is distinc¬
tive about each type. Consider not only the giving of lectures and the
leading of discussions, but the organization of small-group activity, in¬
dividual counseling and guidance, and the ability to maintain a wide airay
of diverse but productive activities in the classroom; each of these forms of
166 The Educational Imagination
teaching requires the use of different skills. The criteria that are appropriate
for appraising the quality of one kind of teaching are not necessarily appro¬
priate for appraising the quality of another.
This admonition to apply to an art form the criteria appropriate to it is
well known in the fine arts. We do not use criteria appropriate for tragedy
to appraise the quality of melodrama and vice versa. What constitutes ex¬
cellence in surrealist painting does not constitute excellence in impression¬
istic work. In teaching, too, excellence is related to the form of teaching
being employed. It is probably too much to expect a high degree of ex¬
cellence in all of the major forms of teaching that can be provided in a
classroom. What we probably do want is a high degree of excellence in
some.
I make this point—although it may seem obvious—because we often talk
about excellence in teaching as though it were a single set of qualities. We
sometimes tend to evaluate teaching with a single image of pedagogical
merit. And research in teaching has tended to underplay the distinctive
differences of different forms of teaching as well as the normative frames of
reference or orientations to education that any set of criteria must in some
way reflect. Yet these orientations are, in the last analysis, the crucial cri¬
teria for appraising the educational value of teaching. Excellence as a lec¬
turer or as a discussion leader is not sufficient to constitute educational vir¬
tue if either the lectures or the discussions are regarded as educationally
inappropriate. No judgment can be made about the quality of teaching as
an educational event or performance without reference to some theory of
education. It is ironic that the most neglected aspect in research on teaching
is the very framework that would have made it possible for the researcher
to say something about the educational significance of the findings.
In all of this discussion about the art of teaching, about differences be¬
tween teaching and instruction, and about teaching as an independent or
reciprocal concept, it is easy to neglect the fact that teachers have needs
that must be met through teaching. Because teachers are people who teach,
it is important that, in our efforts to develop self-instructional materials for
students and prepackaged procedures for instruction, we do not eviscerate
the classroom of those opportunities that teachers need to gain satisfaction
from teaching. When such procedures begin to dominate classroom practice,
opportunities to gain satisfactions from teaching can be seriously dimin¬
ished. The teacher who wants the pride and satisfaction that come from
having designed a reading program may be restricted from using such a
program. Although schools do not exist primarily for the benefit of teachers,
teachers who receive little or no satisfaction from what they do are not, I
believe, likely to be educationally effective. The human need for pride in
craftsmanship and being able to put something of oneself into work is
recognized even by companies that sell packaged cake mixes.
The need to get something out of what one does, aside from student
On the Art of Teaching 167
achievement, is still very great for most of us. The school should provide the
conditions where such needs can be met. Unless the school can provide the
necessary life-space for the teacher’s growth, the existence of optimal condi¬
tions for the educational growth of students is not assured.
REFERENCES
1. See, for example, the two volumes of the Handbook of Research on Teaching.
(N. L. Gage, ed.), Handbook of Research on Teaching, Rand McNally & Com¬
pany, Chicago, 1963; and Robert M. W. Travers, ed. Second Handbook of
Research on Teaching, Rand McNally & Company, Chicago, 1973.
2. This is reflected in the phrase “The state of the art,” which typically implies
that a high state of refinement or understanding has not yet been attained.
3. That the quality of experience defines art is best argued by John Dewey in
Art As Experience, Minton, Balch and Co., New York, 1934.
4. See David Ecker, “The Artistic Process as Qualitative Problem-Solving,”
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21, No. 3, Spring 1963.
5. H. W. Janson, quoted in Meaning, Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch, The
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977.
6. Dewey writes of the role of intelligence in art as follows: “Any idea that
ignores the necessary role of intelligence in production of works of art is
based upon identification of thinking with use of one special kind of material,
verbal signs and words. To think effectively in terms of relations of qualities
is as severe a demand upon thought as to think in terms of symbols, verbal
and mathematical. Indeed, since words are easily manipulated in mechanical
ways, the production of a work of genuine art probably demands more in¬
telligence than does most of the so-called thinking that goes on among those
who pride themselves on being ‘intellectuals.’ ” Art as Experience, Minton,
Baleh and Co., New York, 1934, p. 46.
7. Phillip Jackson, Life in Classrooms, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc., New
York, 1969.
8. See especially, Morris Weitz, “The Nature of Art,” in Readings in Art Educa¬
tion, (Elliot W. Eisner and David Ecker, eds.) Blaisdell Publishing Co.,
Waltham, Mass., 1966.
9. Jackson, op. cit.
10. Joseph Schwab, “The Practical: A Language for Curriculum,” School Review,
Vol. 78, November 1969, p. 12.
11. John Dewey, How We Think, D. C. Heath, Lexington, Mass., 1910.
12. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1949.
13. Nel Noddings, in a personal communication.
14. For a report on this work, see Elliot W. Eisner, English Primary Schools,
National Association for Young Children, Washington, D.C., 1974.
15. John Dewey, Experience and Education, Macmillan Co., New York, 1938,
passim.
10
The Functions and
Forms of Evaluation
1. To diagnose
2. To revise curricula
3. To compare
4. To anticipate educational needs
5. To determine if objectives have been achieved
168
The Forms and Functions of Evaluation 169
effective. The medical analogy has its uses: it suggests that treatments will
be employed that fit the nature of the student’s difficulties. But there are
limits to such metaphors. Students are not patients and they don’t normally
have illnesses to be treated. Furthermore, although there are standard forms
of medical technique, controlled pharmaceutical formulas for medicines,
and routine procedures for medical diagnoses, virtually none of these rigor¬
ous tools, treatments, or techniques available to the medical practitioner is
available to the educational practitioner. To be sure, there are intelligence
tests and diagnostic tests in reading and some other subject areas such as
mathematics, but the confidence one can place in these tools is limited and,
in addition, performance on them is greatly influenced by the cultural con¬
ditions in which students live. Having said this, we can still talk about diag¬
nosis as a function in evaluation. To diagnose can represent the effort to
locate or try to locate the sources of difficulties students are having with
particular learning problems. In the field of reading, where many of the
available diagnostic tools exist, it is possible to employ tests that assess
word-attack skills, paragraph meaning, general comprehension, and vocab¬
ulary. The achievement profile secured from such instruments is designed
to guide the teacher so that if a student is weak in a particular area in¬
struction in that area can be provided.
It should also be pointed out that the diagnosis of learning difficulties does
not require the use of tests, and at its most general level it is used by vir¬
tually all teachers to identify whether their students understand what is
being taught. For example, an art teacher can look at a student’s work or
watch the student while working in class and “diagnose” the sorts of
strengths and weaknesses that the student possesses. One student might, for
example, be unable to control the material adequately to use it as a medium
of expression, another student might be neglecting attention to his work’s
formal features, still another student might be inadequately wedging the
clay with which she is working. In each of the foregoing cases, the type of
problem the student has requires a different type of “solution” or educational
“treatment.”
But even more generally, any teacher attempting to explain something to
students in class would attempt to determine whether the explanation was
understood. To do so requires some form of diagnosis: a request by the
teacher to a student to explain, to demonstrate, to draw relationships. The
questions students themselves ask provide diagnostic information to the
teacher. Indeed, if one looks at teaching dialectically, much of what teachers
do will be seen as a result of their understanding of where students are and
what they need. The use of an example to clarify a point that is not under¬
stood requires some conception of what is likely to make more sense to
students than the explanation just provided. The good example provides the
necessary bridge between the student’s current level of comprehension, his
or her experience, and the aims toward which the teaching is directed. The
170 The Educational Imagination
selection of the right example is, one might say, the result of a diagnostic
evaluation.
Perhaps the classic example of such diagnosis occurs in the sixth book of
Plato’s Republic.1 Glaucon, after he asks about the nature of knowledge, is
given an image by Socrates in an effort to help him grasp the hierarchy of
truth that is used in Plato’s epistemology. Glaucon fails to grasp the mean¬
ing of the image (in this case, a line divided into four segments intended to
represent various degrees of truth), and so Socrates proceeds in the be¬
ginning of Book Seven to tell Glaucon the famous parable of the cave,
which even more graphically depicts the relationships Socrates tried to ex¬
plain earlier. What Plato gives us here is a telling image of both teaching
and diagnostic evaluation. When a teacher monitors his or her teaching
tactics to suit students, a diagnostic form of evaluation has occurred. Thus,
diagnosis in evaluation can be employed dynamically in the context of
teaching or more formally in the context of specially designed tests that
locate the students’ strengths and weaknesses, and therefore it provides a
basis for curriculum change.
/ A second function of evaluation is to revise the curriculum. If for the
moment we conceive of the curriculum as a set of materials to be used by
students or by the teacher in order to have educational consequences, then
it becomes clear that such materials will need modification and improve¬
ments from the point of initial inception to the point where they are ready
for general dissemination to the schools. This process—what Michael Scriven
lefers to as formative evaluation “—has as its major aim the improvement of
the program or curriculum that is being developed. In educational labora¬
tories that develop curriculum materials, such evaluation goes through a
variety of stages before the final product—in this case a packaged cur¬
riculum—is disseminated. One of these stages focuses on an evaluation of
the content and aims of the curriculum.3 Before learning activities are
created, there is some appraisal of the content that has been selected and
the aims that have been formulated. This process, which itself is a part of
the curriculum development process, lays the groundwork for transforming
content and aims into promising learning activities: events that have as
their intended consequences educational outcomes related to the subject
matter or content employed in the first place.
Once the content has been appraised and learning activities have been
foimulated, the materials are hothouse tested, as described earlier. Among
other things, this affords schools the opportunity to have contact with a de¬
veloping educational enterprise that is stimulating to the school. It provides
a type of Hawthorne effect for those teachers who elect to try the new
material.
If the curriculum developer and an evaluator visit the classroom on ap¬
pointment to watch the class use the materials and to observe the teacher
and talk with him or her about the materials, the developer can gain some
The Forms and Functions of Evaluation 171
insight into the problems that exist and how they might Ire remedied. The
materials might be too sophisticated for children of a particular age to use,
the learning activities might turn out to be dull, the teacher might have
difficulty handling the materials physically, the explanations might be mis¬
leading and therefore likely to be misunderstood, and so on. After the ma¬
terials have been revised as a result of hothouse testing, the materials will
be disseminated for field testing. Ideally, these stages of evaluation will
yield curriculum materials that do not have major educational faults.
When the curriculum development movement got under way in the early
1960s, there was talk about the desirability of creating “teacher proof” cur¬
ricula. That aspiration has, through the years, given way to the more real¬
istic view that teachers are not mere tubes for curriculum developers. They
cannot and should not be bypassed. Materials guarantee nothing. What
they do is to expand the range of resources with which teachers and students
can work. They are not a substitute for teachers.
The use of evaluation to revise the curriculum is in my view one of the
central functions of evaluation. It is a type of feedback mechanism for edu¬
cational improvement that diminishes the tendency to use evaluation prac¬
tices as a means of classifying students, rewarding them, or selecting the
able from the rest. Although classification, selection, and reward have been
historically important functions of evaluation, when evaluation is used this
way the responsibility for performance shifts almost wholly to the student
rather than the school. If students fail to perform, under conventional as¬
sumptions the fault lies with the students.4 However, when student per¬
formance is viewed as an index of program effectiveness, the likelihood of
curriculum improvement increases and a major contribution is made toward
improving the quality of education.
A third function of evaluation is to compare programs, teaching, and
other aspects of schooling such as forms of school organization. Educational
policy is supposedly made with an eye toward improving the quality of
educational experience the school provides. This means that when a school
board decides that new school buildings will be designed on an open plan,
there is implicit in that policy the belief that such a plan will have bene¬
ficial effects on the students for whom it is intended. Many, but not all,
policy changes in schools are based on certain values that the new policy is
intended to realize. Often the “new math” was adopted because people
came to believe that it was important for students to understand the logic,
or structure, of mathematics. The use of peer tutoring is embraced because
it is believed that students teaching each other provide benefits that cannot
be secured from a student-teacher relationship. Team teaching is used in
schools because collaboration by teachers is thought to make it possible for
them to exploit their strengths as teachers. Related arts programs are de¬
veloped because such programs are considered to help students appreciate
the common elements among the arts. Comparative approaches to evalua-
172 The Educational Imagination
tion ask whether these beliefs are true. Does the new math do more than the
old math in helping students understand the structure of mathematics? Does
peer tutoring have benefits that more typical teacher-pupil relationships fail
to provide? And so forth. Insofar as educational policy rests on evidence
concerning the effects of the alternatives being considered, the comparative
evaluation of these programs, in principle, is one vehicle for making such
evidence available.
There is, however, a set of paradoxes regarding the use of comparative
methods for curriculum policy making. In the first place, educational ma¬
terials and modes of school organization are not susceptible to the kind of
standardization that can be assigned to, say, light bulbs. If the electric
company says that a light bulb will burn for about 740 hours, nine times out
of ten its life will be close to that mark. Educational materials and new
forms of educational practice cannot be standardized with the precision
possible with materials that are inert; hence, a program evaluated as effec¬
tive in one setting is not guaranteed to be effective in other settings. More¬
over, the new setting will assuredly differ from the others in which the
materials were originally used. Thus, a policy to adopt a new curriculum,
to employ a new form of school organization, or to use a new procedure for
scheduling must to a large degree be based on the attractiveness of such
materials, modes of organization, and procedures rather than on “hard data.”
Even if such data could be obtained, it might take several years to eval¬
uate programs adequately to the point where hard data were available. By
that time, the desire to implement the innovation might have run its course;
its most ardent advocates might have left the district, the need for such in¬
novation might have changed, or some new and even more promising inno¬
vations might have emerged on the horizon. Thus comparisons of educa¬
tional programs are difficult. They are difficult not only because of the
reasons cited, but also because new programs most often tend to be aimed
at the achievement of goals different from those that old programs were
designed to achieve. It is seldom the case that the goals of existing programs
are consideied to be without merit. Hence, when one weighs the promise of
a new progiam against that of an existing one, their effectiveness is found
to be not strictly comparable. They aim at different ends. Because it is not a
matter of one program doing better what another program does—that
would be far easier—the problem of comparison is extremely complicated.
Nevertheless, the effectiveness of different programs can be compared, if
only in relation to their own goals and unanticipated consequences. Such a
comparison will not provide simple and certain conclusions about what to
adopt and implement, but it will expand the pool of considerations from
which competent educational conclusions can be drawn.
A fourth function of evaluation is to anticipate or identify educational
needs. The concept of educational needs is directly related to the practice
The Forms and Functions of Evaluation 173
age the individual development of each child, instructional materials, when por¬
traying people (or animals having identifiable human attributes), shall include a
fair representation of white and minority characters portrayed in a wide variety of
occupational and behavioral roles, and present the contributions of ethnic and
cultural groups, thereby reinforcing the self-esteem and potential of all people
and helping the members of minority groups to find their rightful place in our
society.0
feel, or believe, the first steps are laid for justifying the use of diverse modes
of presentation and response in the curriculum and classroom. To the ex¬
tent to which we value this diversity and try to nurture it, it becomes im¬
portant not only to construct, but also to evaluate materials with an eye to
these values.
The second major subject matter for evaluation is the quality of teaching
that is provided. Although some educational theorists make no distinction
between teaching and curriculum, I believe the distinction to be useful for
several reasons. First, one can and usually does plan curriculum prior to
using it in the classroom. Thus, curriculum development is a process, at
least during some of its stages, that occurs outside of the classroom.11
Second, and most important for the purposes of this chapter, the intellectual
significance of the curriculum can be appraised independently of how well
it is taught. A teacher might do a brilliant job of teaching, but the ideas or
skills being taught might be trivial, biased, or invalid. Conversely, a teacher
might be using a faultless curriculum with respect to its intellectual merit
and its appropriateness both developmentally and experientially for stu¬
dents, but that teacher might be teaching so poorly that only confusion and
frustration result for the students. The educational problem in each of these
cases is different, and without a distinction between curriculum and teach¬
ing I fear they will fail to emerge.
To evaluate the quality of teaching is, of course, easier to say than to do.
Efforts at identifying the qualities that make for effective teaching have
been many but for the most part have not proved very illuminating. The
approaches that have been taken to study and identify effective teaching
have been scientific in character. The need for quantification, for explana¬
tion, for replicability, and for generalization have often led to a highly
reductionistic approach to the study of teaching, one that attempts to locate
specific causal relationships. The assumption is that by identifying specific
causal units, eventually a holistic view of teaching will result. As yet this
has not happened.12 I will have more to say about the study of teaching
later, but I would like to say now that there are aspects of teaching that
can be evaluated by a sensitive student of classrooms: the type of relation¬
ships teachers establish with their classes, the clarity of their explanations,
the level of enthusiasm they display, the kinds of questions they raise. Al¬
though these specific qualities have not been demonstrated through quanti¬
tative empirical research to make for effectiveness, I believe that they are
relevant considerations in evaluating what teachers do when they teach.
In stating that I believe they are relevant for evaluating teachers even
though quantitative empirical research has not as yet demonstrated their
efficacy, we approach the hub of an epistemological issue in education.
What is true? What counts as evidence? It is clear that scientific evidence
about teaching or about most other aspects of educational practice is quite
limited. There is very little in the way of hard data that can be used to
180 The Educational Imagination
justify educational practices, and even the little there is requires a non-
scientific leap of faith because the sample from which the original conclu¬
sions were drawn is not likely to be identical to the population to whom the
conclusion is to be applied. Indeed, if educational practitioners had to base
their educational practices on hard data we would have to close our schools.
Yet, to assume that the only source of understanding is the laboratory is to
render oneself helpless. There is much—to provide a gross understate¬
ment—that is useful from seasoned experience and critical reflection on that
experience. The aspects of teaching that I have identified are only a few of
relevant dimensions that can be attended to and evaluated. Without eval¬
uating teaching as well as the curriculum, one is not in a position to know,
when there are difficulties, what their sources are.
The third major subject matter for evaluation and the one most charac¬
teristically attended to is the evaluation of student outcomes. The selection
of the term outcomes as opposed to objectives was not a casual one. Ob¬
jectives are intended goals; they are the destinations one hopes to arrive at
through the educational program. But roads taken do not always lead to the
destination one intends, and even when they do, much can be learned en
route. Thus, outcomes is a broader term than objectives. The achievement of
objectives can be included in the outcomes, but there is often much more to
include as well.
Figure 7 presents a simple trichotomy of the kinds of outcomes that might
be realized in a classroom. One segment of the circle deals with the out¬
comes that are subect specific; a second segment deals with outcomes that
are teacher specific, and a third segment refers to outcomes that are pupil
specific.
Subject-specific outcomes are directly related to the content that is taught.
Such outcomes can be, but are not necessarily, related to the objectives for
the course. There are several reasons why subject-specific outcomes need not
necessarily be related to course objectives. First, many courses in a field of
study have no articulated objectives yet are educationally effective. Second,
even when objectives are specified, outcomes may be realized that, al-
Figure 7
T eacher Subject
Specific Specific
Outcomes Outcomes
The Forms and Functions of Evaluation 181
though within the context of the subject studied, are not defined by the ob¬
jectives. To evaluate with respect to subject-specific outcomes means to
focus one’s evaluation on the learning of the subject matter of a course or
segment of the course. This is often done through the use of standardized
or teacher-made achievement tests. Generally, such assessment focuses on
outcomes within a subject that are common across students. A multiple-
choice test, for example, presents to a population of students a common set
of test items. Such items allow no scope for a personally constructed re¬
sponse; the alternatives are provided in the distractors from which the
student must select. Thus, what such a test reveals is determined by the
choices the test maker made during test construction. Hence, what one finds
out about student understanding when such tests are used is what has been
selected by the test constructor as being relevant. These are items sampled
from the universe of content that the course has provided. And because in
“objective” or multiple-choice tests little or no scope is provided for students
to demonstrate their understanding of aspects of the course or content not
sampled, those aspects simply fail to emerge for consideration.
Attention to what students learn about specific content within a course
has been a primary and traditional concern of achievement testing. To find
out what students have learned has almost always meant to find out what
about the content taught they have learned. Such a focus is useful for eval¬
uation, but it represents only one segment of a much more complex picture.
Students learn not only what was intended, they learn not only what is
related to the content of what has been studied, they also learn because of
the unique intellectual relationships they make between the content and
their other interests. They may be stimulated by the content of a course to
learn things that are only tangentially related to the content. These out¬
comes, outcomes that are ripe for educational evaluation, are student
specific.
If one raises the question “What has a student learned in my class or
course that is not about what I have been teaching?” one begins to move
into student-specific domains. And if one begins to develop procedures for
obtaining some understanding of such outcomes, one is engaged in a stu¬
dent-specific mode of evaluation. Obviously, so long as the options pre¬
sented to a student or group of students present no opportunity for die
display of what might be called personalized learning, such outcomes will
not be manifest. If we want to know what the personal spinoff is from the
content or courses we teach, the tasks or methods used for evaluation have
to be sufficiently open ended to allow such personalized learning to emerge.
Interviews, open-ended essays, and projects whose parameters provide op¬
portunities for students to reveal what personal meanings they have con¬
structed for themselves need to be made available. Such procedures will, of
course, not be focused on providing comparative data. They are focused on
the revelation of idiosyncratic outcomes.
182 The Educational Imagination
students say about those contributions? Do those who work with particular
teachers over extended periods of time display particular characteristics, in¬
terests, attitudes, or styles of inquiry that derive from characteristics of their
teachers? A comprehensive theory of educational evaluation would include
teacher-specific outcomes as at least one of three that warrant examination.
eating trends but neglect the unique occurrence. In short, if one considers
the range of ways through which people come to express and understand
and compares it with the range used for reporting the results of educational
evaluations, it becomes apparent that only a slender slice of educational life
is likely to be captured by the forms of reporting that are typically used.
To capture this richness and therefore to help the public understand and
appreciate the problems as well as the achievements of a classroom or
school requires the construction of an evaluational landscape. Such a pic¬
ture will probably employ a wide range of information secured from a
variety of sources and revealed through different types of reporting
procedures.
One of these procedures is likely to be what I referred to as educational
criticism.14 Such criticism would be aimed at helping parents, let us say,
understand what has happened during the course of a school year in a par¬
ticular school. What were the key events in the school? How did they
come into being? In what ways did students and teachers participate? What
consequences for the school did such events have? How could such events
be strengthened? What do such events enable children to learn?
What is Mrs. Jones’ classroom like? In what sorts of activities have the
children engaged? What does Mrs. Jones provide that is uniquely hers?
What is the character of the school day for children in her class? What are
children deriving from her class that is not likely to be revealed by stand¬
ardized testing? Questions such as these, if answered by a competent edu¬
cational critic, would give parents an understanding of the school and the
classroom that most at present do not have. Even parents who value educa¬
tion very highly have only the vaguest ideas about the kind of educational
experience provided by the school their children attend. In the first place,
report cards, if they are used, give no indication of the sorts of events I have
described. The major focus of report cards is on how “well” the child is
doing according to some criterion that itself is vague. And if the school is
one where parent-teacher conferences are held in lieu of formal report
cards, even then the discussion between parent and teacher is more likely
to focus on the student’s performance than on the program in which he or
she is participating.
Another vehicle for disclosing the richness of educational programs to
parents is through the use of film and videotape. One can capture on film
or tape aspects of educational life that give a vivid picture to parents and
others of what the school actually provides. The creation of such tapes and
films will of course demand skills that most evaluators do not at present
possess. Yet, the absence of such skills is no argument against developing
them. The use of film and videotape, even the use of still slides and photo¬
graphs, can be extremely informative if they have been taken with an
artistic, educationally informed eye. The task of making such visual ma¬
terials the sources of educational disclosure has scarcely been touched.
186 The Educational Imagination
There have been films made of schools, such as High School by Frederick
Wiseman, that are powerful statements about the quality of life in an urban
high school, and by extension in others. That film is extremely skillful in
portraying certain aspects of high school life, but its strength is at the same
time a source of its weakness. It exaggerates to make a point—it is a visual
polemic. It does not attempt to disclose the strengths of the school it por¬
trays, but instead accentuates its oppressive, mindless, military character.
Informed educational criticism and the informed educational use of video¬
tape and film would aim at a more circumspect view of educational life.
Supplemented by critical narrative, such visual materials considerably ex¬
pand the channels for communication.
The use of still photography is also potentially powerful in revealing as¬
pects of educational life that measured achievement and even artful criti¬
cism cannot capture. Paradigm cases of such visual renderings already exist,
perhaps the most notable being Alfred Stieglitz’s The Family of Man. Since
Stieglitz created that exhibition, numerous other portfolios of visual report¬
ing have appeared. What these portfolios offer us, and what they could
portray about the educational quality of life in schools, is a nondiscursive
mode of disclosure capable, when artistically created, of helping us
vicariously participate in the life that the school provides. At present, the
use of such vehicles as an explicit form of educational reporting is virtually
absent from the scene in American education. When it does occur, it is by
accident, connected to a student yearbook or newspaper but not as part of
formal resources the school uses to understand and report what it is doing.
Educational criticism and the use of videotape, cinematography and still
photography can be supplemented with still other types of information that
would provide a more comprehensive and adequate picture of school life.
One of these supplements is tape-recorded interviews of both students and
teachers that deal with their work and its aims, their satisfactions, the situa¬
tions and problems they encounter, their ideas about educational improve¬
ment, their aspirations in the school, the outcomes they value most and least,
and so forth. Taped interviews on cassettes could be produced and edited
in a way that would deal with ideas, beliefs, and feelings that seldom get
expressed on written questionnaires and are never possible to express on
achievement tests. The spontaneity of the interview, when it is conducted by
a skillful interviewer, one who knows both interview techniques and edu¬
cation theory and practice, could yield data that are present simply
unavailable.
It should be noted that listening to tape-recorded interviews may itself
require a type of connoisseurship that needs to be developed. What is said
and what is not said, how something is said, the tone of expression, and so
forth—all of the nonlinguistic cues that possess meaning—need to be pene¬
trated if what one says is to be fully appreciated. Nevertheless, all of us
have developed such skills to a considerable degree—they are survival
The Forms and Functions of Evaluation 187
skills—and even if they are not refined to an optimum level, we have learned
how to listen sufficiently well to get much out of what others say.
Additional information that could be used to construct an adequate eval¬
uation of a school or classroom would include an analysis of the work that
children produce. In typical evaluation procedures, examination scores,
grades received on essays, and ratings of projects undertaken and completed
are the data that are reported to parents about the progress their children
are making in school. When this is done, it is seldom clear whether, for
example, a grade of B on an essay refers to the quality of the essay in rela¬
tion to some external standard, whether it refers to the quality of the essay
relative to other essays produced by students in the class, whether it is
based on the efforts put forth by the student in writing the essay, whether
it represents the amount of growth the student has achieved since the be¬
ginning of the semester, or whether it is based on a combination of all of
these criteria. These procedures for grading are not the ones I am referring
to as an analysis of what children produce in school. The problem with such
procedures is that they provide conclusions rather than disclosures about
the character of the work done and the sorts of progress and problems
children encounter. To do the latter would require, first, close attention to
what a given child or class has created. If the work is an essay, one might
describe how a child has organized his essay, the quality of the arguments
or evidence he employs, the extent to which his imagination has been used
to create his work. These aspects of the work could be treated compara¬
tively with other work created by the child or the class and could be ac¬
companied by a critique that would help adults or children understand
what has been accomplished. If, for example, one wants to help a school
board or a group of parents understand that human development is uneven,
that children of the same age are at quite different places with respect to
skills or understanding, it would be useful to display the range of work—not
just the best work—that the children in class create. The display of only the
best conceals the range of differences and distorts the real educational pic¬
ture with which teachers must work. The visual display of such range when
critically described and analyzed would do much to make apparent to a
school board, for example, some of the realities of classroom performance.
The major point I am attempting to make here is that the problem of
communicating to some public—parents, school board members, students,
state agencies-about what has happened in schools, the problem of making
known what is strong and what is weak, what needs support and what does
not, can be usefully conceived as an artistic problem. It is a problem of
putting together an expressive, sensitive, and revealing picture of educa¬
tional practice and its consequences. The construction of such a picture can
exploit both the various modalities that people have always used to com¬
municate and also the new technology that can capture and hold even the
most evanescent happenings in classroom life.
188 The Educational Imagination
REFERENCES
1. The Republic, transl. by B. Jowett, The Modern Library, New York, n.d.
2. Michael Scriven, “The Methodology of Evaluation,” in AERA Monograph
,
Series on Curriculum Evaluation, No. 1 Rand McNally, Chicago, 1967.
3. Not all development processes start with aims and content. Curriculum activi¬
ties themselves can provide a starting point for aims.
4. This assumption is widely prevalent in England and on the continent, where
evaluation practices are designed to select the most able for the assignment
to different forms of secondary schools and for university admission.
5. This assumption is embedded in much of the material on evaluation sent to
school districts by state departments of education.
The Forms and Functions of Evaluation 189
It is the function of this chapter to identify and discuss some of the as¬
sumptions, principles, and procedures used in educational connoisseurship
and educational criticism. This form of educational inquiry, a species of
educational evaluation, is qualitative in character 1 and takes its lead from
the work that critics have done in literature, theater, film, music, and the
visual arts.
Interest in qualitative forms of research and evaluation have increased in
recent years, but little of the work that has been done has been related to the
fine arts. Most of those who have used qualitative approaches have re¬
lated their work to ethnography. Yet, there is no area of human inquiry
that epitomizes the qualitative more than what artists do when they work.
Thus, it seems to me that if we seek to know what qualitative inquiry con¬
sists of, we can do little better than analyze the work of those for whom it is
a necessary condition.
Artists inquire in a qualitative mode both in the formulation of ends and
in the use of means to achieve such ends.2 The result of their work is a
qualitative whole—a symphony, poem, painting, ballet—that has the capacity
to evoke in the intelligent percepient a kind of experience that leads us to
call the work art. My claim is that the paradigmatic use of qualitative in¬
quiry is found in the arts.
190
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 191
criticism is a term that is most frequently used in the arts, it also is used in
sports, in the assessment of research, in the appraisal of human behavior,
particularly in social settings, and in a host of other areas in which humans
have intercourse with the world. There is nothing, in principle, that cannot
be the object of criticism.
Although teaching is frequently referred to as an art, and although in our
vernacular we recognize the artistic aspects of educational practice—the
beautiful lesson, the exciting discussion, the well-made point, the elegant
exposition—when it comes to our attempts to describe or understand educa¬
tional practice, criticism is almost never appealed to as a possible method
or approach. The reason for the neglect of criticism as a potentially useful
vehicle for the description, interpretation, and evaluation of educational
practice is, I think, a result of the ways in which educators have been pro¬
fessionally socialized, particularly those holding doctorates and working in
universities.
Doctoral programs socialize students to believe that the most dependable
procedure one can use to obtain knowledge is through science and that
respectable inquiry in education, at least respectable empirical inquiry, is
scientific in character. To use other methods, to employ metaphor, analogy,
simile, or other poetic devices, is to lack rigor. Jeffreys tries to make the
point this way:
No matter what the subject matter, the fundamental principles of the method
must be the same. There must be a uniform standard for validity for all hypotheses,
irrespective of the subject. Different laws may hold in different subjects, but they
must be tested by the same criteria; otherwise we have no guarantee that our
decisions will be those warranted by the data and not merely the result of inade¬
quate analysis or of believing what we want to believe. ... If the rules [of induc¬
tion applied in scientific inquiry] are not general, we shall have different standards
of validity in different subjects, or different standards for one’s own hypotheses and
somebody else’s. If the rules of themselves say anything about the world, they will
make empirical statements independently of observational evidence, and thereby
limit the scope of what we can find out by observation. If there are such limits,
they must be inferred from observation; we must not assert them in advance.4
that the creation of educational criticism, a form of criticism not unlike that
found in the arts but directed to educational matters, could provide a kind
of utility that scientific studies and quantitatively treated phenomena
neglect. Indeed, I hope that one day we will have journals of educational
criticism and critical theory that will seek to refine the quality of educa¬
tional criticism and the methods and assumptions with which those doing
such criticism work.
the frequency with which one attends sports events is not necessarily an
indication of the level of connoisseurship someone has achieved. Let us
distinguish between recognition and perception, and let us agree with
Dewey that recognition is perception aborted: looking is engaged in simply
to be able to see enough to classify.5 That is an oak tree, the other is an
elm, that was a half-gainer, that was a full twist with a somersault, and so
forth. Perception based on recognition alone stops with assigning the par¬
ticular to the class to which it belongs; it does not proceed to the sensory
exploration of the ways in which this particular oak tree differs from other
oaks, it does not locate the specific characteristics of this elm, that half¬
gainer, this full twist with a somersault. Recognition is not exploratory, it is
focused on classification.
If one looks within a classroom primarily to recognize rather than to see,
the number of years one spends in a classroom will contribute little to the
development of connoisseurship. To develop connoisseurship one must have
a desire to perceive subtleties, to become a student of human behavior, to
focus one’s perception. Looking is a necessary condition, but looking is
essentially a task one undertakes; it is seeing that is an achievement.
It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of connoisseurship
in the creation of educational criticism. Connoisseurship provides the funda¬
mental core of realization that gives criticism its material. Because it is so
central to any understanding of practice, it is rather surprising that it has
received so little attention. We tend to take it for granted, or we seem to
believe that with the use of an observation schedule the problem of seeing
what goes on in classrooms is cared for. This is simply naive. What is sig¬
nificant in a social setting might have little to do with the incidence of a
particular activity or statement but a lot to do with a single act or state¬
ment or with the organizational structure of the classroom or with the
character of an assigned task or with the way in which a reward is given.
Observation schedules are tools that can guide one’s attention, but their
mechanical use can blind one to what is significant.
It may be that the neglect of connoisseurship is due to the fact that rela¬
tively few people doing educational research spend much time in class¬
rooms. The general tendency in educational research is to use instruments
that can be easily administered and scored and that are not susceptible to
confounding through bias or long-term exposure to the vicissitudes of class¬
room life. The rigorous experiment in education is “clean.” To achieve such
cleanliness, experiments in educational research tend to be brief. The modal
amount of time for educational experiments reported in two years of the
studies published in the American Educational Research Journal is less than
one hour. For fourteen experimental studies reported during this period, six
used a treatment period of less than one hour, three from one hour to one
day, three from one day to one week, and one for over one year. No time
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 195
was reported for one study. It is my view that such a conception of clean
experimentation in education is likely to lead to work that has little sig¬
nificance for educational practice.
The development of educational connoisseurship requires an ability not
only to perceive the subtle particulars of educational life but also to
recognize the way those particulars form a part of a structure within the class¬
room. Erickson’s discussion of the chess game is most apt.6 To understand a
chess game, one must do much more than measure or even describe in
qualitative terms the character of the physical movements made by each
player. One must be able to perceive the structure of the game within which
the physical movements take on social meaning. One must eventually be
able to conceptualize the rules that give structure to the enterprise and
define it as the game.
Similarly, the development of educational connoisseurship requires the
ability to perceive the “rules” through which educational life is lived. Such
a task is what Gilbert Ryle refers to as “thick description,” about which
more will be said later.7
The work that my students and I are doing at Stanford University is
aimed at the development of educational connoisseurship and the ability to
create useful educational criticism. Educational connoisseurship is to some
degree possessed by virtually everyone who has spent some time in schools
as a student or as a teacher, but it can be refined and developed. What is
involved in the development of educational connoisseurship is, first, the
opportunity to attend to happenings of educational life in a focused, sensi¬
tive, and conscious way. Second, it requires the opportunity to compare
such happenings, to discuss what one sees so that perceptions can be refined,
to identify events not previously perceived, and to integrate and appraise
what has been seen. This is being done at Stanford through the direct ob¬
servation of classrooms and through the careful viewing of videotapes of
classroom life. When students jointly view such tapes, the basis for descrip¬
tion and discussion is provided. Over time, descriptive language becomes
less mechanical, more incisive, increasingly literary or poetic as students try
to get at the essence of what is occurring. To talk about essences and sig¬
nificance in the observation of educational events requires, of course, not
only a sensitivity to the emerging qualities of classroom life, but also a set of
ideas, theories, or models that enable one to distinguish the significant
from the trivial and to place what one sees in an intelligible context. This
process is not serial: we do not see and then assess significance; the very
ideas that define educational virtue for us operate within the perceptual
processes to locate among thousands of possibilities what we choose to see.
The essence of perception is that it is selective; there is no value-free mode
of seeing.
Given the impact of our theories on our perception, the development of
196 The Educational Imagination
In spite of the fact that all of them [theoreticians] fail to accomplish what they
set out to do—to give a true definition of works of art—these definitions are never¬
theless helpful and well worth intensive study. For behind every one is a redefini¬
tion of “work of art”; i.e., an attempt to get us to concentrate on certain criteria or
properties of works of art as against others. If we attend to these criteria or
properties and forget the unsuccessful attempts as true, essentialist definitions, we
can learn a great deal from the theories, especially as to what we should look for
in works of art and how we should look at them. Indeed, the great contribution of
theories of works of art is precisely in their teachings, not in their definitions, of
art: each of the theories represents a set of explorable criteria which serve to
remind us of what we may have neglected or to make us see what we may not
have seen. To do this, I should think, is the primary job of teaching. Here, then,
is the relation between teaching and the nature of art or, to use the title of your
conference, the nature of art and its implication for teaching: that the great
theorists of the nature of art have served as the great teachers as well, in telling
us, through their definitions of art, what we are to learn from them about the arts.8
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseurship 197
on his or her purposes as well as the kinds of maps, models, and theories
being used.
Of particular importance in understanding how critical language is il¬
luminative is the distinction between discursive and nondiscursive forms of
knowledge and that between representational and presentational symbols.
The conception of nondiscursive modes of knowing is not a new distinc¬
tion among those schooled in philosophy, but it is new to those raised in
the traditions pervading American educational research and its offspring,
educational evaluation. American educational research has, since the early
work of E. L. Thorndike, been largely behavioristic in its psychology and
operationalist in its philosophy. To “know” has meant to make statements
couched in the form of propositions and that therefore can be apparaised by
logical criteria. But because logic is essentially a tool for determining con¬
sistency between propositions, something more is needed if relationships be¬
tween propositions are to be more than merely consistent. If propositions
are to make true statements about the world, referents for those statements
have to be located in the world. And because in empirical matters observa¬
tion is subject to biases of one sort or another—biases in perception, in selec¬
tion of population, and the like—observations need to be operationalized
through standardized procedures that are reliable and quantitative and
therefore supposedly least likely to suffer from unreliability and sub¬
jectivity. For generations, this conception of the meaning of knowledge has
dominated inquiry into educational matters. Indeed, to do educational re¬
search has come to mean, by custom, to engage in inquiry having these
characteristics. The idea that there are multiple ways in which things are
known—that there is a variety of expressive modalities through which
what is known can be disclosed-simply has been absent from the con¬
versations that animate the educational research community.
A distinction between the respective contributions of the sciences and
the arts to human understanding is made by Ernest Cassirer in An Essay on
Man. Cassirer points out that a scientific perspective without an artistic one
or an artistic perspective without a scientific one leads to monocular vision;
both are necessary to have depth perception. Science, writes Cassirer,
focuses on what is general and common across particulars, whereas art
focuses on the unique characteristics of the particulars themselves.
The two views of truth are in contrast with one another, but not in conflict or
contradiction. Since art and science move in entirely different planes they cannot
contradict or thwart one another. The conceptual interpretation of science does not
preclude the intuitive interpretation of art. Each has its own perspective and, so
to speak, its own angle of refraction. The psychology of sense perception has
taught us that without the use of both eyes, with a binocular vision, there would
be no awareness of the third dimension of space. The depth of human experience
in the same sense depends on the fact that we are able to vary our modes of
seeing, that we can alternate our views of reality. Rerum videre formas is no less
important and indispensable task than rerum cognoscere causas. In ordinary ex-
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseurship 199
Yet even the discursive pattern has its limits of usefulness. An expressive form
can express any complex of conceptions that, via some rule of projection, appears
congruent with it, that is, appears to be of that form. Whatever there is in ex¬
perience that will not take the impress—directly or indirectly—of discursive form,
is not discursively communicable or, in the strictest sense, logically thinkable. It is
unspeakable, ineffable; according to practically all serious philosophical theories
today, it is unknowable.11
Discursive language, the type used in science and in much of our or¬
dinary speech, is our most powerful tool for classification, but when par¬
ticular qualities of life must be revealed we have to appeal to a language
more intimate, or, in Langer’s terms, a language that presents to our con¬
sciousness what the feeling of those qualities is. Literature, is, of couise, a
prime example of the nondiseursive use of language. So is poetry. What
enables us to empathetically participate in the events, lives, and situations
that the writer portrays is not mere factual description. If this were the
case, everyone who could describe the facts would be a Doestoevsky, a
Shakespeare, or a Bellow. What gives literature its power is the way in
which language has been formed by the writer. It is the shape of language
as well as the perceptive recognition of the metaphorical, connotative, and
symbolic character of particular words and phrases that makes written
language literature. What the writer is able to do, as is the painter, com¬
poser, dancer, or critic, is to transform knowledge held in one mode into
another, namely the mode within which the artist or critic works. Some¬
how the artist finds or creates the structural expressive equivalent of an
idea, a feeling, or an image within the material with which he or she works.
200 The Educational Imagination
that deal with what individuals experience in various situations, has been a
major focus of artists through the centuries. Let’s assume for a moment that
we wanted to know something about life in, say, a concentration camp.
How would we find out? We could try to locate psychological and socio¬
logical studies of the inmates gpd of the organization of such camps, and if
we could find such studies we might learn something about how new in¬
mates were socialized, how they adapted to the conditions of the camp. We
might learn something about social mobility, stratification, and class, about
the various roles assumed, and about achieved and assigned status. We
might learn about the use of sanctions and about the destruction of the ego.
Such knowledge is, of course, useful. Based as it would be on concepts and
theories within the social sciences, it would describe, through the concepts
the theories employ, the various features of camp life and how they
function.
But let us say we wanted to know what it was like to be taken to such a
camp, to go through the initial screening, to work fourteen hours a day in
bitter cold, to have a wretched diet. To know these aspects of life in a con¬
centration camp, one must go to the forms of expression that convey the
qualities of such life to the reader. One could do little better than to read
Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.13 Through literature
and through effective criticism we come to know what it feels like to be in
prison, to be in ecstacy, to be in a particular classroom in a particular
school. Through the arts we have the opportunity to participate vicaiiously
in the lives of others, to acquire an empathetic understanding of situations,
and therefore to know them in ways that only the arts can reveal.
If I dwell on these matters, it is because I believe they are crucial for
understanding why educational criticism is such an important complement
to the existing modes of inquiry in education.
The language of criticism, like the language of the arts, is essentially non-
discursive; that is, it informs not by pointing to the facts of the world but
rather by intimation, by using forms to present rather than to represent
conception or feeling. Representational symbols, the type used in conven¬
tional discourse, are like signposts, they point one towaid qualities but aie
not themselves intended to possess expressive qualities. “Listen, listen to the
bird” is a literal discursive expression, but “Hark! hark! the lark! contains
an energy absent in the former. The former is representational, it diiects
our attention so that a certain kind of experience can be had. The latter
presents us with a form that itself generates the excitement of the ex¬
perience. The former is a conventional utterance, the latter is poetic.
Thus far I have tried to identify the functions of qualitative inquiry in
education and to distinguish between educational connoisseurship and edu¬
cational criticism. Before describing in greater detail the major dimensions
of educational criticism, it will be useful to examine a brief segment of art
criticism written by the distinguished American critic Leo Steinberg. From
202 The Educational Imagination
it, we can get a better sense of what one critic does in the course of one of
his criticisms.
cues (which come later in the criticism), but also by the ambience in his
language.
Steinberg then describes the “vacant geometry” of Brach’s work, “depleted
voids, voided containers,” “huge suspended circles” that “look like ex¬
tinguished suns.” He then stops the paragraph as he began it, with a terse
nonsentence: “Empty icons.”
Again the illusion of Steinberg’s language has its parallel in the works to
which the language refers, not as an attempt to translate their visual quali¬
ties but rather, as Kozloff has suggested in his own writing, “to render the
works. Criticism works by implication, “the most appropriate devices at my
disposal have been innuendo, nuance, and hypothesis, because what is
peripheral to direct statement in language is often central to a pictorial en¬
counter or its meaning.” Steinberg would surely agree.
Steinberg continues in his criticism of Paul Brach’s pictures to combine
nuance and innuendo with more literal references to the qualities of the
work, but always the tempo of the writing epitomizes the suspense and
mystery of the work itself. Steinberg ends the criticism as be began, tersely
and though it were suspended in space. His last paragraph reads, They are
beautiful pictures, solitary and serious.”
It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the
sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my
back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy
sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split
second across the current and flash! the sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t
watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision
just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking
over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I
noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet
on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed
towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles
roll up, roll up, like the world’s turning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear
flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of
time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I
berathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the
creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was fleshlike, feather,
bone.15
What the author has succeeded in doing is to enable the reader to par¬
ticipate vicariously in the auditory and visual qualities of the layered web
of life at the creek. Such writing is in no sense a catalogue of the number
of trout, jays, or oak trees that populate the region, it is not a chronicle of
happenings, it is the artistic reconstruction of events that may be more
vividly experienced through that distillation called a work of art than in
direct contact with the creek. This point is an important one, and one that is
frequently overlooked. The artist, like the educational critic, does not write
about everything that exists in a situation but rather about what he or she
brackets, what he or she chooses to attend to. This bracketing of percep¬
tion and its incisive rendering in an expressive medium allow the percipient
of the artist’s or critic’s work to see, in part, through the bracket what the
artist has created. Many have walked through places like Tinker Creek, but
few have seen them with the clarity and sensibility of Annie Dillard.
The perception of both the pervasive qualities—those qualities charac-
terizing a situation or object such as the upward thrust of gothic interiors,
the scintillation of light in a Monet landscape, the vacuous mechanical
regularity of an assembly line-and component qualities-those particular
qualities within a whole, such as the tonal passages in the second movement
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseurship 205
There are many ways of describing what happens in a social event other than
in functionally relevant terms. We could, for example, describe the playing of
chess in terms of movement in millimeters forward, backward and sideways on a
plane. The behavior of chess pieces on the board could be coded by observers
this way with high inter-coder reliability, and the resulting data could be manipu¬
lated statistically. Yet such description and analysis would by itself tell us nothing
about what was going on in terms of the game of chess. The descriptive categories
would have no relevance to the game being played. For that we need descriptive
categories with functional relevance for the game—checkmate, defense—terms that
are meaningful in terms of an understanding (working theory) of the game as a
whole.16
do not do well in one mode do well in the other. It might be that the kinds
of intellectual processes that nondiscursive forms of conceptions and ex¬
pression require are possessed to different degrees by different students.
Present work in the study of the hemispheric specialization of the brain
might be relevant to such an explanation. As mentioned earlier, it has long
been known that the left hemisphere is the seat of speech, and in the last
fifteen years neurophysiologists have determined that the right hemisphere
plays a distinctively important role in dealing with nonlinear, nondigital,
nonconventional forms of conception and expression. Gabrielle Rico dis¬
tinguishes between the functions of the hemispheres this way:
Perhaps those students who are best able to work in a critical mode are
those whose strongest aptitudes are located in the right hemisphere. At
present, the case cannot be demonstrated, yet it is striking that some stu¬
dents take to educational criticism with a sense of ease and competence that
seems to fit almost naturally the way in which they encounter the world.
Indeed, one student told me that until he encountered the notion of educa¬
tional criticism and the possibility of doing it within the School of Educa¬
tion at Stanford, he was living two lives. One was the life he led outside
Stanford, which was responsive to the arts, to the poetic and romantic as¬
pects of experience, and the other he encountered at Stanford, which
presented a different view of reality and required that he substitute Stan¬
ford’s reality for his own. He now finds he can draw on his sensibilities and
on the modes of thinking with which he is most comfortable for doing his
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 207
Although there is no sharp and clear line to be drawn between the des¬
criptive and the interpretive, there is a difference in emphasis and focus.
The interpretive aspect of criticism asks: What does the situation mean to
those involved? How does this classroom operate? What ideas, concepts, or
theories can be used to explain its major features?
In the interpretive aspect of criticism, ideas from the social sciences most
frequently come into play. These ideas form the conceptual maps that en¬
able the educational critic to account for the events that have occurred and
to predict some of their consequences. For example, let’s assume that some¬
one functioning as an educational critic observes a classroom in which the
use of contracts is pervasive. What we have are children of eight or nine
years of age signing written agreements with teachers to plan and monitor
their assignments in school. The use of such contracts creates a particular
level of involvement in the classroom that the critic characterizes with sen¬
sitivity and vividness. But what do these contracts mean to the students and
to the teacher? And what are their long-term effects? What kinds of con¬
comitant learning are the children experiencing? What type of social rela¬
tions do contracts create, and how do contracts, when they are ubiquitous
in a classroom, affect a child’s conceptions of purpose in school?
To answer these questions, one can refer to a host of theoretical ideas
within the social sciences to explain the ancillary consequences of con¬
tractual relations in face-to-face groups. One can refer to reinforcement
theory to explain why contracts might increase dependency rather au¬
tonomy. One can use cognitive field theory to deal with the importance of
ambiguity in learning and the effects of contracts on the student’s ability to
tolerate ambiguity. The point here is not that there is one theory to be
used to interpret the meaning of events within classrooms, but that there is
a variety of theories. No one is interested in the facts by themselves but
rather in the facts interpreted. What theory provides is not single-minded,
certain conclusions regarding the meanings secured in school but rather
frameworks that one can use to gain alternative explanation for those events.
If theories in the social sciences can be regarded as games consisting of
rules or structures one lays upon a field of phenomena for purposes of
making some sense of the phenomena, the interpretive mode of criticism
can be regarded as the application of those games in whatever numbers
appear to be useful for getting on with the business of education.
To be able to apply a variety of theories from the social sciences to the
208 The Educational Imagination
events occurring within schools and classroom is no simple task. First, one
must know the theories that are to be applied. Second, one must be in a
position to determine that this particular instance or situation is one for
which a particular theory is appropriate. In legal theory, the process of
recognizing that a particular case falls within the province of a law is
called casuistry. And casuistry is a complex art that melds both theoretical
knowledge and practical wisdom. No less is called for in seeing the con¬
nection between, say, Maslow’s stages of human development and the kinds
of social situations created in classrooms. In the education of teachers and
educational researchers, practice in making such applications has been rare.
We seldom use films or videotapes of classrooms, for example, in the educa¬
tion of doctoral students, despite all of our talk about the importance of
“multimedia.” We do not typically use case material as is used in schools of
law, social work, and schools of business to which theory in the social
sciences could be applied. We operate as if the ability to apply the theoreti¬
cal ideas one learns in university classrooms is automatic, that no practice
is necessary, that such skills take care of themselves. I wonder on what
theories such beliefs are based.
The role of interpretation in criticism is related to the concept of “thick
description” as used by Clifford Geertz in anthropology:
Ryle’s discussion of “thick description” appears in two recent essays of his (now
reprinted in the second volume of his Collected Papers) addressed to the general
question of what, as he puts it, “Le Penseur” is doing: “Thinking and Reflecting”
and “The Thinking of Thoughts.” Consider, he says, two boys rapidly contracting
the eyelids of their right eyes. In one, this is an involuntary twitch; in the other, a
conspiratorial signal to a friend. The two movements are, as movements, identi¬
cal; from an I-am-a-camera, “phenomenalistic” observation of them alone, one
could not tell which was twitch and which was wink, or indeed whether both or
either was twitch or wink. Yet the difference, however unphotographable, between
a twitch and a wink is vast; as anyone unfortunate enough to have had the first
taken for the second knows. The winker is communicating, and indeed communicat¬
ing in a quite precise and special way: (1) deliberately, (2) to someone in particu¬
lar, (3) to impart a particular message, (4) according to a socially established
code, and (5) without cognizance of the rest of the company. As Ryle points out,
the winker has not done two things, contracted his eyelids and winked, while the
twitcher has done only one, contracted his eyelids. Contracting your eyelids on
purpose when there exists a public code in which so doing counts as a conspira¬
torial signal is winking. That’s all there is to it: a speck of behavior, a fleck of
culture—and voila!—a gesture.18
The grounding of such values not only requires knowledge of the history
and philosophy of education, it also benefits from practical experience in
the schools. Many things the pedagogically uninitiated might be quick to
criticize negatively would give an experienced teacher pause. Teaching
tactics that might appear inappropriate to someone fresh out of a graduate
school of education and untouched by the trials and tribulations of class¬
room life might be viewed with greater sympathy by one who has taught.
One of the first things that the teachers whose classrooms have been the
subject of educational criticism want to know is whether the critic has ever
taught. Some things can be known only by having acted. Teaching, like
swimming, is one of them.
One of the questions that often arises when the evaluative aspects of edu¬
cational criticism are discussed is whether the critic should make his or her
values known in advance. Should one’s educational values be laid out—up
front, so to speak? To this question I have a mixed response. On the one
hand, it might be useful in preparing an educational criticism to describe
the kinds of values that the critic holds so that readers can understand
where the critic is “coming from.” A manifesto of one’s educational position
insofar as it is describable could, in principle, be provided as a critical
prologue to educational criticism. On the other hand, the values one holds
permeate the writing one does, just as they permeate the conversations
people have about value-saturated issues. After a while those values, even
when not explicit, become clear, and after several contacts with a critic’s
work a prologue might seem redundant. Those who read William F.
Buckley, James Kilpatrick, or John Kenneth Galbraith know where these
men stand on political and economic matters. I suspect that the same will
hold true in reading educational criticism. Indeed, the issue is not whether
such values are present but rather whether they should precede the writing
of the actual criticism. At this stage in the development of educational criti¬
cism as a species of educational evaluation, it appears to me reasonable to
have it both ways.
The fact that two critics might disagree on the value they assign to a
common set of educational events is not necessarily a liability in educational
evaluation; it could be a strength. For much too long, educational events
have been assessed as though there were only one set of values to be as¬
signed to such events. The drop in test scores is perceived as a problem,
the increase in grade-point average is believed to be a problem, but little
or no analysis or few countervailing views are offered. Thus, through a lack
of professional leadership, the public takes our lack of analysis and debate
on the meaning and significance of such events as tacit assurance that they
are indeed indicators of poor-quality schooling. One of the virtues of dif¬
ferences among educational critics with respect to the meaning and signifi¬
cance of educational events is that they could open up the kind of discus¬
sion that educational practice should but does not now receive. Virtually
The F 011ns and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 211
is to look for; they prescribe to a very high degree what counts and what is
to be counted. A qualitative approach to classroom observation is more
open ended and flexible; the investigator or critic, rather than the pre¬
structured schedule, is the major instrument through which observations are
made.
In distinguishing between qualitative and quantitative approaches to
education, I am in no way attempting to argue that one approach is always
superior to the other. One approach is superior to the other, but only with
respect to the nature of the problem one chooses to investigate. Quantita¬
tive methods have clear-cut virtues for some types of questions for which
qualitative approaches would prove to be weak and inappropriate. And
vice versa. It is this judgment—when and for what purposes each mode of
inquiry is appropriate—that poses the toughest intellectual task in laying
out a strategy for the investigation of educational problems. It is precisely
around such judgments that disagreement is the greatest, because the tools
investigators are skilled in using also serve to determine the parameters of
their perception and thus how they define the problem itself.
RELIABILITY, VALIDITY,
GENERALIZATION, AND OTHER MATTERS
OF INFERENCE
One of the central reasons given for scientific inquiry is that such inquiry
makes it possible not only to secure warrant for belief, but also to establish
empirical generalizations. Such generalizations, a product of drawing in¬
ferences from a sample, help one anticipate the future. Description, ex¬
planation, and prediction are the trinity that scientific inquiry makes
possible.
But what of qualitative forms of inquiry that do not employ a scientific
model? Can such forms of inquiry yield generalizations? To what extent
are the claims they make valid? How is reliability determined? How can we
know if educational criticism can be trusted?
The conceptual tools, the statistical procedures, and the research designs
available for testing the inferences, reliability, and validity of conclusions
in the social sciences are of long standing and highly elaborate. Donald
Campbell and Julian Stanley’s classic monograph -° on experimental and
quasiexperimental design is an example of existing canons for the conduct
of scientific inquiry in education. Distinctions between type I and type II
errors, between internal and external validity, between random selection
and random assignment, between experimental and quasiexperimental de¬
signs, among construct, content, predictive, and concurrent validity, be¬
tween stability and reliability, these are some of the technical terms that
have been created to make scientific inquiry into human affairs more
214 The Educational Imagination
rigorous. Does inquiry in the qualitative arena have similar tools? If so,
what are they?
Let’s examine first the question that is most frequently raised concerning
qualitative inquiry in general and educational criticism in particular: Is it
objective? Perhaps the first response that should be raised is another ques¬
tion: What is meant by “objective”? Does objective mean that one has
discovered reality in its raw, unadulterated form? If so, this conception of
objectivity is naive. All of us construct our conception of reality by inter¬
acting with the environment. What we take to be true is a product not
only of the so-called objective conditions of the environment, but also of
how we construe that environment. And that construction is influenced by
our previous experience, including our expectations, our existing beliefs,
and the conceptual tools through which the objective conditions are defined.
To hold that our conceptions of reality are true or objective to the extent
that they are isomorphic with reality is to embrace a hopeless correspon¬
dence theory of truth—hopeless because to know that our conceptions cor¬
respond or deviate from reality would require that we have two conceptions
operating. One is an unmediated view of reality, the other our conception of
that reality. Only in this way would we know anything about correspon¬
dence. If we knew the former, however, we would not need the latter.
What so-called objectivity means is that we believe in what we believe
and that others share our beliefs as well. This process is called consensual
validation. It operated as powerfully in once held beliefs in the existence of
phlogiston, ether, and a geocentric universe as it does in the religious con¬
victions held by the religiously orthodox. Although a scientifically oriented
individual might object and say that scientific beliefs are testable and
religious beliefs are not and that the differences therefore are crucial, the
religiously orthodox would counter by pointing out that scientific criteria do
not exhaust the means through which beliefs can be held to be true. In¬
deed, they would argue—correctly, I believe—that scientists themselves hold
beliefs, even within science, that cannot be warranted by scientific methods.
In the social sciences, this most clearly is the case. The differences in basic
assumptions among Freudians, Rogerians, Skinnereans, Heiderians, Erik-
sonians, Piagetians, and the like are not resolvable through science. The
fundamental theoretical structures through which each defines psychologi¬
cal reality differ, and there is no critical test that will resolve the truth or
falsity of their respective belief systems. Each has a community of believers
who reaffirm the beliefs of those working within the system.
My point here is simply this: objectivity is a function of intersubjective
agreement among a community of believers. What we can productively ask
of a set of ideas is not whether it is really true but whether it is useful,
whether it allows one to do one’s work more effectively, whether it enables
one to perceive the phenomenon in more complex and subtle ways, whether
if expands one’s intelligence in dealing with important problems.
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 215
Given this view, what can we say about the means through which educa¬
tional criticism receives consensual validation? Two processes are important
here. One is called structural corroboration and the other referential
adequacy.
Structural Corroboration
cism, but it is a ubiquitous part of our daily lives. We all use such processes
to make judgments about people, to determine whether they are fake or
authentic in their relations with us, to understand their limits so that we
can effectively relate to them and to cope with the situations in which we
find ourselves. We use this process to negotiate the environment. It is a far
more characteristic way of dealing with the world than conducting a con¬
trolled experiment. In the flux of events and in encountering new situa¬
tions—a new classroom, for example—we try to read its code, to find evidence
for our impressions, to structurally corroborate our initial observations so
that our expectations for that situation are appropriate.
Referential Adequacy
know the thing itself in its comprehensive form to know whether our view
of it was comprehensive. Again, if we knew the former, we would not need
the latter. Yet, criticism might lead us to neglect certain aspects of the
situation, but that is true of any theory, set of cues, or road map. Take as an
example the services of a good travel agent.23 He or she provides the client
with information about what can be seen, but that does not foreclose the
possibility of seeing other things as well. In the process of providing such
guides, the travel agent readies us for sites and sights that we might other¬
wise overlook if left to our own devices. When the terrain is new or com¬
plex, guideposts help. Effective criticism provides such guideposts.
It is frequently pointed out that critics disagree on the characteristics and
merits of the events and objects to which they attend. This claim is in some
respect exaggerated. Critics in general achieve a high degree of consensus
on objects or situations that have a reasonable amount of variation in
quality. When critics do disagree, it is usually because the objects or events
constituting the group to be judged present to critics a narrow range of
unusually high-quality work.
But even when this occurs, the issue of differences among critics with
respect to, say, the characteristics of classroom life is not crucial. In standard
statistical procedures, interjudge agreement is critical. Low levels of inter¬
judge agreement make a study invalid. What one usually does to ensuie
such agreement is to simplify the phenomena to be counted and to exten¬
sively train the judges. If judges are asked to count the incidence of, say,
negative verbal statements given by the teacher, the probability of achiev¬
ing high interjudge agreement is good. The tendency to focus on what can
easily be counted is used as a way of achieving high interjudge agreement,
even when what is easily counted might be of marginal educational
importance.
The need for unanimity among critics is not characteristic of criticism,
because it is recognized that complex phenomena—works of literatuie,
painting, film, and the like—have several layers of meaning and that the
greatest works seem inexhaustible in the meanings one can secuie fiom
them. What is sought is not the creation of one final definitive criticism of
a work; rather, the goal is to have our perception and understanding ex¬
panded by the criticism we read. Classrooms and schools are at least as
multilayered as works of art, and we should seek, therefoie, not a single
definitive criticism but rather criticism that is useful. Indeed, we should
anticipate that critics with different educational orientations and interests
will find in situations as phenomenologically dense as classrooms different
things to describe, interpret, and evaluate. The cultivation of such produc¬
tive diversity is a virtue, not a vice. As in education itself, we do not
seek to create an army marching in step to the same tune but indi\ iduals
who follow their own drummer as long as the beat is inteiesting.
The specter of having to consider for purposes of educational evaluation
218 The Educational Imagination
child not only learns those things but also learns that he or she can learn
even more. This process is not unlike what John M. Stephens refers to as
“spontaneous schooling.” 24 If you teach children half of the names of the
state capitals of the United States, it won’t be long before they know most
of the other half.
The point here is that skills generalize. Their use becomes more flexible
and sophisticated. As educational criticism contributes to the development
of connoisseurship, the generalization of skills occurs. Indeed, that is what is
meant by connoisseurship. It is not the ability to appreciate a single object
or event but the ability to appreciate a range of objects or events within a
particular class or set of classes. No one is regarded as a connoisseur if only
one particular object can be appreciated. What generalizes, therefore, in the
case I have just described is a process rather than a proposition. This
process we refer to as connoisseurship.
The other type of generalization that is fostered by educational criticism
is in the acquisition of new forms of anticipation. Educational criticism il¬
luminates particulars, but it is through particulars that concepts and gen¬
eralizations are formed that are then applied to new situations. What edu¬
cational criticism does is to help us appreciate the uniqueness of a set of
circumstances; but this uniqueness can be appreciated only if we consider
it against a backdrop of other instances and circumstances. For example, to
recognize the distinctive or unique quality of mind displayed by a par¬
ticular student we must be able to recognize the ways in which that dis¬
tinctiveness manifests itself. To do this, some conception of typicality is
required. Once having recognized distinctiveness, we are in a position to
look for it in subsequent situations. Thus criticism creates forms of an¬
ticipation by functioning as a kind of road map for the future. Once having
found that such and such exists in a classroom, we learn to anticipate it in
other classrooms that we visit. Through our experience we build up a
repertoire of anticipatory images that makes our search patterns more
efficient.
The potential liability of such a repertoire is that classification and
recognition abort perception. We may overlook what is unique by the
precocious application of preconceptions. To avoid this, what we seek is a
balance between the inclination toward perceptual exploration and the use
of a repertoire of expectations that makes exploration fruitful. Kant put it
well when he said, “Concepts without percepts are empty, and percepts
without concepts are blind.”
The kinds of generalizations that criticism yields are much more like those
created during the course of ordinary life than those produced through con¬
trolled scientific inquiry. In the first place, no one ordinarily sets up the
conditions for producing generalizations by randomly selecting objects or
events and then randomly assigning them to some treatment. This is not to
say that such procedures are not useful. It is to say that we do not negotiate
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 221
the world in that way, and yet all of ns form generalizations. The central
question deals with the dependability of the generalizations we form. As a
basis for dealing with complex problems of practical decision making,
ordinary experience is far more effective than the attempt to design scientific
procedures for creating generalizations from situations whose characteristics
might no longer be the same after the scientific work has been completed.
The point I wish to argue here, however, is not primarily about the virtues
and vices of the practical and the theoretical; rather, I wish to argue that
useful generalizations are made from particulars all the time. Criticism is
one of the means through which the particular situation can be more effec¬
tively experienced and from which useful generalizations can be drawn.
Lacking any central focus other than the general subject-matter, the text de¬
velops meanings primarily through the images it creates. These general impressions
are perhaps the strongest messages conveyed by the materials. There are several
of these, some created by the visual qualities of the text and some by the written
content itself. The first and strongest is the image of the city as a clean, well-
scrubbed, nicely lighted world. It is an image created entirely through the illustra¬
tions. The cheerful colors, the comic-book flavor of fantasy in the drawings, the
rich photographic tones, and the wholesome scenes which these portray—all con¬
tribute to a feeling of good cheer. Most (though not all) of the few pictures of
urban grime manage to look clean and tonally rich, and the factory in the drawing
of air and water pollution is quite likeable—the gray, thick and bulbous smoke
puffing from the smokestack looks friendly as the smoke of The Little Engine That
Could.25
What is curious is that all of us living in the United States in the latter
half of the twentieth century know firsthand how design, packaging tech¬
niques, forms of advertising, and types of emphasis given to certain products
influence our own behavior and attitudes. The advertising industry is built
on the fact that the forms used to market a product have an enormous in¬
fluence on its success. Exposure, although important for a product, is not
enough; the way in which that exposure occurs is important and the charac¬
teristics of the qualities that constitute the advertisement are critical. Yet
these considerations have, until quite recently, never been applied by edu¬
cators to textbooks, or, as far as I know, to other instructional tools. The
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseurship 223
recent exceptions, of course, are in the areas of race and sex stereotyping.
But there is considerably more that can be attended to in order to discover
the covert messages of the materials that children use in schools. These, too,
are proper subjects for educational criticism.
Take, as an example, the kinds of images used in illustrations for texts.
What sort of men and women are portrayed? What kinds of settings do
they work in? What type of emphasis do they receive? How much white
space, how much color, what kinds of layouts are used to give emphasis to
various aspects of the book? The use of such qualities might seen trivial,
but they play on and with the images we hold of people, places, and ideas.
The portrait of George Washington on a dollar bill and his heroic image at
the bow of a small boat crossing the Delaware amid ice and threatening
sky, surrounded by his weary but loyal soldiers, have created an indelible
image in the minds of many Americans. Such images influence the ideas
we hold, and as such they should warrant our professional attention; yet,
educators have given these matters little conscious attention.
Consider as still another example of the objects that ought to receive
critical attention the school buildings that we design for students and the
furniture we use to fill them.
Buildings represent our ideals about the ways we want to live. State
capitals throughout the nation hark back to Greek architecture to express
the ideals of government—justice, stability, and historical presence—that
citizens believe are conveyed by domes, columns, and white marble. Fac¬
tories are most often designed with a no-nonsense quality about them. They
present an image of work; surfaces are hard, right angles predominate, little
is done to refine, embellish, or soften the forms within which people spend
a major portion of their waking hours. The factory building expresses what
it is, a place of work. Consider bank buildings as another example; although
there are exceptions, of course, bank buildings tend to look like the Rock of
Gibraltar, having massive shapes and often Greek columns so that they, too,
can reap the benefit of association with the past. People who bank their
money want a place that looks solid; a fly-by-night image will not do.
And what of schools? What image do schools present to children and
parents and the teachers who work there?
School architecture has come a long way since the days when many urban
elementary and secondary schools were built, during the 1910s and 1920s.
The best of contemporary school architecture is as congenial to the senses
as almost anything else that has been built. However, most school buildings,
particularly those in cities, are characterized by long vacant halls with nests
of well-insulated rooms opening onto them. The rooms are usually identical:
strong, rectangular boxes, drab in color and not given to amenities. The
rooms speak of functionality but do not address themselves to the aesthetic
needs of either students or teachers. They are not places in which one would
choose to spend a lot of time.
224 The Educational Imagination
What do such places say to students? What values do they convey? How
do they affect the student’s image of the school itself and the experience of
schooling? These questions, too, are appropriate ones for educational
criticism.
And what of the furniture used in schools? Why the ubiquitous use of
formica? Where in the school can one find a soft surface? Where can one
encounter a cozy place, somewhere where it is quiet? Where can a student
create a place of his or her own? Is a desk large enough for such a purpose?
When in the 1920s the German Bauhaus gave us machine-made furni¬
ture that exploited the aesthetic as well as functional possibilities of steel,
glass, chrome, and plywood, the concern for proportion, detail, finish, and
comfort was critical. The modern furniture of that era was so classic in its
proportions and style that it is still being sold. What is used in most school¬
rooms today is furniture that is neither comfortable nor aesthetically satis¬
fying. What passes for modern furniture is too often so unattractive that we
learn how to avoid looking at it. Instead of using the environment of the
classroom as a source of psychological nourishment, we try to shut it out of
our consciousness. The same environmental qualities exist in most college
classrooms. The critic of education who can help us to see what we have
learned to shut out may be helping us acquire the kind of critical con¬
sciousness that is necessary for bringing about change.
Finally, it is appropriate to direct our attention to the works and per¬
formances of the student as proper objects of educational criticism. One of
the characteristics of standardized testing is that it describes student per¬
formance on a common scale. On norm-referenced tests students are dif¬
ferentiated from one another on a common scale of test items and on cri¬
terion-referenced tests in relation to their ability to perform at criterion
level. In either case, a set of criteria common to all students taking the
test is applied and differentiations are made in relation to those criteria.
But what is the distinctive style of a student’s ideas, his or her verbal
expression, the quality of his paintings, her analytic abilities, the way in
which students respond to new opportunities? Is the student perceptive? Is
he sensitive to the implications of new ideas or to the feelings of others? Is
her written expression lean, logical, and classical or is it romantic, analogi¬
cal, and baroque? What qualities of mind differentiate this student from the
rest? What is it that uniquely characterizes the student’s mode of thinking?
Surely attention to the qualities that uniquely distinguish a student from
his or her peers is an appropriate consideration for educators to attend to.
Surely what we want to know about students and what we wish to cultivate
are not only those qualities that they share with every other student, but
also the qualities that give them individuality. Because educational criti¬
cism focuses on the particular, because it does not require that the particular
be characterized on a common scale, its potential for rendering these
qualities in a language that makes them vivid is especially great.
The Forms and Functions of Educational Connoisseur ship 225
REFERENCES
1. John Dewey, “Qualitative Thought,” in Philosophy and Civilization, Minton,
Balch and Co., New York, 1931, pp. 93-116.
2. John Dewey, Experience and Education, Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., New
York, 1950, passim.
3. John Dewey, Art As Experience, Minton, Balch and Co., New York, 1934,
p. 324.
4. Jeffreys, H., Theory of Probability (Third Edition), Oxford University Press,
London, 1961.
5. Dewey, op. eit., p. 52.
6. Frederick Erickson, “Some Approaches to Inquiry in School/Community
Ethnography,” in Workshop Exploring Qualitative/Quantitative Research
Methodologies in Education, Far West Laboratory for Educational Research
and Development, in cooperation with the National Institute of Education
and Council on Anthropology and Education, Monterey, Calif., July 1967.
7. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York, 1973.
8. Morris Weitz, “The Nature of Art,” in Readings in Art Education (Elliot W
Eisner and David Ecker, eds.), Blaisdell Publishing Co., Waltham, Mass.
1966, p. 10.
9. Max Kozloff, Renderings: Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art, Simon
and Schuster, New York, 1969, p. 10.
10. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human
Culture, Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y., 1953.
11. Susanne Langer, Problems of Art, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1957.
12. Rudolf Arnheim, Visual Thinking, University of California Press, Berkeley,
Calif., 1969.
13. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, transl. by Max
Hayward and Ronald Hingl, Praeger, New York, 1964.
14. Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art,
Oxford University Press, London, 1972, p. 286.
15. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Harper’s Magazine Press, New York,
1974.
16. Erickson, op. cit., p. 23.
17. Gabrielle Rico, Metaphors and Knowing: Analysis, Synthesis, Rationale, Doc¬
toral Dissertation, School of Education, Stanford University, 1976.
18. Geertz, op. cit., p. 6.
19. Ibid., p. 5.
20. Donald Campbell and Julian Stanley, Experimental and Quasi-experimental
Designs for Research, Rand McNally, Chicago, 1966.
21. Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, William Collins Sons and
Company, Ltd., London, 1974.
226 The Educational Imagination
227
228 The Educational Imagination
things that affect other’s lives; one cannot sacrifice veracity to make a good
tale.
Compared to the ease of administering and scoring standardized tests, the
use of educational connoisseurship and educational criticism is a time-con¬
suming task. One must find classroom teachers and school administrators
willing to have someone observe in their classroom or school on a regular
basis. One must be willing to invest hours in a classroom in order to grasp
what goes on there. One must appraise what one has seen with a normative
conception of education. All of these demands are formidable; educational
criticism is not a one-shot, short-term clerical task.
These demands might in the long run be too great to motivate people in
the field to use educational criticism as a tool for educational evaluation.
“Efficiency” and unambiguous conclusions seem to be preferred to the
questions we raise and the problems we encounter. Educational criticism is
not efficient—it takes time. And it often leaves its reader with a fuller ap¬
preciation of the predicaments teachers and school administrators face.
There is no single score carried to the second decimal place that can be
added, subtracted, and averaged. What educational criticism has to offer is
human judgment—and this might be too cumbersome to deal with in doing
educational evaluation.
Yet I know of no other way to know what goes on in classrooms than to
be there to see those events occur. I know of no other way to relate facts to
consequences than to see both as they unfold in school settings. The ob¬
servation of those events takes time because those events occur over time.
If we accept the notion that the quality of consequences is a function of the
character of the events that preceded them, then our knowledge of the lat¬
ter is a necessary condition for improving the quality of the former. Said
more simply, we are unlikely to improve the quality of teaching or of class¬
room life unless we know what it is. Educational connoisseurship and edu¬
cational criticism are intended to make that possible.
The three criticisms that follow are examples of the work we have been
doing since October 1975. They represent our initial efforts to render
vividly classrooms and other educational events. I will make no comment
about the content or form of these educational criticisms because I believe
that they are sufficiently vivid to speak for themselves, except to express my
gratitude to their authors for allowing me to include them in this book.
Robert Donmoyer
The arts are valued here as they are valued in the larger society. The teacher
states simply, “They are not one of my priorities.”
Teaching is orderly; learning is ordered. Page 47 always follows page 46. Short-
vowel words are spelled before long-vowel words. Discussion of simple feelings
precedes discussion of more complex ones.
Each day is remarkably like the day before and the day after. The school year
seems to have been made with 174 pieces of carbon paper. The same things are
done at the same times in the same ways in the same books. Only the pages change.
As in the larger society, efficiency is both mean and end. If a student needs to
use the bathroom, the student must hold up a blue flag and wait for the teacher’s
nod. If a student needs help with his work, the student must hold up a yellow
flag and wait for the teacher’s attention. If a student needs to sharpen his pencil,
the student must hold up a yellow flag with a green dot and wait for the teacher’s
permission. There is a flag for getting a drink, and there is a flag for getting one s
work checked, and there is a flag for getting permission to step outside the door
for one minute to talk to a friend. Nothing must interfere with the explaining of
the directions, the filling of the blanks, the solving of the problems, the copying of
the sentences, the checking of the work.
Here as in the larger society, independent individuals are prized. But, as in the
larger society, independence is uniquely defined. Independence here means being
able to sit. . . alone . . . unjoined... in one’s own seat at one’s own desk in one’s
own neatly arranged row doing one’s own work which is listed on one’s own
contracts.
The student must be able to be as disconnected from his work as he is dis¬
connected from other people. The student does not negotiate the contents of his
contracts and the contents have little to do with him. But he is expected to do
the assignments listed therein. He must answer the problems and fill in the blanks
and copy the sentences and, with luck, he remembers to capitalize the Colorados
and Massachusettses even though he does not know what a Colorado or a
Massachusetts is.
Most students sign on the dotted line. There are exceptions. Kenny, from the
very beginning, seemed to have too much individuality to tolerate individualiza¬
tion. By the first recess of the first day of school, even though Kenny had not
exhibited any overt misbehavior, the teacher knew he was a deviant and she
stated as much. As is the custom in our society, the search for an appropriate label
began in earnest. A call was made to his previous school and the appalling news
came back: He had not been classified!! Psychological and educational testing was
immediately called for. In the meantime he was, on various occasions, called
dyslexic, aphasic, educationally handicapped, emotionally disturbed, and finally,
in the seventh week, when tests showed that at least some of the labels just didn’t
apply, he was said to be in need of reality therapy. No thought was given to the
possibility that the classroom reality was what was in need of alteration.
But Kenny is the exception. Most of the children compliantly sit at their desks
and dutifully complete the terms of their “contracts.” This obedience seems to be
the result of something more than a desire to avoid missing recesses or staying
after school or being late for lunch. Rather there seems to be a conversion to the
religion of productivity and the accompanying morality of efficiency. The conver¬
sion is not the result of a dramatic rebirth but rather of a more gradual encultura-
tion. This “religious” training takes place continuously through the teacher’s words
and deeds. The teacher says, “Thank you, Keith, for beginning your work right
away,” or “I’m glad to see Maritza is not wasting time.” Religious instruction is
inherent in the teacher’s response to classroom incidents. When Sonya is in tears
because Patty hit her, the teacher’s initial response is to chide Patty for not doing
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 231
with mechanized precision. The teacher’s face remains immobile, except for an
occasional upward turn at the comers of her mouth. The eyes almost never smile.
The teacher exhibits great economy of movement and gesture. It’s almost as if
Miss Hill were a marionette whose strings are too tight and, hence, her gestures
must be tight and close to her body.
There is also economy of voice. Miss Hill parcels out her words sparingly as if
inflicted with a chronic case of laryngitis. Instead of speaking, she points. If she
wants a student to turn on the lights, she points to the student and then to the
lights. She says nothing. If a student is turned around in his seat and talking to
the student who sits behind him, the teacher stares, then points, then spins her
index finger in a clockwise motion until the student stops talking and turns around.
Here, at least, it appears that talk is not cheap.
When the teacher does speak, however, her voice colors all experience within
the confines of this classroom, and the color that is vocally applied is shocking
beige. Her voice is the perfect accessory for the tan, plastic drapes which cover
the windows and hang, straight, without feeling or expression. It’s a voice barren
of any sort of nuance, as if somehow the hum of the air conditioner were reconsti¬
tuted into words. During the seven weeks I spent in this classroom, I only rarely
heard this voice express anger or joy or emotion of any kind.
Although the resemblance is more spiritual than physical, I could not help but
see a pedagogical version of that modern American Everyman, Mary Hartman,
hard at work in the classroom I was observing. As with Mrs. Hartman, I could
sense something beneath Miss Hill’s expressionless face and voice and eyes,
something hidden inside the vacuum.
There is, of course, and it wasn’t hard to find. It doesn’t take long, away from
the classroom, talking over coffee, to discover a warm, sensitive, intelligent middle-
aged lady interested in music and folk masses and people and people’s feelings.
In the best Jekyll and Hyde tradition, this proselytizer of the catechism of produc¬
tivity is completely transformed when she steps beyond the four walls of her
classroom, out into the open. True, a certain need for order remains, but there is
no evidence of an obsession with acquisition. In fact, she seems to be controlled
by an entirely different set of values.
The more I got to know Miss Hill, the more I came to realize how simplistic the
view of teachers as villain espoused by the muckracking educational journalists of
the 1960s really was. In this regard, I recall an incident that occurred at one lunch
hour.
James, a whimsical, somewhat overgrown, overstuffed cherub with an in¬
candescent face, had been kept in because he hadn’t finished some work. James
couldnt read, spell, or write very well. In fact, it would be more honest to say
tha he had virtually no written language skills. He was quite verbal; he appeared
to be rather intelligent, and he certainly was not unmotivated. His reading prob¬
lem was said to be the result of a learning disability of some sort. On the basis of
what I saw, this seems like a plausible, if somewhat unhelpful explanation. This
explanation was certainly accepted by Miss Hill. She arranged for James to spend
a large portion of the school day in the room for the educationally handicapped
under the supervision of the teacher of the educationally handicapped.
When James was in his regular classroom, he was expected to complete regular
assignments. There was no problem with math. Math assignments were made on
the basis of individual achievement levels. Besides, James was quite talented in
math.
James did have problems, however, with other assignments which usually re¬
quired some use of language. Miss Hill allowed James to copy other students’ work
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 233
and sometimes she had a “bright” student complete his work for him while James
looked on, looking alternately bored and embarrassed.
On the particular day I’m recalling, normally jovial, jocular James apparently
had had enough. Tears rolled down his cheeks and after the other students had all
gone to lunch, James in a controlled rage, informed the teacher that he hated the
teachers who taught at this school.
Miss Hill said nothing for a long while. She just stared emptily at James.
Finally, in a voice void of feeling, she asked him why he felt this way.
James blurted out, “Because the teachers here are mean.”
Once again, unfilled time. Then, finally, an inquiry, nondescriptly made: Do
you think I’m mean?”
The response, immediate, emphatic: “YES!”
Silence. Finally the volley is returned, but in slow motion this time: “Why do
you think I’m mean?”
James relates, between sobs, that the teachers at his other school used to let him
take his work home if he didn’t get it finished in class. Those teachers were nice,
he says. Then he adds that he would like to go back to his other school.
The teacher’s voice is controlled and calm. As always, empty. Slowly, quietly,
she asks, “And did those teachers teach you to read?”
James is a proud boy. He says yes with little more than a moment’s hesitation.
The teacher pauses . . . just for a beat this time . . . and then she transforms
herself into a divinely underplayed Lady MacBeth. She grabs a book, thrusts it
at James and says, “Read this.!”
James tries. Fails. The teacher explains . . . coolly . . . rationally . . . that she does
what she does for James’s own good, James nods. Leaves. Immediately Miss Hill
begins to cry. Her head falls to the table top.
I felt badly for James. I felt even worse for Miss Hill. By now I had begun to
sense dissonance between the professional and the person. I knew that teaching was
not only psychically but also physically painful for Miss Hill, and I was pretty
sure the pain was not being inflicted by her students, most of whom were among
the most easygoing, pliable children I had ever seen. (Even the infamous Kenny
hardly resembled the problem children I had encountered in other classrooms;
only during the last few weeks of my observation did he begin to do some mild,
verbal counterpunching, against an increasingly hostile environment. Even then
he could not be described as uncontrolled and certainly not uncontrollable.)
No, I was pretty sure that Miss Hill’s back pains and nervous complaints were
not brought on by Miss Hill’s students. More likely they were caused by the dis¬
trict office and its numbers racket, the state department of education’s great ex¬
pectations, lawmakers who rely on the property tax to finance education, an in¬
visible principal under the spell of paper work, and an irrational “rational society
which assumes a priori that more is better. All these forces directly or indirectly
make Miss Hill, the teacher, into something quite different from Miss Hill, human
being.
After the incident with James, I began to think about what I might be able to
write that might make life more bearable in this particular classroom, not only for
the students, but also for the teacher. I realized the teacher’s liberation was a
necessary precondition to changing the students’ classroom experience, but I also
began to feel that teacher emancipation was a worthwhile goal in and of itself.
I began by considering Mr. Count’s challenge of radicalism and I very quickly
rejected it. Just as I had come to realize that the analysis of the muckrackers of
the 60s was simplistic, I new realized that Mr. Count’s question was downright
foolish. First, teachers, at least this teacher, don’t have any energy to spare with
234 The Educational Imagination
which they could lead a social revolution. Second, and more important, Miss Hill
would never consider preparing the children in her charge for a world that
doesn’t exist. Such an emphasis on a new social order would be viewed by Miss
Hill as a cruel hoax on children who must be given the skills to function in the
existing social order that they all too quickly enter.
Amitai Etzioni spells out this point somewhat more systematically in his review
of Charles Silverman’s Crisis in the Classroom. Etzioni writes:
The school is unavoidably a funnel which leads from infancy at home to adult
occupational structure in the greater society. . . .
Consideration of the society into which the students will graduate are . . .
important; it is unfair and unrealistic to prepare them for the educator’s favorite
dream world because education does not have the force to transform society.
Hence, educating students for life in a society which does not exist, say in
Silverman’s “humane and just” society or for one in which work is as much fun
as play—will not yield such a society, but might well serve to prepare a frus¬
trated and disillusioned generation of students. . . .
Silverman correctly stresses that our schools are organized as if everyone will
graduate either to work on an assembly line or in a civil service. They are best
suited to preparing indifferent cogs for an industrial-bureaucratic machine.
But despite the hip talk about rapid societal change, as far as I can forsee,
our society will continue to have major instrumental and technical needs.
(Etzioni, 1971, pp. 97,98)
Thus, the idea that Miss Hill’s professional life and the lives of her students can
be made more tolerable by telling Miss Hill to either ignore the present society or
attempt to revolutionize it by using her classroom as her podium seems blatantly
ridiculous.
So, is there nothing that can be said to this teacher that might help her to
make life in her classroom more satisfying for all who spend time there? Must
Miss Hill’s classroom continue to reflect some of the most dehumanizing elements
of the large society? I think not.
First, Miss Hill can be reminded that, despite all the constraints society attempts
to impose on her, she is remarkably autonomous when she closes her classroom
door. Certain things that have been labeled constraints, the absence of supervi¬
sion, for example, actually enhance autonomy. Other constraints, like testing, are
really only psychologically limiting since neither the state nor the district can
impose any real sanctions on a teacher whose students fail to produce. Even the
psychological constraint imposed by the heavy emphasis on test scores could be
muted somewhat for Miss Hill by reminding her that she herself has noted that
her students don’t do well on the tests no matter what she does.
Constraints imposed by budget are real, but not necessarily insurmountable.
Gadgetry and gimmicks have been oversold; marvelous things can be accom¬
plished with the most mundane materials. Class size and lack of preparation time
are more difficult problems to overcome, yet some compensation is provided by
the organization of the school day. As a result of staggered dismissal, three read¬
ing lab periods, and the four or five students who spend a large portion of their
day with the teacher for the educationally handicapped, the number of students
in Miss Hill’s room at any given time is frequently only half of the thirty-two
member class.
Thus, Miss Hill should be reminded that although society’s direct constraints
upon her are most certainly real, they need not necessarily be as limiting as Miss
Hill now assumes them to be. Still, there is the problem of the indirect constraints
imposed by the nature of the larger society and the need to prepare students to
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 235
function in that society. Here again the constraints may not be as limiting as Miss
Hill believes. This can be said for two reasons.
First, it could be argued that Miss Hill’s view of the larger society is too
limited. True, ours is a market economy that views man as a consumer with in¬
satiable desires and therefore glorifies productivity and its accomplice, efficiency.
Yet, as the political philospher C. B. Macpherson (1973) has pointed out, our
society has also embraced an altogether different vision of man’s essence (partly
as an antidote to the somewhat crass self-image outlined above) and this view
has provided the basis for the justification of liberal Western democratic societies
ever since John Stuart Mill first espoused it. Man, according to this view, is a doer,
a creator, a being whose satisfactions come not from consumption but from
the exercise and development of his innate capacities. Our society then justifies
itself by claiming to provide the most conducive environment for such self-
actualization.
The condition of modern society seems to justify having the school foster the
creative side of man’s nature. Etzioni, for example, while arguing against radical
school reform that puts schools out of sync with society, does contend that
We will be able to work less, and less efficiently, still be affluent, and we can
realistically help prepare students for a world with more “work’ and less
“labor” . . . and a world in which more energy and time are devoted to personal
and interpersonal growth, and less productivity. (Etzioni, 1971, p. 98)
There are, in fact, indications that when schools attempt to foster the creativity
of their students, they may be aiding societal stability. Increasing automation and
unemployment, decreasing natural resources, increasing environmental pollution,
and the decreasing desire of third-world nations to be exploited, all would seem
to indicate that it may very well be in the best interest of the society to attempt
to teach the young to find fulfillment in themselves and their creative powers
rather than in consumption.
Thus, our society’s self-justification is based on its claim to enhance man s
creative powers, and present and future societal conditions seem to allow and
possibly even require man to find fulfillment in his own creative abilities. There¬
fore, it seems logical for schools, in addition to preparing students to take their
place in the marketplace, to also provide students with opportunities to have
intrinsically rewarding experiences. These experiences would foster the develop¬
ment of individual students’ creative potentials and would by their inclusion in
the curriculum indicate that such development is of value.
The arts, while not the only source of intrinsically rewarding experience, are
clearly some of the most fertile sources of such activity. Miss Hill should be en¬
couraged to alter her view of the place of the arts in the classroom and to make
artistic experience an educational priority. She should be encouraged to provide
her students with richer, more varied experiences than she now provides. Creativ¬
ity should mean something more than making paperweights by gluing comic
strips on rocks or making Halloween decorations by cutting out black cats pie-
viously traced on construction paper. Art should not be made into a prostitute
by using it to train students to work independently and to complete assignments,
nor should it be merely a reward for completing academic work. Music should be
more than an occasional way of filling the time before lunch. And creative dia-
matics, which Miss Hill does not use at all at the present time, could provide a
constructive outlet for students like Kenny, whose expressiveness, as Miss Hill
well knows, is sometimes difficult to contain.
Once again, budgetary limitations, as well as the teacher’s own limitations,
must be recognized. There are no art, music, or drama supervisors, and although
236 The Educational Imagination
Miss Hill lias had experience and considerable training in music education, she
lacks an art and drama background. Her lack of training is certainly a constraint.
However, teaching in the arts is not based on a scientific formula or a lock-step
methodology. Miss Hill must be encouraged to put into use her own creative
potential that flowers outside the classroom but that has been made to lie fallow
within the confines of the four classroom walls. And probably the the most im¬
portant thing Miss Hill can do is to value an individual’s creative abilities as much
as she values the ability to correctly follow directions in the spelling workbook. For
this, the teacher needs no particular training.
Three fringe benefits should accrue if the arts are made a classroom priority.
First the teacher’s role would be expanded. She would no longer simply be an
accountant, but in order to provide her students with creative experiences, she
would herself become a creator. Hopefully this focus on creativity would not only
make classroom life more satisfying for the students, but also for the teacher.
Second, by expanding the activities that are valued in the classroom, more
students, students like Kenny and James, would have a greater opportunity to suc¬
ceed in the classroom. Even in our bureaucratic society, there are more roads to
success than presently exist in Miss Hill’s classroom.
Third, the granting of the arts a place of importance in the classroom would
affect the dynamics of classroom interaction. The teacher would be freed some¬
what from her endless checking and rechecking and checking-out and checking-in
routine and should have some more time to interact with her students. When
“checking” students’ artistic work, she would be able to focus on each student’s
uniqueness rather than measure him by some distant publisher’s yardstick of
appropriate grade-level performance. There should also be opportunities for
individuals to break out of their cells of independence for group singing and
drama “performance.”
All these benefits indicate the arts deserve a place of prominence in the ele¬
mentary school curriculum. If Miss Hill continues to doubt this, she should be
reminded that ours is a society that sees man as a creative being and justifies its
existence on the grounds that it best can foster such creativity. Therefore, it does
not seem inappropriate for the schools of our society to cultivate the idea that the
ultimate expression of one’s humanity is something more than buying a Fonzie
T-shirt.
Of course it is important not to limit the development of individuality and
creativity to what is thought to be their natural habitat, the arts. Philosopher of
science, Paul Feyerabend, speaks to this point. Feyerabend is primarily concerned
with the evils of a rule-governed approach to science, arguing that scientific in¬
sight has always been the result of methodological proliferation. Occasionally,
however, Feyerabend emphasizes the implications of his argument for education:
artistic creation and to use it to the full, not just as a road of escape, but as a
necessary means for discovering and perhaps even changing the properties of
the world we live in. (Feyerabend, 1970, p. 27)
There is a second reason why it can be argued that the indirect constraints on
Miss Hill imposed by the nature of the larger society may not be as limiting as
they may first appear. This argument refers to the concern with basic skills.
It has been conceded that the school should prepare its students for life in the
larger society. What will be argued, however, is that a classroom like Miss Hill’s
that mimics bureaucratic organization is not an appropriate environment for
students to learn those skills considered so “basic” to functioning in that society.
The point is quite simple: when the school year is made with 174 pieces of carbon
paper, it seems logical to assume that the impression left will become increasingly
dull.
No radical proposals are being advanced. The teacher’s need for a quiet, orderly
classroom must be respected. The fact that many students learn best in a relatively
orderly environment is conceded, and Miss Hill’s belief that most of her students
fit into this orderly environment category may, indeed, be correct. It is also con¬
ceded that most students can benefit from a careful sequencing of subject matter.
Finally the limitation of time and the resultant need for a teacher to, at times,
rely on prepackaged workbooks is also acknowledged.
What is being argued is that when efficiency and order become ends in them¬
selves, when learning is thought to have only a linear dimension, when students do
little else but sit by themselves filling in blanks, copying sentences, and doing
row upon row of math problems, when the teacher spends virtually all her time
checking the blanks and the sentences and the problems, then something is amiss.
Much is made of the fact that because of the socioeconomic status of “these
children,” they require an extra dosage of the 3Rs. It is true that these children
are not the children of college professors or corporate vice-presidents or lawyers
or doctors; most of these children hold no birthright to the good life, economically
defined. Yet this very fact makes Miss Hill’s prescription all the more inappropriate.
These students have not grown up surrounded by empirical evidence of the
social and material advantages that come with playing the school game; most of
these students have probably not been read to since before they could talk. Because
of this it seems highly unlikely that simply increasing the dosage of bland tasting
medicine or demanding that more bitter pills be swallowed will cure these stu¬
dents’ educational maladies.
In the play The Miracle Worker, Helen Keller’s teacher reflects on the goals
she had set for herself. She says,
I wanted to teach you—oh, everything the earth is full of, Helen, everything on
it that’s ours for a wink and it’s gone, and what we are on it, the—light we
bring to it and leave behind in—words, why, you can see five thousand years
back in a light of words, everything we feel, think, know—and share, in words,
so not a soul is in darkness, or done with even in the grave. (Gibson, 1960,
p. 279)
That’s not exactly a behavior objective; admittedly, the objective may be a wee
bit theatrical. Yet it does seem appropriate for a teacher to try to communicate to
her students at least the utility of language. And, more than that, it seems appro¬
priate for a teacher to want to help her students to learn the pleasure to be found
in books, to help them look “five thousand years back in the light of words,” or
possibly help them use books to look into the future. And, too, it seems appropriate
for a teacher to want to give her students an opportunity to communicate what
238 The Educational Imagination
they feel, think, know by writing. Finally, it seems appropriate for a teacher to
want to provide her students with a sense of the power a knowledge of numbers
conveys on the knower and also a sense of the mystery of mathematics.
Unfortunately, these are not Miss Hill’s objectives. At least her classroom pro¬
vides no evidence that she holds these values. Students are never read to, and
students are never encouraged nor given time to read on their own own during the
school day. In the seven weeks I was there, students were almost never encouraged
to write anything beyond spelling tests and language arts exercises. Math, too,
never got beyond the calisthenics stage. All this seems unfortunate. If students
do not see any value in what they are expected to learn and are never given
meaningful opportunities to utilize what they have learned, it seems unlikely that
much learning will occur or be retained.
John Dewey spoke to this point over a half a century ago. He was speaking of
the exercises of Maria Montessori, but what he said seems equally applicable to
the workbook exercises found in Miss Hill’s classroom. Dewey writes,
Exercises which distinguish for the child . . . abstract qualities . . . may give the
child great skill in performing the special exercises, but will not necessarily
result in making him more successful in dealing with these qualities as they
appear in the situation of life. (Dewey, 1915, p. 160)
The training of the pupil to habits of right thinking and judgment is best ac¬
complished by means of material which present him real problems. (Dewey,
1915, p. 158)
This last statement by Dewey directs attention to another aspect of Miss Hill’s
academic approach. The “basic skills” needed to function successfully in our
modern bureaucratic society extend somewhat beyond the 3Rs. What separates
the corporate executive from his secretary is more than just spelling proficiency.
The difference between a shop owner and his clerk is not just facility with
figures. And the community college student and the Ivy League scholar are likely
to be distinguished from each other in many ways, and not just in reading ability.
Just what this extra something is is difficult to say, and therefore it seems impos¬
sible to provide a simple prescription for fostering it.
A more productive approach to this regard might be found in asking what
would not foster this extra something.
Salomon and Achenbach define a behavior trait they label associative reasoning
(Salomon and Achenbach, 1974). Individuals who rely on associative reasoning
might be said to lack what is commonly labeled imagination. Instead of using their
reasoning ability to find a solution to problems, they rely on concrete situational
clues. Salomon and Achenbach observed associative reasoning in an academic
context only and found it to be a severe academic handicap. Presumably, if this
way of approaching situations transferred to nonacademic experience, and it
seems logical to assume that it would, the individual with an associative reason¬
ing orientation would be equally handicapped under nonacademic circumstances.
No clear cause of associative reasoning has been determined, yet Salomon and
Achenbach lean heavily toward environmental explanations. One of their primary
hypotheses is “lack of incentives for thinking independently.” If Salomon and
Achenbach are correct, then the tightly structured, highly routinized environment
in Miss Hill’s classroom, with its emphasis on following directions and its dis¬
couragement of any divergent or independent thinking, is hardly an appropriate
training course for the society on the other side of the classroom door.
Miss Hill, despite her intense efforts to program “these children” for success in
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 239
the larger society, may unconsciously be programming them for failure, or, at
best, for minimal achievement. Anthropologists indicate that, contrary to the
American mythology about upward mobility through education, “education. . .
functions in established cultural systems to recruit new members and maintain
the existing system (Spindler, 1974, p. 309). Ethnographies have shown how
teachers can be blinded by a “self-sustaining cultural belief system,” and have
provided numerous examples of self-fulfilling prophesy based on SES status
(Spindler, 1963; Spindler, 1974; King, 1967; Rist, 1973).
The teachers room at Miss Hill’s school has many prophets of the self-fulfilling
variety. Miss Hill was more discreet than the teachers who lament having to
teach the children of welfare recipients because such children are inevitably
behind.” Nevertheless, she frequently emphasized the differences between her
school and students and middle-class schools and students. For example, she said
of Eileen, a new student with excellent academic and study skills, “She must have
gone to a middle-class school last year. There, children have a chance to extend
themselves.”
There is a real difference between Miss Hill’s room and many middle-class
classrooms, but the fundamental difference is the quantitative and qualitative
expectations for the students. Eileen is an industrious, capable student; Miss Hill
runs an individualized classroom. There is no reason why Eileen should not be
able to “extend herself” this year. Yet, if Miss Hill thinks this is impossible, it
probably becomes an impossibility.
The problem with Miss Hill’s academic curriculum was summed up by John
Dewey long ago, when he pointed to the evils of a narrow vocational orientation
in education.
A democratic criterion requires us to develop capacity to the point of com¬
petency to choose and make its own career. This principle is violated when the
attempt is made to fit individuals in advance for definite industrial callings,
selected not on the basis of trained original capacities, but on that of the wealth
or social status of parents. (Dewey, 1916, p. 119)
It appears, then, that a classroom need not mimic the society in order to pro¬
vide students with the necessary skills for functioning in the society. Such a mime
act may, in fact, be counterproductive. Miss Hill must continue to provide as
much structure as her students really need, and she cannot ignore her own need
of order. But her excessive emphasis on efficiency and her overreliance on work¬
books must be deemphasized.
To begin the transformation of her classroom, Miss Hill might set aside a
portion of each day to read to the class. Another period of each day should be set
aside for students to read silently to themselves or orally to a partner. A walking
trip to the public library near the school should net the necessary books. Also,
language assignments that permit students to use language might be presented to
the students. Initially these writing assignments might be offered as alternatives
to the standard workbook assignments. Pen pal letters, story writing, and journals
are some obvious possibilities. Eileen would make an excellent editor-in-chief of a
class newspaper. Miss Hill might even consider letting her class run a sale of
some sort. A sale would lend itself to all sorts of learning activities: students could
become involved with calculating profits, making change, making posters, and
writing and acting out sale commercials that could be “toured” to other class¬
rooms.
In this discussion, society has been cast in the role of villain. As always, of
course, life is more complicated than melodrama. It could be argued that Miss
Hill’s personal need for order and her tendency to accept authority unquestion-
ingly should entitle her to equal billing with society. Yet, any flaw that might be
240 The Educational Imagination
embedded deep within Miss Hill’s personality need not be a tragic one. And hope¬
fully this discussion has shown that even society does not require that tragedy
continue to be acted out in Miss Hill’s classroom.
Counts, George S., Dare the School Build a New Social Order? New York: John
Day, 1932.
Dewey, John, Democracy and Education, New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.,
Inc., 1916.
Dewey, John and Evelyn Dewey, Schools of Tomorrow, New York: E. P. Dutton
& Co., 1915.
Etzioni, Amitai, “Crisis in the Classroom (A Review),’ Harvard Educational
Review, 1971: 41, 87-98.
Gibson, William, “Miracle Worker,” Dinmj and the Witches and The Miracle
Worker: Two Plays, New York, Atheneum, 1960.
Feyerabend, Paul K., “Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of
Knoweldge, Analyses of Theories and Methods of Physics and Pcychology
(Michael Rodner and Stephen Winokur, editors), Minneapolis: PTniversity of
Minnesota Press, 1970, pp. 17-130.
King, Richard A., The School at Mopass: A Problem of Identify. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967.
Macpherson, C. B., “The Maximization of Democracy,” Democratic Theory:
Essays in Retrieval. London: Oxford University Press, 1973, pp. 3-23.
Rist, Ray, The Urban School: A Factory for Failure, Cambridge, Mass. MIT
Press, 1973.
Salomon, Marion Kerner and Thomas M. Achenbach, “The Effects of Four
Kinds of Tutoring Experience on Associative Responding,” American Educa¬
tional Research Journal, 1974: 11, 4, pp. 395-405.
Spindler, George D., “Beth Anne—A Case Study of Culturally Defined Adjustment
and Teacher Perceptions,” Education and Cultural Process: Toward an An¬
thropology of Education, (George Spindler, editor), New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, Inc., 1974, pp. 139-153.
Spindler, George D., “The Transmission of American Culture,” Education and
Cidture, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1963, pp. 148-172.
Thomas Barone
The splendid houses perched majestically upon the hills peek out from between
the lush growth of trees and well-tended foliage that dress them. Many seem to
snicker at the laws of gravity as they balance themselves so casually upon the
slanted land. They stare straight ahead, haughtily ignoring the bright green
carpet at their feet. The houses maintain a distance from each other; they wrap
their fences around their land as if to insist that it is theirs alone.
As I drive past, I wonder about the people in these lavish houses with their
redwood paneling and their thoroughbred stallions in the adjacent fields. What are
they like? How do they live? Do they balance their lives as effortlessly as they
have balanced their houses on these hills? Do they ever stroll through their woods
and sniff the honey-colored air and listen to the California mist as it steals softly
over the hills? Or do they gaze straight ahead, like their houses? What distances
do they maintain from whomever might be their friends? Does each wrap his
arms around his life to insist that it is his alone? What is it about them that the
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 241
world has chosen to reward in a manner such as this? What did they need to
learn in order to secure their sumptuous perches on top these hills? And most of
all, because I am a teacher, I wonder what kinds of lives they desire for their
children.
Past clusters of apricot blossoms that brave the chill of almost-spring, down a
hill into a grove of towering fir trees, there the school is nestled. The hills have
stolen the breath from the car by the time I reach it. As I step out, the trees pro¬
tect me from the February breeze until I reach the room.
The room invites me in. It is a large, extended room drawn at the waist: it was
once two single rooms that have come together to talk. Surely I could spend a
whole childhood here. A wealth of learning materials engulfs me, each piece
beckoning me to pick it up. The patchwork rag that hides the floor is soft and
fluffy and warm. Some desks have gathered together for serious business. Chairs
converse across semicircular tables. At the bookshelf, dozens and dozens of books
slouch around, barely in rows, leaning on each others shoulders. Children’s draw¬
ings line the walls. What are those masses of shiny objects growing from the ceil¬
ing like silver stalactites in the secret comers of the room? I focus in on thousands
of tiny . . . beer can pull-tabs . . . crunched together, straining to pull the roof in.
A massive wooden beehive called The Honeycomb, with geodesic cubicles in which
to hide yourself. A towering ten-foot dinosaur made of wire and papier-mache,
splotched with paint. . . blue and red colors crawling up its body. The monster is
smiling helplessly—is he not?—because a covey of tiny people have just been
tickling him with their paintbrushes.
In another corner, there are several plants growing in small cups. An incubator
with eggs. Over there a phonograph and some records. A map on the chalkboard
locates the hills I just drove through—the ones presided over by those houses.
Next to the map there are frozen smiles on faces captured within tiny squares of
paper. Strings connect the smiles with places on the map. This smile lives there;
that one here. But all of the smiles, I have come to learn, live inside this room.
Mostly in this room there are letters and words. Lined up on the walls: Aa Bb
Cc Dd Ee Ff. In combinations which have meaning—at least for me: leave, would,
said. Blue next to a dab of blue paint. The words appear on the faces of the
books and gather together in great multitudes on their insides. On the map. On
the material that covers the couch. Soon in my eyes, even when I shut them. And
later they pop out of the smiles of the children and hang in the air. Caressing
each other in a low murmur, the omnipresent words pervade the room.
Soon I am not alone. The other children are pouring through the door, infusing
the room with life, brimming with energy hankering for release. Mostly fair¬
skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, and all fresh and ebullient, these are yesterday s
Gerber babies. Lots of Erics and Chrises and Heathers and Lisas. Each seems to
be drawn to his own corner of the room, his energy pulling him toward a special
task. One moves to the bookshelf and snatches up a book. Several take themselves
to the math table. Three crawl in the Honeycomb. One tickles the dinosaur with
a paint brush. Others string pull-tabs or watch a film.
Several are my special friends. We had become friends on my previous visits
to the school. One day I decided that I would become one of them. So I shrank a
little in my mind and revisited a world I had left so long ago. I became both-
them-and-me, gazing upward at life once more, but from above. A very wondrous
process: a grownup seeing through the eyes of children. So its just two teachers
(Mrs. Abramson and Miss Tomlen), and two aides (Miss Carlson and Miss
Rogers), me and Eric and Eric and Eric, and Chris and Chris and Chirs, Heather
and . . . well, forty-three first- and second-graders in all.
Together we re a town within a room, a real community. Almost a family, I d
say. We scurry about and form amorphous groups that dissolve agains as if by
242 The Educational Imagination
secret signal. Sometimes we bask in the solitude of the Honeycomb, but mainly
we clump together in ever-changing twos and threes. And we’re always helping
each other with our work. Like this one day that Lisa, Bobby, Susan, and I were
stringing pull-tabs. Lisa’s idea—Lisa and ideas hang around together—was to
diwy up the work to get it over faster. “Like when they make cars,” she said.
“Susan can pick the good tabs out of the box. Bobby can take the tin off the
circles. Tom can count and separate them into tens. And I can string them up.”
And so we did. We didn’t learn much about counting like we’d supposed to.
(We all knew how to count to 100, anyway.) But we sure did learn a lot from
Lisa, and I learned a lot about her too.
We help each other out a lot; the teachers like us to. They don’t teach us to
compete; so we don’t put our arms about our work and guard it with our selves.
Not inside this classroom. We do not measure our efforts against each other’s.
You know that from our open gestures and the easy way in which we share our
knowledge. The air is perfumed with collaboration. You see no petty bickering. A
friend of mine sits reading, and Todd approaches with a hopeful face.
“Eric, wanna help me with my math facts?”
“Sure,” comes the quick reply. And off they scramble to an empty corner.
But now I guess it’s time to tell you of a sheet of paper that each of us keeps
faithfully by his side as we move about the day. It’s called a contract, and it is
implanted in our lives by the teachers when the day is still an infant. It’s our
constant companion to the very end. This is how it works: When finished with an
activity, we give the contract to a teacher or an aide, who scratches her initials
onto the paper. We have to finish six “core” activities that Mrs. Abramson once
called “obligatory,” and some other things that don’t seem to be as important.
“Fun things,” Mrs. Abramson has called them. Sometimes we can swap three or
four of the “fun” activities for a certain “core” activity.
The teachers in this classroom are our friends. I have watched Miss Tomlen a
lot and she is always a blur of movement helping everyone to learn. She is a
member of our community, she is. A bit like a mother as she comforts and cajoles
and watches us as we grow. So you see, I can’t help think it a little strange that
in a classroom so thick with cooperation and trust that we must attach ourselves
to a sort of legal document that certifies our work. That contract, it becomes a
part of you. Lose sight of it, and there’s an itch in the back of your mind that’s
hard to scratch until you find it once again.
Most of my friends, I have to say, disagree with me; they assure me that I’ll
get used to it. Maybe so, but they’ve never been inside a classroom where you
can walk about without a paper stuck in your hand. And if the teacher is your
friend, why should she act like a lawyer? Contracts. I don’t know. Shouldn’t you
only need them when you do things with people you don’t know so well? Like
someone, say, who’s going to build your house?
What do we do all day? Well, lots of things, but mainly reading and math.
They’re very important, sitting at the tip-top of our contracts. Why else would
the smiles of our teachers become so broad when we have finished them? You can
tell it from the omnipresence of the words and numbers that decorate the room,
and because when you get to see the teacher, it’s almost always to learn reading
and math.
Especially the reading. I know the other kids sense its importance because
they’ve told me so many times. Todd told me once, “Well, you can get the other
things excused. Like the math. You can do Tour-for-one’ (exchange four ‘fun’
activities for one ‘core’ activity). But you always have to do the reading assign¬
ment.”
Beading. It’s basic, isn’t it?
We read every day from programmed texts that a Mr. Sullivan named after
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 243
himself. We read a line and guess the answer. Then we check to see what (not
whether) the answer’s right. I think that knowing that we got it right is supposed
to replace Mrs. Abramson’s friendly little pat on top your head. My friends and I
agree that Mr. Sullivan does not deserve a pat on top his head. He doesn’t have
the answers that he thinks he has. And yet we faithfully read his books.
Why do we do it, when other sorts of kids might guide their minds to less
rigid places? I think we do it because we eau’t imagine that we might not do it.
We really need the teacher’s signature on our contract and especially the smile
that tags along. Besides, all our friends do it. And their parents read a lot. My
friends themselves have told me so. But I would have guessed that anyway. I bet
it’s very basic to their kind of life.
Mr. Sullivan didn’t write the books upon the shelf, so they aren t all chopped
up. If you know how, and if you let yourself, you can get a very different kind of
reward for reading them. A reward from inside the books and inside yourself.
My friend Scott reads a lot of these books. Maybe this would be a good time to
introduce you to him. I got to know him when we were holding elections for
class officers. Scott knew that I was a true-blue member of the classroom com¬
munity because Lisa, the classroom’s Registrar of Voters, had certified me as such.
So right after the assembly at which he was nominated, Scott plopped down at
my side and slipped one tiny but sincere hand upon my shoulder.
“Are you gonna vote, Tom?” Scott gets right to the point.
“Hmmm,” I said, quickly sensing the question I should ask. “Whom do you
think I should vote for?”
“Well,” he replied in a sixth-grade tone of voice. “You could vote for me.”
“O.K. I will,” I promised, feeling vaguely like a tool.
By the way, he won the election. I guess he deserved to, because Scott man¬
ages his own affairs very, very efficiently. For example, let s get back to those
books. One of the very first times I visited the room, when I still appeared to be
a “big person” (as the teachers call themselves), Scott asked me to listen to him
read. As we sank into the wordy sofa, I noticed that he had already begun. He was
skimming across the surface of each word, licking the sentences but not tasting.
Soon he had strip-mined the paragraphs of their superficial meaning so rapidly
that I wondered how much he really understood. I asked a question about the
content of the story, and his answer was so pointed that it stuck me. He had
devoured half a book (even if it was a very short one with lots of pictures) and
digested it with amazing speed and never once paused to savor it.
Now the clock was urging me to leave, but I was trying not to hear it. For the
story had aroused my second-grade curiosity, and I truly wanted the reward of
continuing to read it. The clock, however, won, as it is wont to do.
“Scott,” I said, “I have to leave.”
“Well, will you sign me up?” His outstretched hand thrust the contract forward,
as his eyebrows nearly touched the sky.
“But you haven’t finished reading the book, Scott.”
“Or sure, I’ve read this book before.”
I wasn’t reassured, but in one bewildered instant I officially certified his ac¬
complishment for all the townsfolk to see. ^
Already he had darted to the teacher’s side to announce his victory. “Miss
Rogers, I’ve done fourteen things today.
“You did, Scott? Well that’s really great!”
Now I think it is truly great that Scott has learned to read and write (and
maybe charm his older friends with one disarming smile). But at least one of
those fourteen things wasn’t great, as I’m sure you will agree. Thirteen would
have been greater. Even one thing—don t you think? if it really spaikles, can be
greater than fourteen that have no luster. For example:
244 The Educational Imagination
On some enchanted mornings the contracts take a nap and a different kind of
feeling fills the air. On one of these mornings Miss Rogers introduced us to her
violin. She began to play it as we sat transfixed, floating from the room through
our ears. We drifted to a magic land where sounds change into colors, and the
colors are fleecy soft. The words still hung around, but now they smelled much
sweeter; they were nudged between the songs sung by her magic wand as Miss
Rogers taught us how to listen. We listened with our noses, eyes, and ears, and
we let them take our minds along.
Then another day Miss Carlson took us to Pakistan, as several of us stirred a
dash of imagination into some food. We sprinkled exotic flavors into strange
concoctions that so often live a world away. Lord, how we felt when the others
inhaled the brown and yellow flavors that we had married together!
But these excursions to an outside world happen all too seldom. For example,
we cannot launch ourselves off the art table, for no one teaches us how to see
what we paint, like Miss Rogers taught us how to hear her violin. So each of our
paintings imitates all the others. The lines to other worlds are never crossed, as
far as I can tell.
So usually we remain within the room beside our contracts. Sometimes we
sneak out through the books upon the shelf, but usually we race over them, like
Scott, using them to erase a portion of our obligations.
We are mainly learning how to read, I tell you . . . and learning how to count.
Those words are our tools. When we use them we learn to think a certain way.
We line them up, and our world lines up with them. The words are tools for
straightening out our world so we can use our number-tools to measure it. With
words and numbers we can hammer it and nail it, structure it in accordance with
our fond desires. Oh, the kingdom and the power of our words and numbers!
What about the glory of sounds and shapes and colors? Is it not also important
for us to learn how they can play upon each other? How we can rearrange them
in our dreams? When we imagine other worlds of sounds and shapes and colors,
could it not help us to see our own world in a different way? Imagination might
even be another tool for conquering the world at hand. (If you really have to
look at it that way.)
Not so much for the Scotts of the world, perhaps. They’ll probably always
read because they have to. Maybe they don’t really need to dream. They’ll always
master those important skills. But what about for others who haven’t sensed the
import of a word-written-down? The “underprivileged” they’re called, whose
parents never slip a book inside their Christmas stocking. Those who are intro¬
duced to reading only very late in life (perhaps by Mr. Sullivan), how will they
read about a world they cannot see or smell or hear?
And even you, Scott. How would you feel if you could know that words in
books can be savored like spices in a curry? Can hum like the strings of a violin.
Can fly you to worlds you’ve never even dreamed of. That you could hear their
purrs and scowls and feel their waves of meaning as they splashed upon your
mind. Then wouldn’t it be basic and important to you?
As fact would have it, Lisa is the daughter of a psychiatrist. In fiction—some¬
times much more truthful—her father might be a business manager or perhaps an
engineer. Scott is the son of a lawyer, and that’s the truth. Scott has been that
for over seven years and is likely to remain so.
Scott and Lisa and all my friends are sailing to their houses now, there to act
out their lives as sons and daughters, I am sure. And I am thirty-one years old
again as I instruct my car to take me to my other home. But on my way I still
hear the words of babes as they echo through these hills. I glance again at those
houses and now I think I understand their smugness. For I have befriended then-
future, and know that they can well afford their airs of nonchalance. Their well-
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 245
groomed heirs are returning in a little yellow school bus. They carry with them
their well-honed skills and each a piece of the warmth in which they passed the
day. (There are much, much worse ways to live a life in school!)
But I sigh softly to myself, for I still don’t know if anyone within these houses
ever sees these fluffy hills, with their fur now changing to a tawny brown. Who
catches the scent of eucalyptus trees as it mingles with the sunlight? Or who can
understand those distant lives—in much, much darker places—lives crunched upon
each other like jagged, rusty tin cans in a garbage heap? Who feels the excite¬
ment that throbs inside majestic works of art? For whom are books the tunnels to
imaginary worlds that never were before and yet have always been?
As I whiz on my way, I notice that many of the apricot blossoms have fallen
now, lying shriveled on the road. Just before they are pressed beneath the in¬
sistent wheels of my automobile machine, in a flash I wonder if my good pals
Scott and Lisa will forever gaze past them—straight ahead. Or will they learn
to see their colors?
That would be really great.
Gail McCutcheon
Introduction
Mr. William’s fourth-grade room is a room of contrasts. Students’ richly colored
crayon designs and poetry are pinned up on a bulletin board, proclaiming their
creative individuality by their differences in topic, form, and sophistication. From
atop a cabinet, a blue parakeet scrutinizes the class, chirpingly lecturing the
twenty-six students from time to time. Dried weeds, plants, ship models, and
ceramics line the shelves in front of windows that serve no apparent instrumental
function.
Yet below these decorative, expressive articles sit an SRA reading kit, a row of
spelling and phonics workbooks, several sets of mathematics texts and workbooks,
and a pile of math contracts. Somehow, they seem out of place among the
expressive articles.
The contrast between materials bears silent testimony to the temporary com¬
promise Mr. Williams has reached between teaching according to his beliefs and
teaching according to parents’ desires, two major sources of influence on his
curriculum. The compromise over this conflict of interests is only temporary,
though, for Mr. Williams knows he will have to reach another solution next year
for his own peace of mind.
Children in Mr. William’s room engage in both independent activities and
intellectual discussions held in a large-group setting. Independent activities range
along a continuum between those Mr. Williams assigns and plans to a great extent
and those over which each child has greater control. In the first section of this
study, we will examine the independent activities and then we will turn to the
class’s intellectual discussions, which occur in groups. Along the way, we will also
consider the relative effects of Mr. Williams’s beliefs and parents’ desires on the
curriculum of this classroom.
Independent Activities
Child Controlled Activities
When children have a great deal of control over their activities in Mr. Wil¬
liams’s room, the control is generally over the content of those activities. Children
are free to choose within a broad range of topics—an incident from the explora¬
tion of California, a feeling, a science subject. But all children are to express them¬
selves in the same way—through pictures, a poem, a report or whatever; the con¬
tent, not the form, is up to individual choice. All projects are due on the same date,
although children spend varying amounts of time working on them.
For example, one day in a social studies lesson, each child portrays a different
scene from the early exploration of California through large, colorful chalk draw¬
ings. Mr. Williams’s comments while they work call attention to his interest in
their concern with technique, style, and expressive qualities as well as the pic¬
ture’s content and reporting ability. Later, the children cooperatively arrange the
pictures chronologically. Their deliberations demonstrate that they know a lot
about this history, and the activity provides an opportunity for them to apply
their knowledge.
On another day students write poetry. First, Mr. Williams reads poetry about
personal feelings; then he asks students to try to think of a personal feeling to
convey. “Try to make everything in the poem lead up to that feeling,” he says.
Students work intensely, occasionally reading a line to a neighbor softly or to
Mr. Williams for help or just to hear it out loud.
I Wish / hy Andrea
The students work with a quiet intensity, and while they work Mr. Williams visits
among them with an occasional question or statement, a section pointed to, or a
suggestion. Mr. Williams does not comment on the feeling children chose to
communicate, but occasionally he suggests making it more vivid by recounting
specific instances or using more graphic words. The content, rhythm, and rhyme
scheme (or lack thereof) are designed by each student.
In this lesson, Mr. Williams reveals one of his own interests, that of writing
poetry. Mr. Williams is popular among his students, who like to play soccer with
him at recess. His enthusiasm about poetry along with his popularity may explain
the intensity with which these children write.
His interest in language arts is also revealed in a science lesson. On another day,
children begin to plan and write reports. Twenty-six children are using the
ordinary, middling, standard commodities found in every fourth-grade classroom
across the country—books, papers, crayons, scissors, pencils, pictures, and curiosity.
But these children seem excited; a quiet, busy hum of purposeful self-direction
permeates the classroom as they leaf through books and pause a while to read,
jot down questions on 4 X 6 note cards, draw a diagram, discuss a difficulty with
Mr. Williams or each other, and share information with a “Wow, look at this!” or
“Oh, neato!” to a friend. Although they are using everyday equipment and are
doing things children do every day in classrooms, their excitement and involve¬
ment are unmistakable.
Earlier in the lesson, Mr. Williams asked each to choose a science topic from a
comprehensive list. Although he was not concerned when several chose the same
topic, it did matter whether students were interested in the topic and whether
they could obtain relevant information. After listing their questions about the
topic, they were to group the questions into related categories of their own de¬
sign to facilitate the structuring of their reports.
Teachers who allow children to pose their own questions often find that chil¬
dren’s questions are more interesting than the questions we adults answer for
them when we write their textbooks or teach their classes. James is not unique in
this classroom in the quality of his questions as he wonders about clouds:
Obviously, James’s work is cut out for him if he plans to answer these questions,
and he is busy looking at books, drawing pictures, and noting facts. Mr. Williams
circulates, helping children use the index to locate their topics in various books,
discussing difficulties with them, and accepting their questions rather than cor-
248 The Educational Imagination
By not circulating throughout a work period and telling students what to do,
but being available for help, Mrs. Williams may be building the sense of inde¬
pendence he hopes to foster. If he continually directed students, they would not
have an opportunity to practice independence. If he goes around to help all
period, he believes students who know an answer may rely on him, just because
he happens to be close at hand. So he maintains a little distance, hoping children
will try to think about an answer themselves first.
Another way in which Mr. Williams facilitates this type of independent activity
in addition to modeling an inquiry approach and consulting when needed Is to
provide a variety of activities for children. All are assigned, but the assignments
appear to be within the capabilities of the youngsters in the classroom. And the
modes of expression differ, which may permit children who have different abilities
to excel at different times; the limelight is shared. In many classrooms, a verbal
mode of expression predominates to the exclusion of all others. Mr. Williams,
though, arranges activities in various modes. James’s cloud report may be very
good, but Andrea’s soup poem and Holly’s pastel drawing may also be excellent.
Their reports may not be as well done as James’s, though. Arranging for different
modes of expression not only permits a wider range of children to excel, but it
also guarantees that all children will at least be exposed to varied modes of
expression—verbal and pictorial, linear and metaphorical, partist and holist, syn¬
thetic and analytic.
In these independent activities, then, in which children have a role in planning
the content, structure and occasionally the form of their work, they seem highly
motivated, peresevering in their tasks, and involved in them. Mr. Williams s role
is one of modeling, consulting, and arranging the environment and activities. These
activities are most likely to occur in language arts, social studies, and science.
Teacher-Controlled Activities
Other independent activities are less structured by the children and are more
formally assigned by Mr. Williams. In these lessons, children work with the SRA
reading kit and do math problems or workbooks, assigned through contiacts as
well as en masse. These activities are assigned and structured for the most part
by the teacher or a publisher. That is, a child working on one of these lessons
cannot select the content, format, or media in which to work; they are pre¬
ordained by the publisher of the materials being used and were assigned by Mr.
Williams. So in math, for instance, everyone does a common set of problems in
the book, and some students also work on contracts. Group lessons focus on a
common problem set-lines and rays, addition with regrouping, diameter and
radius, or whatever-and on correcting yesterday’s problems by having students
put answers to different problems on the board. This group lesson ensuies the
exposure of all students to the same information, which concerns Mr. Williams.
He is afraid that if all students work only in contracts, the group’s knowledge is
likely to be fragmented and highly varied. Additionally, Mr. Williams realizes he
cannot deal with concepts on an individual basis because of time constraints. And
he believes concepts cannot be gleaned from a book by many individuals. He
hopes that presenting the same information to all will provide everyone with a
common base of mathematics knowledge, conveyed in an unpressured way by
students checking their own work. Additionally, the lesson provides a group task.
When a great deal of work in a classroom is individualized, it may produce a
250 The Educational Imagination
forms a fifth criterion. Others are (6) appeasing the parents, (7) covering the
traditional subject matter areas (science, social studies, art, music, physical educa¬
tion, language arts, and math) at some time during each month, and (8) con¬
forming to local guidelines established by testing practices. Mr. Williams believes
he must cover each subject matter at some time so he will “have something to put
down on the report card,” although he is not concerned if he spends two weeks
on a science project early in the month, excluding several other subjects, later
spending two weeks with social studies. Math and language arts have times re¬
served for them every day, though. As stated earlier, the city testing program
dictates certain skills in mathematics to be covered, and Mr. Williams uses a
series that accompanies the city-adopted test. In this case, it can be seen that
both the structure of the report card and the testing practices of a school system
can directly influence the curriculum of a classroom.
These eight criteria are not utilized in each of Mr. Williams’s curriculum deci¬
sions, for some contradict each other (such as the first and second). While he
plans series of activities for different subjects, Mr. Williams appears to do little
long-range planning other than that necessitated by film and book ordering
schedules. His planning is primarily done, then, on a short-range basis, and the
selection of activities involves several criteria that are applied with different
emphases according to the activity being considered.
In providing this differentiated student activity, Mr. Williams seems to empha¬
size independence, originality, self-direction, and competence in dealing with
various media. Students’ inventive use of language is evidenced in their poems;
their willingness to ask difficult but original questions is apparent in their science
reports. Additionally, student interest in learning does not appear to have been
stifled. After doing assigned work, they engage in many activities. They draw the
tree outside, write poetry, read magazines, paperbacks, or each other’s poetry.
During the activity itself, most seem excited and involved. If Mr. Williams goes
to the school kitchen to bring back a cup of tea or to the office about one of the
many persistent interruptions, students continue with their activities. He does
not appear to be perceived as a watchdog, an enforcer who ensures that work
gets done; children seem self-directed and interested in the work or they believe
it is important enough to do it even if he is not in the room. These students appear
to be achieving one of Mr. Williams’s major goals for them—independence and
self-direction when working.
A friendly, busy hum generally pervades the room during these work sessions.
Friends sit together, coloring, writing, chatting quietly, speculating, helping one
another, or criticizing each other’s work.
But students are differentially involved in these two types of experiences—
teacher-fashioned and partially student-fashioned ones. That is, during certain
experiences most students appear to be deeply involved, but in others the in¬
volvement seems more superficial. When students write poetry or science reports
or make pictures portraying an aspect of California exploration, they are deeply
involved. Work-noise buzzes through the room, students write, read, or draw
intensely; conversations generally concern the work, and most behavior is related
to the activity. Little could draw them away from their work, it seems. But during
time for SR A kit or math work, students are more likely to talk about other
things—last night’s unexpected rain or an exciting National Geographic special
about the great apes. Bill opens his math book to the page indicated on the con¬
tract. “Ooh! Lookit all of that!” Walking across the room, he says, “I’m gonna get
a drink,” very near Mr. Williams, perhaps hoping to lure Mr. Williams into telling
him to get busy and remove the responsibility for getting to work from himself.
But Mr. Williams does not go for the bait or does not hear Bill. Bill stands, pokes
252 The Educational Imagination
his loose tooth, then ambles into the coatroom before returning to his desk.
James bores holes through the dirt on his desktop with an eraser that has become
a drill. Many types of behavior that is not task-oriented are in evidence.
Several differences between these sorts of activities may account for the vary¬
ing student attention. Students report they prefer doing science reports, poetry,
and California history pictures over SRA kit and math at a ratio exceeding four
to one (twenty-one students to five). Most say the former activities are more
interesting, and they may prefer them for several reasons. I suspect a major
difference between the two regards the setting of the task. The materials them¬
selves extensively structure the content and dictate the approach to the task in
SRA kits and math books, so they may connect less with children’s personal in¬
terests and desires than the other activities. However, the content of the science
report, poetry, and California history pictures were determined substantially by
students. Mr. Williams set a general task, but children filled in particulars them¬
selves, permitting them to choose personally interesting topics, and perhaps as a
result they are more willing to devote sustained, intense attention to them.
Another reason for their preference may pertain to the apparent relative routin-
ization of the activities. Mr. Williams emphasizes certain activities such as work in
spelling, SRA kit, and math by providing time for them every day. Other activities
(poetry writing, science reports, and social studies pictures) are engaged in less
frequently and may seem less routine, more novel and unique, and may capture
students’ attention as a result.
Additionally, they may perceive Mr. Williams’s preferences. He enjoys poetry
writing, science, and social studies, but he inserts work in spelling, the SRA kit,
and math contracts into the day because of obligations—obligations to parents, to
the report card, and to the testing program. In all likelihood, he is more enthusias¬
tic about his own interests and less so about the obligations; in fact, those obliga¬
tions may make him resent them or regard those subjects as drudgery—tasks to
complete, but no more.
Oddly mixed, hidden messages may be transmitted to children about these
independent activities. On one hand, certain activities—SRA kit, math, and
spelling—are provided every day and must be finished before other activities can
be pursued, so they must be important. But on the other hand, Mr. Williams does
not seem particularly interested in them—he just puts page numbers on the board
or on contracts and doesn’t discuss them much; they seem very routine.
Social studies, art, music, science, and poetry writing are not assured a daily
place, so they may be perceived as less important. Yet Mr. Williams seems en¬
thusiastic about them. He holds discussions about them, elaborating on ideas,
provides challenging activities related to them, and spends a lot of time talking
about them. So they must be important. Children, in fact, may believe they are
more valuable than the daily activities for reasons already cited. It there any
evidence of this?
Since all finish their daily assignments, everyone has the opportunity for both
types of experience. Rut the SRA kit and math contracts are not engaged in as
fervently, intensively, or as wholly as the other activities. In my experience, they
were never selected as activities when children finished assignments or projects.
Complaints were voiced about math and SRA kit work, but not many were raised
about science reports, poetry writing and social studies. About the SRA kit and
math, children said.
Intellectual Discussions
The other major activity in Mr. Williams s classroom consists of intellectual
discussions among students and teacher held at least once a day. These are most
likely to occur when Mr. Williams reads the class a story, when a reading group
discusses a chapter or book, when students share current events or their recent
experiences and ideas, or in a science or social studies lesson. For example, Mr.
Williams reads a story to children in which a character takes a patent medicine.
arising in the course of the day. Mr. Williams reports that he does not plan
specific questions or particular information to provide, although he has a few
key questions in case they need help in starting the discussion. He also knows
several ideas he wants to help the group develop, but most of the questions flow
out of the discussion he has with the students, he says.
Another quality of these discussions is a lack of closure on some issues, perhaps
permitting children to continue to consider them. Mr. Williams wonders aloud
during a discussion about a book the students are reading:
Mr. Williams: I wonder why the ocean never fills up if all these rivers keep
pouring into it.
Jim: The ocean goes on and on—it never fills up. It’s very big.
Sue: People take water out of it to drink, in reservoirs.
Mr. Williams (surprised): To drink?
Jack: It evaporates and lotsa people use it to drink.
Mr. Williams: Water from the ocean?
Jack (flustered, correcting himself): Oh, no. It’s salty. But it evaporates and
then it rains.
In this discussion, Mr. Williams does not fully resolve the question by answering
it precisely, making it possible for children to continue to wonder about it.
Additionally, he does not restate Jack’s final point, perhaps forcing children to
listen to one another if they are to enter the discussion rather than only to him.
Some children may wonder about the question Mr. Williams raised the next time
they go to the ocean; others may completely forget about it. Leaving some ques¬
tions unresolved may also demonstrate that not every time one wonders about
something should one expect to find an answer; some questions need extensive
thought, others require more facts, and one may move on to consider another
question. Children may learn to tolerate ambiguity, indefiniteness, and uncer¬
tainty as a result of being exposed to this type of experience. It may also reveal to
children the fun of wondering, imagining, and asking for its own sake instead
of merely wondering for the instrumental purpose of obtaining a definite answer.
But it may also model question asking, an important part of inquiry.
In another example of Mr. Williams’s intellectual discussion mode, a reading
group considers a chapter in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows, while
other children read stories they will discuss tomorrow, work in the SRA kit, and
choose magazines or paperbacks to read. For an hour the group pays close atten¬
tion to this chapter, ferreting out its meaning, concentrating on interpretation
rather than on how to decode the words.
Mi. Williams reads about winter when “nature is deep in her annual slumber,”
pointing out nice phrases along the way (“riot in rich masquerade”), providing
his own interpretation to the students, and moving his hands to virtually enact
particular phrases:
go into the wild wood?” he asks. Children conjecture: to get food. Mr. Williams
disagrees. Medicinal value? Perhaps, but John, Aaron, and Jim conspire to point
out the magic value of certain plants such as garlic worn around the neck to
prevent vampires from biting one. They relate stories about Dracula they’ve read
and seen in movies.
Children in third and fourth grade seem particularly curious about the dia¬
phanous boundary between magic and real and possess all sorts of facts about
Dracula and black widow spiders, monsters and dinosaurs, Star Trek and the
Apollo missions, spell-casting witches and Houdini. Mr. Williams seems aware of
this as he fishes for the information needed to interpret the part of the story
about plants. He accepts the boys’ interpretation regarding plants’ ability to cast
spells and ward off evil. While none may have been able to interpret this aspect of
the story alone, as a group they are able to reach and support an interesting
interpretation. Later, he asks:
What do you think the author had in mind when he wrote this scene?
What was the difference between the world Mole lived in and the one Water
Rat lived in? Do people live in different worlds?
Reading a phrase, he points out that the author of Wind in the Willows makes
the river have life, describing it as an animal playing with leaves, chuckling:
Moving the questions among students skilfully so all have a chance to answer in
front of the class, Mr. Williams is not willing to accept just any answer. He may
tell a student to reread a section, to find evidence, to clarify the meaning of what
was said, to amplify an interpretation, or to rethink a position. And he may sum
up previous explanations before asking for more plausible alternatives. While this
could conceivablv deflate some children and prevent them from being able to
respond to another question, in Mr. Williams’s class, children do not seem to be
particularly bruised by making mistakes in front of their peers and being told
their answers are wrong. Their hands go back up, they answer again. It is a
supportive group, they do not ridicule one another’s mistakes, and Mr. Williams
generally lets students know their answers are wrong in a matter-of-fact tone, not
accusingly or sending messages that the child is stupid. Another group reads a
story and is trying to interpret a passage.
Mr. Williams: Why did Oswald say that his legs are younger than Grandpa’s?
Holly: Recause he’s younger than Grandpa?
Mr. Williams: I think there’s more to it than that.
Discussing the economy of the words, they examine the suitability and contribu¬
tion of most words and the entire image of the geese pulling winter. They seem
excited, eager, and involved as they think about and discuss geese, winter, the
economy of words, and the image in the poem.
Reading is caressed; the words, language, aud fun of reading are communicated
to children. Moreover, Mr. Williams demonstrates that we have to dig the meaning
out of stories, not always the easiest thing to do. They practice interpreting, criti¬
cizing, and analyzing stories and consider the author’s use of literary devices and
language. Less attention is paid to decoding skills—phonics or linguistics—as Mr.
Williams believes these children already know how to decode words, a belief
supported by listening to children read. Even very difficult words (by fourth-
grade standards) such as “imperiously,” “contemptuous,” “insatiable,” and
boisterously” are read with ease. Perhaps certain decoding skills are being learned
in context rather than separately on worksheets. By providing opportunities for
this type of discussion, Mr. Williams appears to desire for children to learn how to
deal with the printed work on a relatively sophisticated level for fourth grade, a
level at which students demonstrate they are able to function in groups. Lauren
admits she does not “usually understand everything before a discussion, but after¬
ward it’s a lot better.” Perhaps a discussion format is really the only way to learn
how to analyze, interpret, and critique such complex stories effectively, particu¬
larly at the beginning of the process. The group’s strength in interpretation may
be greater than an individual’s. In many reading programs, a better job may have
been done of teaching children how to read than of teaching them to read. We
may be winning the decoding battle but losing the reading war by neglecting to
tiansmit the fun of reading. In this case, though, Mr. Williams believes his chil¬
dren have functional reading skills, so he tries to develop interpretive and critical
skills and an appreciation for reading and literature.
Mr. Williams also conveys the feeling that it is okay to talk to a river, to
wonder why the ocean doesn’t fill up, or to enjoy the beauty of a poem about
geese or pheasants for their own sakes, not for any particular goal or for the pur¬
pose of answeiing a particular question. An activity can have intrinsic merit as
well as an extrinsic merit; we can engage in an activity because it’s joyful or
pleasant to do, not only because we can get an answer or a product out of the
activity.
Anothei time in which intellectual discussions occur in NIr. Williams’s room is
when he introduces science or social studies material such as a lesson about the
contents of the galaxy.
Drawing galaxies, stars, planets, and comets on the board as they talk, Mr.
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 257
Williams lectures students and converses with them, providing conceptually com¬
plicated but clear information about different bodies in the solar system. His
hands dance athletically through the air, helping him express his ideas to the
children who are perched, draped, and sprawled on the table, chairs, desks, and
floor near the board in the front of the room.
Interweaving particular facts, personal attitudes, and general concepts, they
discuss the bodies in the solar system and galaxy. Through a visual presentation
(the chalk pictures) and a spoken one, they consider the galaxy and solar system.
“What is the name of our galaxy?’’ he asks. “It has a kind of a neat name. ’ After
several guesses, one child tells the others: “The Milky Way.” And Mr. Williams
speculates about the name aloud: “I suppose from a distance it looks kind of
whitish and maybe one of the rays looks kind of like a milky way.’ He draws the
galaxy with large, chunky colored chalk on the board—a side view, then a top
view. His performance is greeted with “oh wows!” “gees,” and “ooos” as children
watch and listen with rapt attention, perhaps a little enviously. While he is the
main actor, telling them about the movement of the galaxy accompanied by his
expressive hands and chunky chalk, and about the galaxy s shape and our posi¬
tion on one “spirally arm,” the students seem to be listening. Many can probably
relate other information to this talk because of their reports about bodies of the
solar system; others are astronomy buffs. They ask him questions, answer his,
make sounds of awe at appropriate times, do not impatiently wiggle and squirm
or play with nearby objects.
Mr. Williams tells them about one little statistic he knows. He doesn t go in
much for statistics, he confesses, but he does know that 109 worlds—earths—
would fit across the sun, illustrating its immensity. While it seems doubtful that
fourth graders could envision precisely how immense the sun actually is from
this fact, they may appreciate its hugeness, as they ooh and wow, and the im¬
mensity seems to be what Mr. Williams was trying to convey.
Instead of telling students all of his information first, he asks them for facts
they know about the sun, perhaps providing for a break in the one-way flow of
information. Several volunteer: it s super duper hot, it s our closest star, it
gives us light,” “in the middle it’s 40,000 degrees, but they disagree about its
actual dimensions.
Then Mr. Williams goes on to provide his information about the sun, and
students interject questions once in a while. Andrea wants to know how scientists
can tell what temperature the sun is. Many teachers would be reluctant to deal
with such an obviously difficult question, particularly in front of an outside ob¬
server (no matter how good the relationship between the teacher and that ob¬
server may be), provided they even know the answer. But Mr. Williams explains
simply how astronomers measure the temperature through a special sort of
photography and use the light spectrum and special instruments to determine the
temperature. He later confides a belief that teaching is a two-pronged ventuie.
First you have to figure out what to tell the kids. Then you have to communicate
it to them on their own level. It’s the last one that was the bear about this ques¬
tion Andrea asked,” he said.
On other occasions when he does not know the answer, he acknowledges his
lack, asks if anyone else knows or asks someone to find the answer, although he
may not always remember to follow up by asking the student to share the informa¬
tion.
Ah, there’s some disagreement about how hot it really is in the center of the
sun. How about some of you experts finding out? [Jim volunteers.]
Reinforcing the notion that everything in space moves in many directions, he
258 The Educational Imagination
discusses the idea that the mass of almost the entire solar system is comprised of
the sun. He realizes at this juncture that he must define “mass” meaningfully
before students can understand his point. He did not preplan this part of the
lesson, but realized this necessity while he was talking, he later confides. The
notion of mass is difficult, but he relates it to children through an example.
If we’d put all of us together, we’d be a mass [giggle], and if we put all the
desks and books into a blob, they’d be a mass. If we put all the comets, planets,
moons, and sun together all into one blob, the biggest part would be the sun.
He moves on to discuss comets and asks about their composition. Having re¬
cently written reports about comets and being astronomy buffs, many students
want to answer. Eagerly, they stretch their hands up and say “Oh!” to attract
attention in hopes of being called upon, and perhaps indicating their willingness
to answer and belief that they have information worth sharing. But it is an
orderly, unboisterous thing. Rocks and gases? Gases? Icy particles? Mr. Williams
agrees that it’s a combination.
Near the sun, comets go faster, but he asks what else happens to a comet near
the sun.
His hands and body acting to help catch and elicit the point and drawing on the
board, he says, “The sun gives off heat. That heat is powerful. It radiates and
pushes away. So it pushes away the vapors and then you get the tail.” Weaving
several tactics in this exchange, Mr. Williams conveys information by eliciting
some fiom students, and he tells certain parts of it himself, vividly describing it
through movement and drawing. He is like an actor, using the stage and his
movements and playing the audience to convey his lines. But a good actor also
knows how to pace the scene. Mr. Williams paces the lesson by setting up a
rhythm in which he presents a great deal of information and then they discuss a
question or children s knowledge about the topic for a while before he presents
information again. This rhythm may provide a breather for him and for students.
Clearly, the presentation is rich with information, and Mr. Williams knows a
great deal about astronomy. If he knew enough to teach every science and social
studies unit this extensively, he’d be a Renaissance man! Not all students could
deal with the quantity or quality of information he presents. Children who are
not as verbal as these nor as intellectually advanced could find the presentation
troublesome or boring. But most of these students seem able to deal with it, as
evidenced by then entering into the discussion, giggling at appropriate times,
oohing and ahing, asking relevant (and conceptually difficult) questions, and
remaining attentive for 45 minutes despite two recess bells for younger children
and a noisy playground directly outside. Mr. Williams’s playing with the ideas he
piesents and his apparent interest in learning about topics like the solar system
provide a model to students of an intelligent person who is creative and playful
with ideas one who seeks knowledge. Since he is an important person to them
(their teacher), and they like him, his modeling influence may be particularly
strong. ^
Some Examples of Educational Criticism 259
Providing an opportunity to deal with a great deal of clearly and graphically pre¬
sented complex information exposes these children to a situation that could
nurture certain abilities. For one thing, they may learn to deal with many facts in
a short period of time without short-circuiting and reaching information overload.
Their attention is quite amazing; this lesson lasted more than 45 minutes, yet
almost all students seemed attentive and involved, even though they were dealing
with ideas rather than being involved in more active physical activities.
In this lesson, the richness of information, Mr. Williams’s graphic portrayal, his
eliciting questions and answers from students, his provision for background ex¬
periences to provide a fund of knowledge to which students can relate this lesson
and from which they can draw to answer questions and construct meaning, his
enthusiasm and potentially strong modeling influence, and students’ middle-class
backgrounds combine to make this lesson what it is. No single element of the
configuration probably accounts for the students’ rapt attention, but together they
help us understand why children attend for so long and so keenly.
Learning how to deal with complex ideas by sitting and listening or reading
and discussing will be helpful for their educational careers, for most of these
children hope to attend college, and will probably do so, given their middle-class
backgrounds. But they are also important skills of social discourse. Because of
practice in dealing with complex information, children in this classroom may
have a positive attitude toward learning, thinking, dealing creatively with in¬
tellectual problems and with knowledge in general.
Intellectual discussions in Mr. Williams’s room, then, have several salient quali¬
ties. (1) They are discussions, in that they flow among participants in an easy
give-and-take and do not appear to be extensively preplanned. (2) They do not
always resolve the questions or issues raised. (3) The group is supportive of its
members. And (4), as a group, they deal with more complex information and
reach more incisive answers than individuals could alone.
In general, what do we have here? In Mr. Williams’s room, children deal with
ideas. They obtain and express the ideas through discussions, reading, drawing,
and writing. But they deal with ideas at a relatively sophisticated level for fouith
graders, apparently an appropriate level, for these children are able to function
on it. The ambience is unpressured and informal, but intellectual, and the class is
a group, not a set of twenty-six individuals.
Mr. Williams seems to respect students, encouraging them to think, organize
information, ask creative questions, and express themselves effectively in a variety
of ways. He does not talk down to them or coddle them but deals with their ideas
seriously. He seems to emphasize quality—well-organized reports, expressive
poems and artwork, insightful contributions to conversations, and creative ques¬
tions of personal importance in structuring reports. He is not afraid to tell students
matter-of-factly to generate more questions, to create a more vivid image, or to
rethink an answer, which does not seem to threaten them, foi they bounce back
and answer, write, question, or whatever. Perhaps children are stronger than
many think who write that we must be careful to accept what children say so we
don’t discourage them or thwart their creativity and interest.
This seems to be an environment that could nurture both creative problem
solving and finding particular answers. These children seem to enjoy inquiry
processes of problem solving and finding answers and may learn to enjoy leading,
wondering, and thinking for their intrinsic merit as well as for instrumental pur¬
poses of solving problems or finding answers for an extrinsic reward. Many answers
are highly creative and original, as evidenced in poems and reports, and children
also demonstrate their ability to locate specific answers for math contracts, SRA
kit work, and spelling.
260 The Educational Imagination
I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand
stars how not to dance
E. E. Cummings
261
262 The Educational Imagination
often visual images, of what schools should be, of how children should be
taught, and of how the consequences of schooling should be identified.
Language serves to reinforce and legitimize those images. Because dif¬
ferences between, say, terms such as instruction and teaching are subtle, we
often use a new word without recognizing that the new word is capable
of creating a new world.
The process of professional socialization is particularly influential in this
regard. When prospective teachers and graduate students are trained (edu¬
cated?), they are in a vulnerable position. Their careers are at stake. The
selection of reading lists used in courses, the student’s dependency on his or
her professor’s positive regard, the language that pervades the culture of
the professional school or department, the need to use the right jargon on
essays and exams, all of these factors create a powerful culture for socializa¬
tion into the profession. The images are easily instilled: it is an overstate¬
ment to say that the student’s professional life depends on it, but not much
of an overstatement. Doing well means at least in part being able to use—
indeed, to believe in—the images, concepts, and language of the culture
within which one works as a student.
In arguing the importance of images and metaphors in shaping our con¬
ception of schooling and teaching, I am not suggesting that we would be
better off imageless. All of us need some conception of education, schooling,
teaching, and the student’s role in order to deal with the professional world,
just as we need some conception of honesty, truth, virtue, and affection to
deal with our world in general. Fundamental conceptions are the bedrock
upon which we build our theoretical palaces. They are indispensable. What
I do argue is that the critical analysis of these images is seldom undertaken,
and because they enter our minds unannounced we are in a poor position to
treat them with the kind of scrutiny they deserve. What so often happens
is that when our views are challenged by those holding different ones, in¬
stead of examining our own we tend to attack theirs, thereby avoiding the
critical examination of what we believe by investing our energies in
demolishing other views. The moral here is not to rid ourselves of the con¬
ceptual structures that allow us to make sense of the world but rather to
recognize what these structures are. This will help us guard against the
unwitting internalization of subtle but powerful concepts that pervade the
pages of professional journals in education, public debate about schooling,
and other forms of persuasion and socialization.
The dominant image of schooling in America has been the factory and the
dominant image of teaching and learning the assembly line. These images
underestimate the complexities of teaching and neglect the differences be¬
tween education and training.
Tolerance for ambiguity is not a national characteristic. We are a nation
of happy endings. In the preceding pages, I have argued that both image
and language play a crucial role in shaping our conception of schooling and
A “Final” Word 263
that the images and the language that they yield are necessary for con¬
ceptualization to occur. Imageless thought is empty.
At the same time, the images we hold—whether of education, society,
democracy, or the good life—deserve analysis and critical appraisal. All
images are not created equal. The images of schooling, teaching, and
learning often reflect a factory view of schooling and an assembly-line con¬
ception of teaching and learning. Consider, for example, our interest in
control, in the productivity of schooling, in the creation of measurable
products, in the specification of criteria against which products can be
judged, in the supervision of the teaching force, in the growing breach be¬
tween labor (teachers) and management (administrator), in the talk about
quality assurance and quality control, in contract learning, in payment by
results, in performance contracting, in the hiring of probationary teachers
on the one hand and superintendents on the other. What happens is that
such terms become ubiquitous, their conceptual implications are taken foi
granted, they become a part of our way of educational life without the
benefit of critical analysis. The consequences of such concepts and the
images they imply are, in my view, devastating. They breed the illusion
of a level of precision in practice that is likely to be achieved only by re¬
ducing education to training. The assembly-line mentality that was so per¬
suasively described by Callahan in his study of the scientific management
movement in education between 1913 and 1930 has been reborn in the
1960s and is still with us. Such an image of education requires that schools
be organized to prescribe, control, and predict the consequences of their
actions, that those consequences be immediate and empirically manifest, and
that they be measurable. In such a school, the exploitation of the adven¬
titious, the cultivation of surprise, and the use of ingenuity are regarded as
“noise.” They disturb routine and require that formula be replaced with
judgment. For, as everybody “knows,’ judgment is not to be trusted.
There are several motives for the use of industrial metaphors in educa¬
tional discourse. First, the use of such metaphors implies technical acumen
on the part of the user. It affords educationists with a technical language
that suggests systematization and rationality. When one is working in com¬
plex organizations that do not lend themselves well to systematic conti ol
and long-range planning or prediction, the illusion of control and prediction
can be secured by using language from domains where control and predic¬
tion are possible. Eventually, the use of such language changes the aims of
the enterprise. Aims that do not lend themselves to the precision or criteria
that the users of such language value are deemphasized. If none of the old
aims will do, new ones are created. The curriculum specialist’s position gets
converted to that of a program manager. The education of school adminis¬
trators increasingly takes place in the business school. Education becomes
converted from a process into a commodity, something one gets and then
sells.
264 The Educational Imagination
For the lay public, the use of industrial metaphors is reassuring. School-
ing is, after all, serious business. It is not surprising that business procedures
should be regarded as more effective than discussions about mind, culture,
wisdom, imagination, sensibility, and the like. Such terms and the images
they convey have no business in an enterprise concerned with the really
serious business of getting ahead in the world.
Rationality has been conceived of as scientific in nature, and cognition has
been reduced to knowing in words; as a result, alternative views of knowl¬
edge and mind have been omitted in the preparation of teachers, ad¬
ministrators, and educational researchers.
The use of industrial metaphors in educational discourse is itself reflected
in the ways that both lay people and professional educators conceive of
human rationality. This conception is one that is scientific in nature. By
scientific here I mean scientific in the context of verification rather than
scientific in the context of discovery. To know has come to mean to be able
to state some form of proposition and to be able to verify the truth of that
proposition through scientific criteria.
Consider, for example, the term cognition. Cognition to a great many edu¬
cators is contrasted with affect: cognition refers to thinking and thinking
means linguistically mediated thought. Hence, unless one can utter in
discursive terms what one believes one knows, one does not know. Given
such a view of thought and rationality, human performance and experience
that take form in nondiscursive modes of conception and expression are
legarded as arational, somehow less a function of human intelligence and
cleaily having little to do with knowing or understanding.
This is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the use of the Scholas¬
tic Aptitude Test and the Graduate Record Examination, both of which
focus on the use of discursive language and mathematical reasoning. Each
of these areas depends on the student s ability to apply rules to the tasks
that constitute the tests. The student s intellectual ability is operationally de¬
fined as his 01 her ability to deal with such tasks, regardless of his or her
ability to deal with tasks that are not rule governed or that lie outside of
those areas of human performance or ability that the tests test. The intel¬
ligence needed to create poetry, music, or visual art simply does not count.
This view of human rationality is not only reflected on those widely used
tests, it is also reflected in elementary and secondary curricula. At the ele¬
mentary and secondary levels, the primacy of scientific rationality is evi¬
denced in the subject areas that are given priority, in the forms of human
performance regarded as most important, in the amount of time devoted to
particular fields of study, and in the requirements for graduation from
secondary schools. Approximately 90 per cent of all high school districts
require some work in the sciences as a condition for graduation. Only about
10 per cent require any work in the arts in order to graduate.
A “Final” Word 265
views. , .
The model of natural science on which much educational research is
based is probably inappropriate for most of the problems and aims of teach¬
ing, learning, and curriculum development.
One might be more sanguine about the promise of conventional forms of
educational research if past efforts had been more productive in guiding
practice. The fact of the matter is that there is precious little practice m
education that is data based. When research does guide practice it is often
because the values embedded in the research are consistent with the values
of the practitioner. In such cases, the practitioner uses the research to
legitimize what he or she already believes.
Some argue, of course, that the reason practitioners do not base their
practices on research is because they do not read it. Although it is true t at
most teachers and school administrators do not read educational research,
one can only wonder about the relationship between the effort and the
return There is little in research that can be used to guide practice; for ex¬
ample, the descriptions of the methods used in experimental research are
minimal, dependent measures almost always underestimate the range o
outcomes with which teachers are concerned, and one is almost always
forced to violate the limits of scientific generalization in applying research
findings to one’s own teaching circumstance. Even those who do expen-
266 The Educational Imagination
mental educational research in teaching seldom use the results of such re¬
search to influence their own teaching.
If research conclusions as they are now presented in the pages of educa¬
tional research journals do little more than advance the careers of educa¬
tional researchers, what function do they have in guiding practice at the
elementary and secondary levels? Educational research provides not so much
conclusions or recipes for practice as it does analytical models for thinking
about practice. I believe the models that are most readily used are those
that are consistent with the educational views one already holds. Rogerians
are seldom converted to a Skinnereian world on the basis of data.
In emphasizing the impracticalitv of conventional forms of educational
research, I many have risked overstating the case. There are some educa¬
tional practices that are based on research findings—computer-assisted in¬
struction, behavior modification techniques, the Distar Reading Program,
are examples—but compared to the world of educational practice, research-
guided practices are rare. When they do occur, it is because they are highly
focused and control oriented. When it comes to educational aims that focus
on the cultivation of productive idiosyncrasy, the development of imagina¬
tive thought, the acquisition of the skills of critical thinking, the invention of
new modes of expression, educational research has not been notably pro¬
ductive. The character of the context has imposed itself too prominently.
The contingencies are too salient when people are allowed to exercise free
will. In such contexts, rules cannot replace judgment; procedures cannot be
substituted for intelligence. The natural science model may not after all
prove to be the most helpful means for improving the quality of educational
practice or for understanding what occurs in human affairs. Our most diffi¬
cult task might reside in determining when in our concerns and aspirations
such a model of inquiry is appropriate and when other forms of inquiry
are more felicitous.
The canons of behavioral science have too often determined what shall
be studied and what shall be regarded as important in education.
The point here is straightforward. When an enterprise tacitly or explicitly
establishes certain criteria for respectable intellectual work, problems are
defined that can be treated by the methods that can meet those criteria. In
educational research, this has meant that problems that do not lend them¬
selves to methods regarded as empirically rigorous are neglected or, even
worse, dismissed as pseudoproblems or inherently meaningless ones. The
paradigm case of such occurrences is in doctoral programs, in which students
are expected to do some types of inquiry but not others, with the true ex¬
periment being the most rigorous ideal. Students who see other lights, who
wish to march to other drummers, are often subtly persuaded that they
will be seriously out of step, that nonscientific modes of inquiry (with the
exception of analytic philosophy and history) are not really acceptable ways
to do a doctoral dissertation. Furthermore, there is precious little offered
A “Final” Word 267
Because tests test what psychometricians can measure, the canons of mea¬
surement indirectly influence what is taught in schools and what priorities
will be established among those fields that are taught. Consider again the
Scholastic Aptitude Test. This test is given to approximately two million
students each year. It has two major parts: one verbal and the other mathe¬
matical. Scoring well on this test is important for admission to many col¬
leges and universities. Students who want to score well believe—whether
true or not—that the more courses they take in mathematics the more likely
they will receive high scores on the mathematical section of the SAT. Thus,
students often feel compelled to forego courses in which they may have
a genuine interest in favor of courses in mathematics that may improve
their chances for admission to the college of their choice.
The influence of testing on school curricula is also felt at the lower levels
of schooling, at the kindergarten and primary levels, where the quality of
education is judged in terms of student reading scores and at the inter¬
mediate level where tests in mathematics and language arts become the
public criteria of educational quality as test scores find their way onto the
pages of local newspapers. Few teachers can withstand the almost certain
public pressure for high scores on district- and state-mandated tests, even
if the teachers wanted to pursue educational values that those tests did
not assess. The social significance of the means used to measure student
peiformance through testing is profound. I do not believe that major
changes can be made in the content and aims of educational practice in
schools without significantly broadening the criteria and methods used to
assess educational effectiveness. The formalized rites of passage provided
by tests are likely to constrain any effort to put into practice a really broad
view of human development, despite our aspirations to the contrary.
Operationalism and Measurement have focused so heavily on behavior
that the quality of the student’s experience has been generally ignored or
seriously neglected.
The employment of empirical procedures that lend themselves to oper¬
ational definitions, definitions that can be measured, has been one of the
tenets of the social sciences. In education this has meant that overt behavior
is to be the primary referent for determining the success or failure of a new
teaching method, curriculum, or form of school organization. The measured
vaiiable referenced in what students do is critical for achieving objective
description. The quantified variable can provide a score to the third or the
fourth decimal place. Scores have attractive features; they can be added,
subtracted, averaged, multiplied, and divided. They can be subjected to
sophisticated forms of statistical analysis on the most up to date modern
computers. Statistical conclusions can be derived that provide a compelling
illusion of precision and objectivity, a value-free image of pristine descrip¬
tion, untouched by personal judgment, bias, or human failing. Furthermore,
the tests that often yield such data are prepackaged, almost hermetically
A “Final” Word 269
sealed, before the students open them, and they are identical for all students
taking the test. It is almost as if we did not want to touch or get to know
the student; the aim is to remain distant, dispassionate, aloof, unbiased.
This attitude, often erroneously regarded as a mark of scientific objec¬
tivity, leads us away from understanding the quality of life the student is
experiencing. Because our focus is on behavior, our aim is to shape that
behavior and our success is achieved when that behavior is displayed. But
what of the student s experience? How does he feel about what he is doing?
Is what she is learning becoming a part of her world view? Are the major
lessons he is learning those that are being taught? To answer these ques¬
tions, we must of course look beyond behavior. We must make inferences
from behavior about experience. We must seek an empathetic understand¬
ing of the kind of lives children lead in school. But this means that we must
make judgments, that we must attend to what is not easily standardized,
and that we must get to know students as people. These are not relation¬
ships to which operationalism and quantification lend themselves. And
when we add to this our penchant for efficient forms of standardization, all
in the name of impartiality, we risk seriously misreading what students are
learning in school. Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is not, after all, the inci¬
dence of d minor occurring in its four movements. It is not even the notes
taken in their entirety on the score. Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is first
and last music, sound, and experience. Bank forms of reductionism miss the
point, and I fear that in our efforts to be “objective” and operational we
too often miss the most telling points of school experience. Our penchant
for standardization hampers our ability to perceive what is truly unique
about students, and our preoccupation with measured behavior distracts
us from appreciating and understanding what students experience in
school and what they genuinely learn after all the test taking has been
completed.
In urging that attention be devoted to the quality of life students experi¬
ence in school, I am not suggesting that attention to performance be ne¬
glected. There has been in some schools at some periods in our educational
history so much romantic attention to the students’ feelings that the de¬
velopment of various forms of competence was seriously neglected. The
neglect of competence and the failure to foster it appropriately can be a
major source of emotional difficulty for children. Yet, our focus today is not
in that direction. Our infatuation with performance objectives, criterion-
referenced testing, competency-based education, and the so-called basics
lends itself to standardization, operationalism, and behaviorism as the vir¬
tually exclusive concern of schooling. Such a focus is, I believe, far too
narrow and not in the best interests of students, teachers, or the society
within which students live. Empathy, playfulness, surprise, ingenuity,
curiosity, individuality must count for something in schools that aim to con¬
tribute to a social democracy.
270 The Educational Imagination
The history of the curriculum field has been dominated by the aspiration
to technologize schooling and to reduce the need for artistry in teaching.
Except for notable exceptions during the progressive era and during the
free school period of the 1960s, the pervasive orientation among curriculum
theorists and school administrators has been an effort to develop a scien¬
tifically based technology of curriculum and teaching. This aspiration was
first articulated during the scientific management movement I have already
alluded to. But it also was central in the writing of those who attempted to
ground educational practice in scientifically based knowledge derived from
educational research. The optimum aim of such inquiry was to yield laws
that would do for educational practitioners what the work of Boyle, Ein¬
stein, and Bohr did for physical scientists. It was aimed at eliminating the
chancy and undependable, and replacing them with rule, procedure, and
method. What is the best method for teaching reading? What is the best
method for instruction in mathematics? What is the optimal ratio of stu¬
dents to teacher in the classroom? How can we formulate aims that are
so clear that anyone who can see can determine whether they have been
achieved? How can we study the community to discover what our educa¬
tional needs really are?
In the curriculum field, per se, this orientation culminated in the aspira¬
tion to develop teacherproof curriculum materials. Nothing was to be
left to chance. The intelligence of the teacher was not something one
trusted. Ideally, the teacher was to serve as a handmaiden to the materials
that were produced by a set of methods that approximated those used in
the manufacture of cars, washing machines, and television sets. If such
procedures worked so well in these industries, why would they not work in
schools, particularly in the design of curriculum and in the process of
teaching. Examine our metaphors: they are right out of the computer sci¬
ences and the assembly line. Somehow, if curriculum planning could be
systematized and teaching appropriately monitored, the complexities of
large schools and school systems might be managed more efficiently. The
whole affair would be simplified, everyone concerned would know just
where we want to go and how to get there: nothing would be left to chance.
For teaching, the tack has been the same: what we need is precision
teaching; we must diagnose and prescribe; we must above all individualize
instruction. Never mind that these concepts have seldom been analyzed,
they possess an aura of conceptual rigor. Particularly when the pressure
is on, the vicissitudes of art and artistry can hardly be tolerated.
What is ironic is that most administrators, I believe, would regard most
of what they do as resting on judgment rather than rnle, as more a matter of
art than a matter of science. Getting a feel for an organization, developing
a sense of where your support rests, looking for openings in which you can
move, bringing coherence and spirit to the central staff, keeping your finger
on the pulse of the community, enjoying the playing of school politics;
A “Final” Word 271
these are some of the features that dramatize the lives of school adminis¬
trators. Indeed, they are crucial for survival.
The same holds for teachers; at its best, theirs is largely an artistic act.
This is not to say that neither teachers nor administrators can use concepts
grounded in scientifically based research. It is to say that concepts and
generalizations must always be interpreted and that judgments that exceed
the information provided by the generalizations must always be made if
they are to be used in classrooms. Yet, despite practitioner’s recognition of
the arts of the eclectic, to use Schwab’s phrase, those arts seldom get ex¬
amined in the research literature. Indeed, they are often regarded with
derision, something to be excised rather than cultivated, appreciated, or
emulated. If scientific research on teaching provided more to practitioners
than it does at present, its potential might appear more promising and the
assumptions on which it is based more robust. This is not the case. Perhaps
it is time that other assumptions about teaching and curriculum planning
be entertained, not as a substitute perhaps, but surely as a complement to
what we have been doing over the last seventy-five years.
Knowing, like teaching, requires the organism to he active and to con¬
struct meaningful patterns out of experience. At base, such patterns are
artistic constructions, a means through which the human creates a concep¬
tion of reality.
Man, Aristotle once observed, by nature seeks to know. To construct a
meaningful world requires that we conceptualize patterns of the environ¬
ment, recognize the rules that are both tacit and explicit in our social life,
feel sufficiently free to play and to take risks so that conceptual invention
can occur. The creation of these patterns means in part the construction of
structures that hang together, that are coherent, that express both order and
interest and enable us to make sense of the world. This sense making is,
I believe, an artistic act. We function as the architects of our own enlighten¬
ment; we build our own conceptual edifices and we want them to be beauti¬
ful as well as serviceable.
How telling that in our vernacular we talk about a sense of justice, mak¬
ing sense of things, having a sense for what is fitting and proper. Pattern is
an inescapable quality of the organization of thought. Logic in action pre¬
ceded logic as rule. The former made the latter possible, not vice versa. But
patterning is not limited to propositions, it is a part of practical action and
of activities aimed at the creation of art, per se. For schooling, or more
properly for a theory of education, the notion that the human organism is
stimulus seeking and pattern forming is crucial. What it implies is that all
forms of learning, and some more than others, are at best creative acts. The
organism must always act, even to make simple distinctions among sensory
qualities. For the more complex forms of conception, more complex distinc¬
tions and patterns are necesary. But to make such patterns well requires an
environment supportive of exploratory thought that encourages children to
272 The Educational Imagination
tests to determine the level of interest. Out of the flux of interacting the
comedian must blend his own; a line one second late falls flat. And the
configurations change. Automaticity and reflectivity must go hand in hand.
The act must reach a crescendo and finally, when the audience has nearly
had enough, be brought to closure.
The exercise of intelligence involved in such action is apparent in a Jack
Benny, Bob Hope, Danny Thomas, or Milton Berle, yet no comedian could
give a theoretical account of why what he does 'works.’ We appreciate the
comedians’ skill, we recognize their artistry, but we do not expect from
them psychological explanations that account for their effectiveness.
Because such explanations are not forthcoming, should we regard such
activity as irrational or arational? Should we regard it as outside the realm
of intelligence? I think not. What we are seeing when we see artists work-
on the stage, in the studio, in the concert hall, and in a classroom—is not the
absence of rationality and intelligence but the ultimate manifestations of its
realization. Such individuals work with the creation and organization of
qualities, the act with the qualities of speech and gesture, the musician
with those of sound, the painter with color, line, and form, and the teacher
with words, timing, and the creation of educational environments. What all
of these artists have in common is the aspiration to confer a unique, per¬
sonal order on the materials with which they work. And most work in con¬
texts that are in a state of continual flux. No recipe will do. No routine will
be adequate, even if routines must be acquired as a part of one’s repertoire.
The point here is that much of what we know and the basis for much of
our action rest on inexpressible forms of consciousness that recognize the
feel of things and sense the qualities that lead to closure and consummation.
When we see such abilities displayed in public, whether on the stage or in
the classroom, we should give them their due. The achievement of art is
not, after all, a menial accomplishment.
The process of curriculum development, like the process of doing quanti¬
tative empirical educational research, appears much neater and much more
predictable in textbook versions of curriculum development and research
than it is in practice.
Philosophers of science characteristically distinguish in their writing be¬
tween the context of discovery and the context of verification. In the context
of verification, the rules of inference and logic are applied to determine the
veracity and consistency of statements about the world. The context of dis¬
covery, however, is another matter. How ideas are generated, how insights
are formed, and how fresh conceptions emerge into consciousness are not
now adequately understood. And so, too, in writing about curriculum devel¬
opment and in reporting the results of empirical quantitative research, the
illusion is created that the “rational” procedures outlined for describing
curricula are the ways, in fact, that curricula are, can be, or ought to be
created. It is not that the vicissitudes of curriculum development are denied,
274 The Educational Imagination
it is simply that they go unmentioned. As a result, the novice may get the
impression that curriculum development typically proceeds or ought to
proceed with the neatness with which it is described in textbooks. This is
misleading on several counts. First, it gives the inexperienced reader an
oversimplified image of a process. Second, such descriptions tacitly imply
that if one does not proceed along the lines suggested in the textbook,
something is wrong. One isn’t doing one’s job well. Third, such presenta¬
tions make curriculum development seem essentially like a technical task.
Once the objectives are formulated, the task is simply to follow a set of
steps to achieve them. Such an image fails to help students of education
know how messy program planning really is and how much flexibility, in¬
genuity, and tolerance for ambiguity are needed to do it well. But perhaps
most importantly, such a rendering of what is a complex, fluid process
serves to sustain a limited conception ’of rationality and tends to under¬
estimate the qualities of playfulness, humor, and artistry needed to do
really excellent work in the curriculum field. It is important for students of
education to understand that what is finally published is a sanitized version
of the reality that preceded it, a reality that in many ways is often far more
interesting than its written description.
The aspiration to create teacherproof materials rests on a mistake. Teach¬
ers need materials that stimulate their ingenuity rather than materials to
which they are to he subservient.
There is a temptation in the development of curriculum materials to try
to create materials that will replace the need for teachers to exercise judg¬
ment. The aim is to design materials that are so robust that they can with¬
stand even the most incompetent teaching. The reason for this aspiration is
clear: if such materials can be created, then one can control the educa¬
tional process from a distance; one can build an error-free program. Having
done this, one need not rely on the frailties of human judgment; decisions
on the part of the teacher can be minimized. Routine can replace reason.
Such an aspiration operates, of course, in the creation of the assembly
line. The ultimate manifestation of such an orientation to development is to
have the worker become an extension of the machine he or she uses. Per¬
sonal identity and idiosyncratic thought are replaced by something more
impersonal and more predictable.
Because some curriculum developers want the materials they develop to
be effective, they seek to make them as errorless as possible. All one needs
to do is to follow the directions right on the package. The aspiration to con¬
struct such teacherproof materials is, in Illich’s terms, the aspiration to
create anticonvivial tools, tools that eventually define and determine what
a person should do. Although the assembly line is a paradigm case of an
anticonvivial tool, such tools abound in cultures with high technology. In
the long run, such tools restrict rather than expand choice.
Convivial tools-the telephone, for example—expand one’s options, can be
A “Final” Word 275
used without extensive training, do not restrict what messages one can con¬
vey, and do not impose time constraints on their use. Convivial curriculum
materials can have similar characteristics. They can provide a structure
within which a teacher can operate, but they still can provide options; in¬
deed, they can stimulate ingenuity.
Although different teachers may require different amounts of detail in
the curriculum materials they use, the ultimate aim of such materials is to
minimize the teacher’s dependency on them, to offer to the teacher mate¬
rials that will foster a sense of competence both in pedagogical matters and
in the content to which pedagogy is directed. In short, one function of
well-designed curriculum materials is to free the teacher to teach, with
ingenuity, flexibility, and confidence.
Now such an aspiration, such a conception of teaching and the materials
that teachers use, seems to some to be a utopian dream. Teachers, some say,
do not as a group have the intelligence to use such materials, most do not
want to change or learn, and the creation of such materials requires a level
of sophistication that teachers do not possess. And on and on.
I believe that most people want to make their lives more interesting and
that we seek events, ideas, and materials that help us achieve a more inter¬
esting life. The view that teachers are largely dullards is, in my opinion,
false. It is simplistic and leads to a control-oriented conception of cur¬
riculum and an assembly-line view of the tasks of teaching. And even on
the assembly line the results fall far short of their goals.
The creation of curriculum materials cannot be separated from our con¬
ceptions of what teaching is and what the teacher’s role is to be. If the
teacher is to be a functionary in a system that is standardized, a system
that is intended to yield common outcomes for all students, then the aim of
standardized materials in form, content, and use is consistent. Although
there may be some educational services that lend themselves to such a
view, its pervasive use diminishes the very qualities that educational pro¬
grams, as distinct from training programs, can foster.
Differences among both educators and lay people regarding particular
educational issues and practices are often based on more fundamental,
deep-seated differences regarding the functions and aims of schooling.
Differences of opinion about the virtues of particular educational prac¬
tices are often the hubs of intense educational controversy. Should stu¬
dents be placed in tracks according to achievement? Should children be
given letter grades in elementary school? Should curriculum content include
controversial issues? Should common minimum standards exist for students
at each grade level? Should elementary schools assign homework to stu¬
dents regularly? Should teachers be encouraged to take children on field
trips? These are some of the questions for which a great deal of disagree¬
ment exists. Yet the difference among lay people and educators alike with
respect to these questions are not limited to the particular questions posed.
276 The Educational Imagination
If one digs a bit deeper, one finds far more fundamental differences in the
ways in which the contesting parties conceive of the school’s function—
indeed, in how they conceive of education itself.
The existence of disagreement about educational practices should not be
conceived of as a liability. It would be a serious liability indeed if a subject
so important as education were not a matter of concern and dispute. The
resolution of these views, even a temporary one, can be treated on two
levels: through accommodation and compromise and through encouraging
the contending parties to penetrate more deeply into the values that animate
the controversy. It is here that the school administrator has a truly educa¬
tional function to perform. That function is one of helping community
members understand the implications of their educational values, to appre¬
ciate the alternatives, and to anticipate the second- and third-order conse¬
quences of the practices they are considering. Clearly, at some point in the
debate, a state of readiness exists; the community or a portion of it is
interested in an educational issue. Before positions get crystallized, before
the prospect of a public reversal of a position makes it impossible for posi¬
tions to be altered, the school administrator can help initiate the kind of
dialogue that might educationally enlighten a community about an educa¬
tional policy.
The major orientations to education that underlie disputed policies in
schooling have been identified in Chapter 4. Although these views do not
exhaust the possible positions groups might take, the five views described
provide a framework through which the value base underlying the sympto¬
matic issues might be identified and discussed.
The factors that influence schooling may have their source far from the
school or school district.
Because schools are social institutions-that is, institutions created by the
society for the achievement of socially defined purposes—they are influ¬
enced by the forces that pervade that society. Some of these forces operate
in close proximity to the school: the availability of excellent teachers; the
support, both moral and financial, that the professional staff enjoys from
the community the school serves; and the quality of the physical resources
with which teachers and students work are a few examples. But other
factors also shape the direction and priority of the school, and some of
these are subtle. The development of a pill to control conception, for ex¬
ample, has had an enormous influence on what schools will offer students
in the way of school programs. The influence is not direct, but it is ex¬
tremely potent nevertheless, because with fewer children in school, there
is less money made available to schools by the state. With less money,
school boards must cut back on expenditures. Because most of the money
a school district expends goes into salaries, when funds are cut salaries must
be cut, and this means the loss of programs.
I use the birth control pill as one example of an important source of
A “Final” Word 277
hardly a soul who is against individualization, but when one presses for a
clarification of what the term means, too often a superficial understanding of
the term’s possibilities is revealed.
Similar conditions exist with respect to terms such as open education,
flexible scheduling, peer tutoring, learning by discovery, the inquiry method,
and the like. The virtues of such slogans for the practitioner—particularly
for those in administrative positions—is that they provide a public image of
up-to-date educational practice. In addition, they confer on the educational
practitioner who uses them in the presence of lay people an aura of tech¬
nical sophistication. Such a consequence of technical language is not un¬
usual: medicine is another prime example of an area where language is so
used. And technical language has, of course, its virtues; properly used, it
increases precision in discourse. But in education, such language is all too
often pseudotechnical; it covers up or substitutes for the kind of rigorous
thought that educational problems require.
The school is the basic unit of educational excellence.
By and large the most “natural” unit in schooling is the school. The school
both physically and psychologically defines the environment of teachers and
students. It is the school that establishes the structure within which teachers
and students must function and that establishes a territory distinct from the
rest of life. The school possesses a physical character that no other aspect of
education can achieve: a school district is too large and a classroom is an in¬
tegrated part of the physical structure of the school. The school stands out
as an entity; it is something that secures allegiance and provides students
with an identity.
But beyond the physical characteristics of the school and their impact on
our perception, the school defines a set of social parameters, as well. The
structure of classrooms, the rules, time schedules, and the psychological
climate create the milieu within which the purposes of schooling are
realized.
For the school to function as an organization, some modus vivendi must
be established, some balance must be secured among the forces that ani¬
mate it. As in a living organism, the parts exist in a transactional state, and
changes in one part must be compatible with the rest of the structure or the
changes must be so potent as to change the rest of the organizational struc¬
ture. If the structure of the school as a whole is resistant to change, as is
true of many schools, then it is likely that the change agent will itself be
changed rather than the school.
Consider, for example, the life-style of beginning teachers. Beginning
teachers often enter the school with strong aspirations acquired during their
professional training or on their own. Most new teachers soon realize that
their aspirations must be significantly changed to fit the school. For some
teachers, the compromise is such a difficult ethical problem that they choose
to leave teaching rather than alter their core educational values. After a few
A “Final” Word 281
years of teaching, those who choose to remain adapt to the institutional press
and eliminate the sharp corners of professional idiosyncrasy. They become
a well-rounded lot, a more homogeneous and adaptive group that does
what it needs to survive.
Because the press of the institution is so significant, the problem of bring¬
ing about change within classrooms cannot be isolated from the school’s
constraints on and incentives for change. In this regard, the principal of the
school is of central importance. In general, the principal sets the tone for
the school and provides the formal positive and negative sanctions, even
when a well-regulated evaluation system is not in force. His or her expecta¬
tions for punctuality, record keeping, student performance levels, educa¬
tional priorities, and the like are communicated in both formal and in¬
formal ways. Other factors, including timetables, the allocation of fiscal re¬
sources, and the allocation of space, further define both what counts in
school and what is possible. Given these conditions, attention to the macro¬
structure of the school becomes crucial for those interested in raising the
quality of the educational experience for students. It is difficult for a teacher
to sustain a mode of teaching or to achieve educational aims that are con¬
tradicted daily by the culture in which he or she works. Such a teacher must
almost always adapt to or leave the school; only in rare cases can a teacher
alter the macrostructure. So what I am arguing is that the professional life¬
style of the teacher is significantly shaped by the characteristics and struc¬
ture of the living organism we call a school. In a rational model of schooling,
the form of the school organizationally as well as physically follows the
function it is intended to perform. In the real world, it is more often the
case that the function of the school is defined by the forms we create to
manage it.
The current emphasis in schools on verbal and mathematical reasoning
seriously biases our conception of human intelligence and significantly im¬
pedes the development of socially valuable interests and aptitudes.
The coin of the realm in schooling is words and numbers, so much so as
to constitute a form of educational inequity for students whose aptitudes
are in realms other than verbal or mathematical. Consider the impact of
testing on the educational mobility of students. Virtually all achievement
tests given to students in elementary and secondary schools by school dis¬
tricts or state education agencies assess verbal or mathematical performance.
Students whose aptitudes are verbal or mathematical or who have oppor¬
tunities out of school to learn in these areas of human performance are ad¬
vantaged. The game being played, as it were, is consistent with their back¬
grounds or capacities.
But what of those students whose aptitudes lie outside of these realms:
the dancer, the poet, the painter, the filmmaker, the composer? As things
now stand, their aptitudes never enter the equation for calculating intel¬
lectual ability. To clarify this problem, consider what would happen if
282 The Educational Imagination
The specific forms that such planning might take may differ from school
to school, but the need to work in an environment that allows—indeed puts
a premium on—the teachers’ and administrators’ professional growth will
not.
One of the things I have learned in talking to school administrators is
that a great many of them moved into school administration to escape the
constraints and the routine of the classroom. What they were seeking was
not so much power or money but a more interesting professional life, a
wider field in which to play. The creation of an expanded professional life
space, the development of an environment that is educational for teachers
and administrators as well as students, is, I believe, one of the most seriously
neglected needs in education.
Incrementalism is a useful way to change schools if one has a sense of the
place of the increment in a larger pattern or strategy for change.
Virtually every student of education has the aspiration to change schools,
that is, to bring about improvement in the ways in which schools function.
Yet it has been observed by students of change and by those who are old
enough or interested enough to have a long view that, although change in
schooling occurs, it often occurs in spite of our efforts to bring it about.
Schools change—and they have changed significantly in structure and form
over the last fifty years—because of developments in the society more than
because of the efforts of educators to bring them about. This should not be
surprising. The form and function of schooling are closely related to the
values and expectations of the society. People expect the schools to support
the values they hold. Significant deviation from those values is seldom
tolerated.
For some students of education, the situation called for a radical or revolu¬
tionary approach to schooling. They believed that, somehow, enlightened
pupils and the enlightened adults in the community could radically alter
the character of American schooling. If this could not be done within the
existing system, then new schools-free schools-would be established to
serve as an alternative.
The animation of the late 1960s has all but dissipated, and free schools
are largely dead. Even in their prime they touched less than 1 per cent of
the students in American schools. If revolution within the schools is not a
viable means of bringing about improved forms of schooling, then what is?
Two answers seem to me to be possible. One is that educators can have no
significant impact on the character of schooling and therefore must always
follow rather than lead the aims of the polity. The other is that schools can
change on a guided, incremental basis through the efforts of those in the
field of education. The former view severely constrains the aspirations of
those who attempt to conceptualize and develop better educational pro¬
grams. If one regards change in the schools as a result of the forces of
history, the prospects for professional educational leadership are dim. To
A “Final” Word 285
be sure, those forces occur and are potent, yet history also indicates that
there have been schools that have had the kind of leadership and com¬
munity support to rise above these so-called irresistible forces. Further¬
more, in an incremental process educators can develop the kind of coalition
with other educators and lay groups to support the forms of educational
practice that they value. This process is at base a political one, but it can,
and I would argue should, be based on an educationally enlightened con¬
stituency. This means, of course, that the leadership of the school or school
district must regard its clients to be not only the pupils who attend the
schools, but also the community that supports them. This kind of leader¬
ship must tread a narrow line between the desire to impose a perspective—
which is likely to fail—and the desire simply to serve the prevailing per¬
spective. School administrators and teachers, theoretically at least, are by
virtue of their training better prepared to contribute to the dialogue about
both the means and ends of schooling.
I realize that many—perhaps even most—teachers and school administra¬
tors do not have such skills and understandings at present, but it is the
principle I am arguing for, not the status quo. I would like schools to be
better than they are. I believe that educators should lead the dialogue about
schooling, and I believe that enlightened dialogue can contribute to the
creation of improved educational practice. Such an aim need not require a
revolution. It can be achieved through a gradual process that incrementally
seeks the approximation of an educational ideal.
Schools teach both more and less than educators realize.
In Chapter 5 I pointed out that each school offers children three cur¬
ricula: the explicit curriculum that is public and advertised, the implicit
curriculum that teaches because of the kind of culture that a school is, and
the null curriculum, those voids in educational programs that withhold from
students ideas and skills that they might otherwise use. The utilities of dis¬
tinguishing among these types of curricula are several. First, it allows one to
raise questions about what children are learning that would never be identi¬
fied if one were to focus only on the intended goals of the explicit cur¬
riculum. We tend in the planning of school programs to act as though what
schools explicitly teach constitutes the whole of what students learn. Yet
what schools teach by virtue of their structure, their expectations, their
timetables, and their rules might in fact have a much greater impact on
what students learn.
Second, by distinguishing among these three types of curricula we are
in a position to evaluate the consequences of each. A school might offer an
exhilarating course on critical thought about social problems and yet might,
in its general culture, be promulgating a type of intellectual dependency
that contradicts the values and skills the course attempts to foster. Con¬
sider, for example, the use of student hall guards in secondary schools. In
some schools, such guards are on duty at every intersection in the building.
286 The Educational Imagination
Monitoring these halls guards are teachers, one assigned to each floor oi
section of the school. Monitoring these teachers is a vice-principal who from
time to time makes rounds to be sure that the teachers are on duty; the
teachers in turn monitor the hall guards, who in turn ask each student who
walks through the halls after classes have begun to see his or her hall pass.
What we have is a hierarchical system, all in the service of control. One
might wonder what such a system teaches students who are enrolled in
courses dealing with critical thought about social problems.
Third, these distinctions remind curriculum planners to look beyond what
is now traditionally offered in school programs in order to identify areas of
human understanding that have been neglected. A great deal is offered to
students in school that is not a function of choice but rather a function of
tradition. Much of what we teach, we teach because it has always been
taught. The concept of the null curriculum reminds curriculum planners to
ask about what has been neglected. For example, which forms of knowing
have been omitted and what is their significance? What are the potential
consequences of curricular neglect? I am not suggesting that the program of
the school can teach everything or that it can be all things to all people. I
am suggesting that content inclusion-content exclusion decisions are among
the most important decisions curriculum planners can make. These deci¬
sions, as far as possible, should be made with appropriate consideration to
what one rejects as well as to what one accepts for inclusion in school
programs. What we don’t teach might be just as important as what we do.
The complexities and significant qualities of educational life can he made
vivid through a method used to describe, interpret, and evaluate other cul¬
tural forms. This method is one of criticism; in education it can he regarded
as educational criticism.
One of the central focuses of this book concerns the influence that testing
has on the ways in which we conceive of the effectiveness of schooling, cur¬
ricular content, and educational aims. Since the turn of the century, testing
has rested on fundamental beliefs about how we come to know; our use of
testing as means of educational evaluation is itself rooted in the epistem¬
ology of science. Knowledge about educational practice and its conse¬
quences is to be derived by applying methods of social science to the study
of education. The more closely those methods approximate those used in
the laboratory, the more positive we can be about their conclusions.
Although I do not advocate abandoning scientific methods to study edu¬
cational phenomena, I have argued in this book that those methods in no
way exhaust the means through which educational phenomena can be
studied. This book has attempted to provide not an alternative but rather
an invitation to the pursuit of a complementary approach. The approach
that my students and I have been using at Stanford University is called edu¬
cational criticism. It depends on the observation and appreciation of the
events or materials that constitute educational life. The object of such at-
A “Final” Word 287
289
290 Index
Curriculum (cont.)
revision, 170-171
worker, 5 Faculty psychologists, 51
Feldman, Edmund, 90
Field testing, 132
Flexible purposing, 38, 161
D Formative evaluation, 170
Free schools, 59
Darwin, Charles, 46, 56, 87 Freud, Sigmund, 56
Descriptive theory, 45-46
Desegregation, 29-30
Development of cognitive processes, G
51
Dewey, John, 6-9, 17, 38, 44^45, 67, Gagne, Robert, 10
74, 99, 124-125, 156, 161, Galtung, John, 65
191, 194 Garvey, Marcus, 30
Diagnosis, 168-170 Geertz, Clifford, 208, 216
Dictionary of Psychology, The, 84 Ghandi, Mahatma, 56
Dillard, Annie, 204 Glaser, Robert, 10
Dilthey, William, 18 Glass, Gene, 17
Discursive forms, 198-199 Goals, 116-117
Donmoyer, Robert, 229 Goodlad, John, 10
Dreeben, Robert, 75, 78 Group deliberation, 147-148
Du Rois, W. E. B., 30 Guilford, J. P., 52, 121
E
H
Early childhood education (ECE), 2
Harap, Henry, 8
Economics, 88-89
Harbo, Torstein, 17
Educational accountability, 4
Hart Bill SB 3408, 3
Educational consciousness, 26, 32
Hentig, Hartmut von, 17
Educational connoisseurship, 219, 286
Herbert, Spencer, 50
Educational criticism, 185, 220-260,
Herrick, Virgil, 67
286, 287
Hidden persuaders, 89
Educational objective, 105
Holt, John, 59
Educational science, 6
Hothouse trials, 131-132
Educational slogans, 279-281
Hull, Clark, 95
Educational Testing Service, 4
Hutchins, Robert Maynard, 55-57
Einstein, Albert, 56, 86
Eliot, T. S., 1
Enrollment, 22-23, 32
Equal education, 29 I
Erickson, Fredrick, 205
Ethnography, 19 Ibo, 30
Evaluation, 12 Identification of educational needs,
Explicit curriculum, 91, 285 172-173
Expressive outcomes, 103-104 Ife, 30
Index 291
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