Reflection 4

Important Personalities In The History Of American Curriculum

Charles William Eliot

1834-1926

He transformed a provincial college into the preeminent American research university. His main focus was the role of education in every aspect of national life and to find the relation between education and economic growth. He was offered an opportunity to enter the world of active business but he was more interested in science because science answered the questions of practical men, conferred knowledge, and power for those who use it. His educational vision combined the important elements of Unitarian and Emersonian ideas about developing character, framed by a pragmatic understanding of the role of higher education. He wrote an article named “The New Education” that not only focused on curriculum but the ultimate utility of education. He believed that a college education would give a student the ability to make intelligent decisions and choices.

Col. Francis W. Parker
1837-1902

Referred as “father of progressive education”. His main goals were: to mo the child to the center of the education process and to interrelate the several subjects such as a way to enhance the meaning to the child. He was committed to organizing schools as a democratic community and he also wanted to establish principle of teaching that derived from the principles of the mind.

Charles Sanders Peirce
1839-1914

A philosopher, mathematician and physicist. Founder of pragmatic movement in American philosophy. His main interest was logic where he developed the logic of relations. He also made an important contribution to other field of modern logic. He was especially interested in methodological procedures as evidence in laboratory science.

William James

1842-1910

He was an American psychologist and philosopher who wrote influential books on science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism.

G. Stanley Hall

1844-1924

Was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His main focus was on childhood development and evolutionary theory. He was instrumental in the development of educational psychology and attempted to determine the effect of adolescence has on education. He believed that pre-adolescent children are savage and rationalizing that reasoning was a waste of time for children. He also believed that open discussion and critical opinion were not to be tolerated and that students needed to be indoctrinated in order to save them from individualism that was damaging the American culture.



Ella Flagg Young

1845-1918

The assistant superintendent of schools in Chicago and later became a faculty member at the University of Chicago. She argued that both students and teachers found their capacity for independent thought diminished by a system that made little provision for it. During her career she led the Chicago schools through a period of change were industrialization rapidly dominated the economy and diverse new populations arrived. The school that she created that all teachers and administrators discussed curriculum and logistical matters.

Booker T Washington
1856-

Washington’s views on education were that he wanted for black in the south to value the need for industrial education from a vantage of American and African experience. He wanted for school to be more than just a place where people learn to read and write in English. He emphasized the importance of the industrial curriculum in the Tuskegee’s curriculum. He wanted for southern blacks to become farmers, carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers, cooks, laundresses, sewing women, etc. so he increased over the years the trade skill classes offered.

Thorstein Veblen
1857-1929

He believed that technological developments would eventually lead toward a socialistic organization of economic affairs. His main focus was to teach economist the effects of social and cultural change on economic changes. He was the co-founder of the American school of institutional economics.

John Dewey
1859-1952

His areas of work included philosophy, psychology, education, politics, and social thought. He is considered to be a preeminent voice in American educational philosophy which is called “progressive education”. He believed that schools should teach students how to be problem-solvers by helping students to learn how to think instead of learning about large amount of information.

Jane Addams

1860-1935

The founder of Hull-House, which was located in the center of a poor immigrant Chicago neighborhood. The main purpose of the hull-house was to deliver a variety of programs that will help individuals improve their quality of life and for participatory action research. She believed in self-expression, learning to play, and active engagement.

George Herbert Mead

1863-1931

He was a major figure in the history of American philosophy and one of the founders of pragmatism. Mead’s theory of the emergence of mind and self out of the social process of significant communication has become the foundation of the symbolic interactionist school of sociology and social psychology. His significant contributions to the philosophy of nature, philosophy of science, philosophical anthropology, philosophy of history and process philosophy.

Marietta Johnson

1864-1938

She was a teacher that founded the School of Organic Education to put in practice John Dewey’s book Schools of Tomorrow. She did not believe in examinations, homework and that any child should be allowed to fail. Her educational philosophy played an important role in the components of learning. The idea that started the revolution was “Children should be active in all their learning; in fact learning is a consequence and accompaniment of activity. Not only do we learn to do by doing, but all learning is through experience.”

WEB Dubois

1868-1963

An American civil rights activist that attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of 20th Century racism. He did not share the same view as Booker T. Washington of integration between blacks and whites, he wanted for an increase political representation for blacks in order to guarantee civil rights and the formation of Black elite to work for the progress of the African American race. He thought that blacks should seek higher education and he believed that blacks should challenge and question whites on all grounds.

Emma Goldman

1869-1940

She was a known rebel, an anarchist, ardent proponent of birth control and free speech, a feminist, a lecturer and a writer.

William Heard Kilpatrick

1871-1965

He was a successor of John Dewey and the leading figure in the American progressive education movement. His theory of learning was emphasized on “purposeful activity” in order to engage students while they worked on a variety of projects.

Boyd H. Bode

1873-1953

The leading spokesperson of Progressive education and a founder of American pragmatism. Many of his work were focused on educational issues and he began to teach seminars on educational theory. He published many works such as Democracy and Education, Fundamentals of Education, Conflicting Psychologies of Learning, Democracy as a Way of Life and Progressive Education at the Crossroads. His works are one of the surest and most pleasant roads to understand pragmatism and education.

William C Bagley

1874-1946

He was referred to as the founder of essentialist educational theory. At the beginning of his professional life he would dedicate to the improvement of teaching. His major book, the Educative Process was a comprehensive portrayal of an early science education. He offered several basic educational principles: the right of an immature student to the guidance of well-educated, caring, and cultured teachers demanded a democratic culture, a specific program of studies that required thoroughness, accuracy, persistence, and good workmanship on the part of the pupils.

Mary McCleod Bethune

1875-1955

She was an American educator and a civil rights leader that was best known for starting a school for black students in Florida.

Werrett Wallace Charters

1875-1952

A professor and director of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University, he contributed to the field of curriculum development and audiovisual technology. His contribution to the field of curriculum development came in the form of activity-analysis approach to curriculum construction. The activity analysis was considered a scientific approach to curriculum construction.

John Franklin Bobbitt

1876-

He began a Curriculum of Modern Education with an explication of his view of “The Good Life”, were he developed four consistent ideas: emphasis on the importance of general education, inability to predetermine future lives and roles of students, necessity for schools to develop individuals’ intellect rather than to train them for work, and a respect for many of the classic authors of “great books” from the Western tradition.

Jessie A. Charters

1880-???

She was one of the pioneers in the field of adult education, surmounting curricular, gender and economic barriers. She founded the Department of Adult Education at Ohio State University and her major interest was parental education. Her work was to bring education to parents, college-age women and alumni; she expanded the scope of continuing education to a diverse audience.


Harold Goddard Rugg

1883-1957

He published textbook for social sciences which were the most progressive textbooks used in schools at the time. His writing addressed problems that dealt with unemployment, immigration and consumerism, represented the expression of the progressive education. After Robey’s review public schools stopped using Rugg’s books and in some communities they were burnt.

George S. Counts

1889-1974

Wrote “The Principles of Education” that focused on the philosophical, psychological, and methodological overview of American Education. He shared the child-centered movement in progressive education. Counts wanted for teachers to lead society instead of following it. He believed that school was an agency involved in society’s politics, economics, art, religion, and ethics.





Hilda Taba

1902-1967

She was a curriculum theorist, curriculum reformer, and teacher educator. Her contribution to theoretical and pedagogical foundations that helped laid the foundation to diverse students in schools. Taba’s dissertation has three key ideas that are important for curriculum. First arguing that learning should be modeled instead of just observing, predicting and measuring. Second arguing that children need to learn how to solve problems and resolve conflicts. Third arguing that teachers need to provide students a conceptually sound curriculum that is organized and taught effectively. Taba created the Spiral of Curriculum Development which is a graphic organizer designed to illustrate concept development for elementary social studies.

Mortimer Adler

1902-2001

An American philosopher, educator and author. He was a Perennialist that believed that philosophy should become part of mainstream public school curriculum. He also believed that education should be the same for everyone and the education should be liberal, non-specialized education without electives or vocational classes. In his point of view education never ends, the earliest a person truly is “educated” only then he can devote himself to a life of learning. He wrote plans for public schools in the United States but his ideas had most impact at the college level.




Ralph W. Tyler

1902-1994

An American educator that worked in the field of assessment and evaluation. He developed the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Some of his contributions to education were agencies such as National Science Board, Research and Development Panel of the U.S. Office of Education, National Advisory Council on Disadvantaged Children, Social Science Research Foundation, and others.

John Goodlad

1920-

His book ‘The Nongraded Elementary School’, proposed that the educations systems has flaws and her gave some alternative methods to address those flaws. The book proposed two elements of the nongraded system, first was that curriculum is centered on continual and sequential learning and second organizing groups around various combinations (age, achievements, heterogeneous, etc.).

Paulo Freire

1921-1997

He was a Brazilian educationalist that made a significant impact on progressive practice. He drew a number of strands of thinking about educational practice and liberation. The five aspects of his work are: language and mystical concerns, argue in an either/ or way, everyday situation to become pedagogical, liberatory practice, and model of literacy.