CURRICULUM THEORIES

Curriculum is a major subsystem of educational process. As a sub system of

education, curriculum should have unique properties and functions that distinguish it from
other subsystems. A curriculum theory therefore must explain various characteristics and
relationships among the unique properties and functions of curriculum sub system.

A theory may be defined as a set of related statements that are arranged so as to

provide functional meaning to a series of events. The set of related statements may take the
form of descriptive or functional definitions, operational constructs, assumptions, postulates,
hypotheses, generalizations, laws or theorems. Let us apply these basic idea about a theory to
the idea of curriculum theory. If a theory is a set of related statements that are arranged so as
to give functional meaning to a set or series of events, a curriculum theory is a set of related
statements that gives meaning to a curriculum by pointing up the relationship among its
elements and by directing its developments, its use and its evaluation. The subject matter of a
curriculum theory is may be events associated with the decision about a curriculum, the
development of a curriculum, curriculum design, curriculum evaluation, and so forth.

A number of curriculum theorists have emphasized the multifaceted nature of the concept of
curriculum which is constructed, negotiated and renegotiated at a variety of levels and in a
variety of contexts. Curriculum as one of the most intriguing concepts in the educational
arena can be defined in multiple ways. Some considers curriculum as the process aspect of
education while some others defines curriculum as a product or educational outcome. The
various conceptions given to curriculum can be classified into four.

1. A technicist approach which privileges its own definition according to the context.
2. a pluralist approach to the definition of curriculum — here the definition varying
according to the purpose which is to be accomplished;
3. a practice-oriented conception which believes that searching for a definition of
curriculum is a waste of time,' and finally,

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 4. the post-structuralist conception which places curriculum in a context of impossibility
of meaning, implying that people make definitions in order to control the object of
definition. The result of this last conception is that definitions are best avoided.

The multiplicity and variety of ways in which curriculum has been used and defined has, in
turn, had repercussions on the state of curriculum inquiry.

The word curriculum derives from the Latin word currere, originally meaning the circuit of a
race. In relation to education, the word may be taken to mean the path, way or track of a
course of study. Etymologically, therefore, curriculum means a prescribed content of study;
not a syllabus or a statement of aims but an outline of the subject matter.

Different perspectives on curriculum can broadly be divided into five major categories –
Rousseau’s Naturalistic paradigm,the objective based traditional and technicist theories,John
Dewey’s Pragmatic and progressivist standpoint, critical or modern theories and Alternative
theories on curriculum. Let us have a brief discussion on these theoretical paradigms

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 1. Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Naturalistic Paradigm

History of curriculum theory trace back to 18th century French Philosopher Jean Jacques
Rousseau, who proposed an educational theory founded in naturalism. According to him,
there should be a connection between nature and educational experiences. Nature is the only
source of knowledge. He argued that man is the product and part of nature. He advocated
natural and autonomous development of the learner, which is the pioneering perspective on
learner centred system of education. His ideas on education and curriculum popularly known
as negative education in which students should be free of social order and subject to natural
order. Negative education is against bookish, classroom based, institutionalized, moral based
formal educational system. He advocated learners’ freedom and development of discipline by
natural consequences. Rousseau proposed his ideas through his seminal work contract de
social and his educational treatise Emile

2. The Objective based Traditional Theory of Curriculum

This objective based theory also labelled as the traditional or technicist approach, derives
from Ralph Tyler's seminal work Basic principles of curriculum and instruction (1949),
which focusses on the principles of curriculum, in contrast to the question of curriculum as a
'problem' involving deficient choices and decisions made on the basis of strong, and therefore
challengeable, perceptions. Tyler listed the four basic elements of curriculum

1. educational purposes a Educational Institution seeks to attain

2. selection of experiences useful in reaching these purposes
3. organization of these learning experiences
4. evaluating effectiveness of these learning experiences.

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This approach has laid a variety of definitions or descriptions of curriculum. Most of the
emphasis, however, in contrast to Tyler's original formulation, has been on the first element,
objectives. In this theory, according to Furst, the curriculum needs a set of objectives to
qualify as a rational activity and is defined as the programme of activities which will enable
pupils attain these educational objectives. Hence, curriculum in this theoretical notion
considers as a programme of activities by teachers and pupils designed so that pupils will
attain as far as possible certain educational and other Educational Institutioning purposes or
objectives.To those objectivistic theorists, Curriculum is all planned experiences provided by
the Educational Institution to assist the pupils in attaining the designated learning objectives
to the best of their abilities. Theorists call it as a structured series of intended learning
outcomes. There are four areas covered by a theory of curriculum as objectives, knowledge,
evaluation and learning experiences and implies that the curriculum is the learning which is
planned and guided by the educational institution, carried on individually or in groups, inside
or outside the institution.

The objective based approach has been criticized for its assumptions of linearity and its
reliance on behaviouristic conceptions of human beings and education. The main criticism of
objective based theories is that the focus of such an approach is mechanical and
decontextualised. Looking at education as an instrumental and mechanical activity, it denies
the concept of education as a process which has value in itself.

Grundy's similar critique is implicit in the very title of her book: Curriculum: Product or
praxis, which attacks the product or commodity or technicist approach to curriculum and
explores an understanding of curriculum as praxis in the neo Marxian sense of the term.

Barrow (1984) provides a critical review of definitions which originate from a technicist or
an instrumentalist and behaviourist approach. Essentially the curriculum planners' task is seen
with reference to the objectives of student learning. The task is to provide teaching strategies,
learning activities and evaluative devices, so that these selected objectives may be realized in

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the classroom. The emphasis here is on the teacher as an implementer of the curriculum,
assessing needs, designing objectives, strategies and tests. These approaches to curriculum
theory are essentially mechanical, universalizing aiming at generalizability similar to natural
sciences and non-sociological. They are products of the initial manifest alliance between the
fields of education and psychology. They assume ideals valid across time and space; an ideal
learner, an ideal learning apparatus, an ideal product of a given curriculum, an ideal
curriculum and— by extension— an ideal way to formulate curricula across disciplines. As
Apple (1982) puts it, for the major part of this century, education in general and the
curriculum field in particular has devoted a good deal of its energy to the search for one
specific thing - a general set of principles that would guide educational planning and
evaluation. In large part, this has reduced itself to attempts at creating the most efficient
method of doing curriculum work.

Concurrently, sociologists have paid attention to the social indices of the educational activity
and to education as a social system. Emile Durkheim in his theory of Organic analogy,
conceived of society as an organism, the parts intrinsically related to the whole and
subordinate to it. Society, accordingly, stood in a somewhat organic relationship to its
individual members, the latter virtually existing for the maintenance and perpetuation of the
former.

A Hobbesian view of essential human nature made Durkheim see the primary social problem
as one of control, organization and discipline - its individual consequence being 'morality'.
Education, therefore, for Durkheim, became the primary means of socialization - producing
'moral' members of society - and allocation and training of various human resources for
variousroles in the economy. Education socializes by imparting common sets of norms and
values for the development of moral behavior to the younger generation, thus generating
among the members of society a consensus on these matters. This is what Durkheim calls
moral education. The ‘objectives' and 'product' orientation of Durkheimian sociology forms
the intellectual context for the similar orientation of the curriculum theorists suggested by
Tylor and his followers. In fact, one of the crucial characteristics of the positivist,
behaviourist, functionalist approach, highlighted by Grundy (1987), is its technicist firmness
on the input-output model of education. By paying no attention to process, this approach
assumes the neutrality or transparency of the process which, in fact, is a conflictive, power-
ridden one.

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Parsonian structural functionalism in the United States of the 1950s, is a working out of
Durkheim's conceptions. Most of the objective oriented curriculum theories consciously or
implicitly, from psychological behaviourism on the one hand and Durkheimian-Parsonian
sociology, which is itself behaviourist in its conception of human beings, on the other hand.
Objective based traditional curriculum theory dominated the educational scenario all over the
world until 1990s. This approach is widely criticized as mechanical and teacher oriented and
less learner oriented. There is a shift in emphasis of curriculum theories after 1990s from
objective based theories to critical and reconceptualised theories all over the world.

3. Critical or reconceptaulized theories of Curriculum

The theories of Marx and Weber and all neo Marxian theorists are in a peculiar position
of conflicting nature of society. Marxist epistemology, in many respects is positivist.
However, Marxist theory's view of human nature is rather Rousseauistic as opposed to the
Hobbesian pessimism of Talcot Parsons and Emile Durkheim. In addition, society is seen as
conflict and class ridden. Power is governed by the inequitable distribution of resources. The
central problem for Marxist theories of society is not social control obtained through
consensus, but class-division, conflict and injustice. The consensus required by Parsonian
theory is seen as ideological legitimation of the domination of the ruling groups. Most
importantly, Marxist social analysis and its theory of the modes of production provides a
rooting in historical movement and offers a theory of social change. In contrast, structural
functionalism provides only a theory of stability and social maintenance.

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 Education, in terms of Marxist theory, is an element of the superstructure of the social
formation, ultimately determined by the economic base and, in turn functioning to maintain
the economic-politico-social status quo. The positivist epistemology of classical Marxism
leads to a position very similar to Parsonian functionalism; education reproduces and
maintains the existing social formation. Unlike functionalism, however, Marxism's
fundamental perception of an unjust, oppressive and conflictual status quo, enables it to
attach a negative value to the control and maintenance function of society.

Unlike sociological functionalism, where order is assumed and deviance from that
order is problematic, Marxist and Neo-Marxist analyzethis in a different way. Rather than a
functional coherence where all things work relatively smoothly to maintain a basically
unchanging social order, these analysis point to 'the contested, reproduction of society's
fundamental relations, which enables society to reproduce itself again, but only in the form of
a dominant and subordinate social order.The notions of alienated labour and human creativity
lead to a concept of praxis of human agency which, alongside the development of the
economic forces and relations of production, becomes the motive force of social change in
the direction of a just and equitable social order.

Educational theory and curriculum theory of Marxist inspiration initially tended to lay
adevastating stress on the reproduction and social maintenance consequences of existing
educational systems (Bourdieu, 1990). Robinson (1994) also indicates that this emphasis had
the methodological consequence of focussing on macro-level systems through sweeping
generalizations which left little scope for specific identification of weak spots for corrective

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action. The result was a certain pessimism, a sense of the vast power of structures and
complete helplessness of the human beings trapped in them. This led to an awareness, on the
one hand, of the need to turn from macro generalizations to the examination of micro
situations, and, on the other hand, of the need to recognize andexplore the role of human
agency and resistance within existing structures. In curriculum terminology, this examination
helps to move away from the administrator's curriculum in order to focus on what teachers
and students might make of it or grassroots curriculum. Apple, a critical curriculum theorist,
whose early work, Ideology and curriculum (1979), emphasizes the role of curriculum in
reproducing social structures, explains his own move, in Education and power (1982),
towards a more agency-oriented approach in terms of the Educational Institution as a
productive, as well as reproductive apparatus.

These critical theory perspectives also draw upon Weberian sociology and its analysis
of stratification based on factors other than economic ones as well as Weber's study of the
role of the bureaucracy.

To summarise, what distinguishes the radical approach to society, education and

curriculum is its conflictual model of society and its ultimate emancipatory aim of education
for social justice which does not necessarily underlie all constructivist,micro-level inquiry
concerned with the creation and negotiation of meaning.

The radical approaches sketched here, provide the context within which one may
place the alternative approaches to curriculum generally labelled the "reconceptualist". These
approaches usually draw upon Marxist and Weberian theory and from the sociology of
knowledge. However, their attitudes to existing social systems differ considerably, in the
extent of their radicalness — ranging from pure hermeneutic analysis of meaning creation or
negotiation for its own sake to explicitly political commitments to social transformation.

4. John Dewey’s Pragmatic and progressivist standpoint.

Before proceeding to discuss recent developments of the reconceptualist kind in curriculum

theory, it may be instructiveto look at the turn-of-the-century philosopher, John Dewey. John
Dewey, A modern American educator and advocate of pragmatic philosophy proposed a
curriculum which is experimental in nature. He believed that there is a genuine need for
inquiry into real life situations and problems. A genuine thought always start with
problematic puzzling situation. Teachers must provide social experience to learners to ensure
creative and novel solutions of problem in natural settings. It is the prime duty of educator to
provide a free and democratic atmosphere in educational settings. According to him
curriculum must provide free and real life experiences and those must be purposeful from the

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point of view of individual as well as society. His popular work democracy and education
gives an outline of educational practices in a democratic society. John Dewey’s work on
education made educational process purposeful and realistic project based mode of
transaction emerged out of this line of thinking on curriculum.

Dewey's conceptions of education in general and the curriculum in particular, appear

to stand somewhere midway between the two extremes of the reconceptualist approaches.
Dewey's ideas were motivated primarily by his perception of the irrelevance of contemporary
curricula to the lives of children and of the disjunction between the mechanical instruction
that the child received in Educational Institution and it’s real life experiences in the family
and society of Dewey's time. His alternative revolved around two crucial insights: (i) the
essentially ethical and moral nature of all education and (ii) the use of productive occupations
as proposed by Gandhiji as the coreof any curriculum with the academic matter to be built
around it.

Educational development, According to Dewey, does not mean just getting something
out of the mind. It is a development of experience and into experience that is really wanted'.
If the child grows into experience, there is development of experience: from the standpoint of
the child, the subject matters function in such a way that the child grows, develops, fulfills
itself in experience and by experience; from the standpoint of the curriculum certain subject
matter is now taken into the experience of the child, which is a way of saying that the
curriculum grows by including the child's experience.

Thus Dewey's answer to the problem of irrelevance of existing educational curricula

is to replicate life situations in the Educational Institution so that child, teacher and
curriculum interact in a specific situation that enables all three to feed into each other and
grow. Similarly, his comments on the relationship between research and the educational

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activity indicate that "'no conclusion of scientific research can be converted into an
immediate rule of educational art'’’. At the most, the findings of such research can be taken
as directing attention to certain areas of specific educational contexts. It becomes evident
from the above that unlike the proponents of the objectivist theories, Dewey declines to see
education as a means to an extraneous end.Education rather, is itself defined as an ethical
activity which dialectically links the student and the world in a process of mutual growth.
Many of these elements recur in the reactions of the reconceptualists against the Tylerian
influence.

5. Alternative theories on Curriculum

There is a recent influence of the critical sociology formulated by Freire (1972, 1973),
Illich (1973), on the curriculum of nonformal educational experiments in which seek to
develop a "pedagogy of the oppressed", outside the formal education system. Such
innovations have been partial, with very little influence on the curricula of formal systems.
Friere criticized formal system of education as banking education and follows oppressive
attitudes. He suggested a pedagogy of oppressed which will develop critical consciousness
among the oppressed class to challenge the oppressing. Ivan illich, another influential thinker
proposed deEducational Institutioning society and completely against formal mechanical
educational system of modern era.

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