|
Historical Setting
|
Article: Efficiency Jettisoned: Unacknowledged Changes in the Curriculum Thought of John Franklin Bobbitt
Source: Null, J. (1999).
Unacknowledged changes in the curriculum thought of John Franklin Bobbitt.
Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, 15, Fall, pp. 35-42.
Abstract
To grasp the complexity of the curriculum history field, scholars should consider the full range of ideas expressed by those who merit study. The expansion of John Franklin Bobbitt’s curriculum positions to include his final book, Curriculum of Modern Education, enkindles a cresset in an unexplored chamber of his curriculum thought. Often narrowly classified as efficiency-minded only, Bobbitt, after an influential three decades in curriculum, changed his position in the early 1940s. To indicate the extent of Bobbitt’s altered position, this article examines four ideas from Curriculum of Modern Education. The explication of Bobbitt’s last major work draws attention to the importance of historical time and context. Several prominent educators, including John Dewey and William C. Bagley, advanced positions that corresponded, rather than clashed, with notions from Bobbitt’s last book. Throughout his life, Bobbitt was highly influences by the time and social conditions in which he worked. The illumination of a “new Bobbitt position encourages more complete understanding of the complex field of curriculum history.
When personal convictions encounter practical situations, something "gives”. More commonly than not in such circumstances, the personal convictions change, even if other individuals fail to recognize the altered ideas. The case of John Franklin Bobbitt and his curriculum ideas illustrates this situation.
The Early Bobbitt
Little recognized now, Bobbitt pioneered this century’s emerging curriculum field. IN an era of rapid expansion of schooling and emphasis upon efficiency, Bobbitt published the first book labeled “curriculum.” (FN1) For at least two decades, Bobbitt and a host of others advocated both a curriculum theory and a process of curriculum organization that promoted school efficiency and objectification based upon adult activities and occupations. (FN2) Indeed, much of his early work was characterized by a type of steadfast insistence on principles of scientific management and engineering, both swept along by his near-religious fervor. (FN3) For example, he wrote:
In any organization, the directive and supervisory members must clearly define
the ends toward which the organization strives. They must coordinate the
labors of all so as to attain those ends. They must find the best methods of
work, and they must enforce the use of these methods on the part of the
workers. (FN4) The central theory is simple. Human life, however varied,
consists of the
life is one that
However numerous and diverse they may be for any social class, they can be
discovered. (FN5) A fourth principle of general scientific management is: work
up the raw material into that finished product for which it is best adapted.
(FN6)
Bobbitt’s early curriculum ideas stressed
the certitude of social efficiency, and American school leaders widely adopted
them. (FN7) Indeed, Bobbitt
continues to be recognized primarily as an advocate of scientific,
efficiency-based management of curriculum.
During the last portion of his career, however, he reversed his
long-standing positions. Some of
his contemporaries failed to acknowledge this change, and contemporary scholars
appear unaware of Bobbitt’s altered ideas.
Later Years
Curriculum of Modern Education, (FN8) Bobbitt’s final book, developed four consistent ideas: (1) an emphasis on the importance of general education, (2) the inability to predetermine future lives and roles of students, (3) the necessity for schools to develop individuals’ intellect rather than to train them for work, and (4) a respect for many of the classic authors of “great books” from the Western tradition.
Bobbitt began Curriculum of Modern Education with an explication of his views of “The Good Life.” He advances 18 dimensions of this condition that schools should address. Sixteen of them related specifically to general education, and only 2 concerned specialized or vocational education.(FN9) His relegation of vocational education for adult work to only 2 of 18 portions of “The Good Life” constitutes a significant departure from his earlier writing. Bobbitt attacked the mechanistic mindset, which, paradoxically, he earlier had helped to foster in American education. For example, he wrote:
Fortunate it
is for boys and girls that right education can result only from living
itself.
Recognition of this principle will emancipate them from the mechanical
processing that has so long masqueraded as education and that has proved to
be
For Bobbitt in his later days, intellectual development simply was essential to general education. He wrote, for example:
Let the process be a continuing one that begins in infancy and then goes on
widening,
deepening, and maturing through all his years.
This is the life of
intellect.
Its automatic fruitage is understanding… There can be no effective
substitute.
In the degree in which the school has succeeded in promoting the
acuity, the width of range, the vividness and the
continuity of vision, it has
educated; in the degree in which it has attempted the substitute plan of
delivering to people ready-made understandings that do not issue from the
continual coursing of their own vision over realities, it has failed.
(FN11)
Bobbitt urged that students continue their general education until age 18 to 20. At this age they would possess, he believed, the intellectual resources with which to make personal decisions about their future life roles. He noted specifically that students’ lives could not be determined in advance. He also accepted the reality of students’ choice of their own directions in life.
In expressing this second major idea of his book—the inability to predetermine students’ future lives and roles—Bobbitt changed his mind about “science” and education. Although he frequently used the term science in this book, he employed some different meanings for this term from ones he had used earlier. Bobbitt’s allegiance to “science” never waned. However, in Curriculum of Modern Education, his “science” became synonymous with “intellect.” Bobbitt delineated the limits of science and the power of individual student decisions when he wrote:
Science describes and explains. It portrays, and nothing else. In itself, it does
not direct. It is not a set of orders or of permits. It is like a road map that
shows the ways best for reaching one’s destination and the ones that lead
otherwhere. But the map makes no decisions. It is the person using it who
decided upon the route to be taken. In the same way, Science shows the range
of possibilities. It shows the ways to success and the ways to failure. But it
leaves each person to make his own choice. All direction is in the mind and will
of the individual himself. (FN12)
Continuing to stress adults’ inability to control student thinking and action, Bobbitt also considered the role of administration in the new age of “modern education.” Veering widely from the ends-means, “factory” model of curriculum planning that he had helped advance during the first three decades of this century, Bobbitt admitted the impossibility of objectifying and planning for all students from a central location:
It is evident also that the lives of the young people cannot be planned in
administrative
offices and the plans sent out to teachers who are merely to
regiment the lives of the pupils according to the specifications. The education
of free persons is their living of their own lives. (FN13)
He now recognized, as he earlier seemed not to have understood, that students control their own learning. Thus, his position appears strikingly close to those of John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and L. Thomas Hopkins. Also, for Bobbitt, the role of teachers changed. No longer, as he had thought earlier, would they shape and fashion children according to predetermined specifications or objectives. Rather, in his later days, he believed teachers should guide, influence, and assist students in their own learning, an education that did not end abruptly with school graduation or paid employment.
According to his changed position, which contributed to the third major idea of Curriculum of Modern Education, Bobbitt held that general education promoted the growth of the intellect rather than the preparation for work. Accordingly, he asserted that schooling should assist students in their development of intellectually stimulating habits of mind without insistence that they conform to pre-specified standards:
The school is not to “make” a curriculum but to help the child or youth better
to
has
its
Development of the intellect, according to Bobbitt, freed individuals from the constraints and control of other people’s thoughts. Individuals who relied upon superiors or associates to guide their actions did not develop their individual potential, were dependent and therefore failed to take responsibility for their own self-direction, were likely intellectually immature, and, in the end, could not possibly live “The Good Life.” (FN15)
The fourth major idea that Bobbitt advanced in Curriculum of Modern Education resembled the contemporary positions of William C. Bagley and Robert Hutchins, along with the later positions of Mortimer Adler and E.D> Hirsh. Bobbitt’s ideas only rarely coincided with Bagley’s essentialism or Adler’s perennialism. However, in Curriculum of Modern Education, Bobbitt mentioned twice the importance of students reading the great authors during their acquisition of a general education. Bobbitt’s respect for intellectual development continued:
A task, then, for every person who ahs the capacity for understanding is to find
the great writings of the world and by reading them let them reconstitute in his
mind the magnificent vision of reality achieved by those of heroic intellectual
stature. Let him read Plato,
Aristotle, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas. (FN16)
A phase of education, then, that is indispensable for everyone who would reach its culminating level is that he read the writings of the men of greatest intellectual stature…such names, among scientists, as Hippocrates, Archimedes, Galen, Roger Bacon. (FN17)
Bobbitt’s early ideas stand in sharp contrast to those of Bagley or Adler. However, in his final book, he drew upon disparate sources for legitimation and advanced a quite different set of ideas. In his last book, Bobbitt also encouraged teachers to become curriculum makers, stressed curricular focus on learner interests, and showed concern for the natural process of learning. (FN19)
The Bobbitt of 1941 did not hold the same curriculum positions that he had begun to advance in 1911. What happened? Simply, no one knows. One possible key to understanding this significant change has been suggested by his biographer. B. G. Dewulf noted Bobbitt’s tendency to mold ideas around received wisdom when he observed: “The favoring winds or social currents shifted Bobbitt’s emphases considerably during his career. Thus, Franklin Bobbitt was as much a leader in the educational arena as he was a follower of immediate cultural trends.” (FN19)
Perhaps Bobbitt changed his mind about curriculum planning as a result of his own scholarship and reflection. Or, quite possibly, the ideas contained in Curriculum of Modern Education existed throughout Bobbitt’s career, and current historical understanding conceals these concepts. (FN20) The educational leaders who brought behavioral objectives to American schools abandoned and rejected that inadequate technology more than 50 years ago. Still, as Bobbitt’s later positions closely aligned with prominent progressive positions, his book Curriculum of Modern Education encountered suspicion and sharp criticism, little success in sales, and only minor recognition. However, in review of the book, L. Thomas Hopkins recognized the changed Bobbitt:
This book
represents the matured philosophy of the curriculum of a man who is
one of the pioneers in curriculum development.
He has traveled a long distance
from the emerged curriculum described in his How to Make a Curriculum to
the
emerging curriculum of the present book.
He now sees the good life as the
educative curriculum, the living of the good life as the educative process, and
aid in living the good life as the teaching process. The curriculum is the total
life of the individual, while the school represents a qualitative contribution to
such
various
Other reviewers concurred with Hopkin’s assessment of a changed Bobbitt.(FN22) In addition, even Bobbitt, when addressing the charge of inconsistency, admitted these changed ideas and attributed them to a “sustained and continuous growth of understanding.” (FN23)
1. Explain how Bobbitt’s curriculum theory changed over time, as the emphasis in American educational goals diverged from the goals of the early 1900s' industrial revolution.
2. What can present-day educators learn and apply from Bobbitt’s position in his last work, Curriculum of Modern Education (1941)? Can and should curricular history play a role in current educational decisions?
Footnotes
1 John Franklin Bobbitt, The Curriculum (Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin, 1918)
2 Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
3 See for example, John Franklin Bobbitt, “The Elimination of Waste in Education, “Elementary School Journal 12 (1911/1912): 259-271; and John Franklin Bobbitt, The Supervision of City Schools: Some General Principles of Management Applied to the Problems of City-School Systems, Twelfth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I (Bloomington, IL: National Society for the Study of Education, 1913), pp. 7-96.
4 John Franklin Bobbitt, The Supervision of City Schools: Some General Principles of Management Applied to the Problems of City-School Systems, Twelfth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I (Bloomington, IL: National Society for the Study of Education, 1913), p. 7.
5 John Franklin Bobbitt, The Curriculum (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p.42.
6 John Franklin Bobbitt, “The Elimination of Waste in Education, “Elementary School Journal 12 (1911/1912): 260.
7 Raymond E. Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces That Have Shaped the Administration of Public School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 65-66; see also Herbert M. Kliebard, Forging the American Curriculum: Essays in Curriculum History and Theory (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 83-96; and Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 77-105.
8 John Franklin Bobbitt, Curriculum of Modern Education (York, PA: Maple Press Company, 1941).
9 Ibid., pp.6-8.
10 Ibid., p. 222.
11 Ibid., p.87.
12 Ibid., p.15.
13 Ibid., p. 228.
14 Ibid., p. 321.
15 Ibid., p. 58.
16 Ibid., p. 176.
17 Ibid., pp. 403-404.
18 B.G. Dewulf, The Educational Ideals of John Franklin Bobbitt (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Washington University, 1962), p. 370.
19 Ibid., p.367.
20 Regarding this point, I wish to thank Peter Hlebowitsh for his helpful comments at the 1999 annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Curriculum History.
21 L.T. Hopkins, “Reviews of Current Books,” Curriculum Journal 12 (March 1941): 137.
22 B.G. Dewulf, The Educational Ideals Of John Franklin Bobbitt (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Washington University, 1962), p. 354. See also S. Everett, “Principles to Guide Curriculum-Makers,” Elementary School Journal 41 (June 1941).
23 Franklin Bobbitt, “Foreign Service Effects, “Phi Delta Kappa 27 (May 1946): 263.
24 For a convincing contention that noted the importance of practice for curriculum scholars, see William G. Wraga, “Extracting Sun-Beams Out of Cucumbers: The Retreat from Practice in Reconceptualized Curriculum Studies,” Educational Researcher 28 (January-February 1999): 4-13.
25 For compelling arguments for the importance of studying curriculum history, see O.L. Davis Jr., “The Nature and Boundaries of Curriculum History: A Contribution to Dialog Over a Yearbook and Its Review, “ Curriculum Inquiry 7 (Summer 1977): 157-168; and Alan W. Garrett, “Curriculum History’s Connections to the Present: Necessary Lessons for Informed Practice and Theory,” Journal of Curriculum and Supervision 9 (Summer 1994): 390-395.
26 Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May advocate ideas such as asking journalists’ questions, asking “What’s the story?” and drawing time lines in their Thinking in Time: The Use of History for Decision Makers (New York: Free Press, 1986), pp. 232-246.
