Eisner, E. W., & Vallance, E. (1974).

Five conceptions of curriculum: Their roots and implications for

curriculum planning. In E. W. Eisner & E. Vance (Eds.) Conflicting conceptions of
curriculum (pp. 1-14). Berkeley, CA: McCutchan Publishing Company.

Five Conceptions of Curriculum: Their Roots and Implications for Curriculum

Planning

American education today, perhaps more than in the past, is studded with a variety of conflicting
conceptions of the goals, content, and organization of curriculum. The complexity of educational thought
is manifested not only in the diversity of papers presented in professional meetings and printed in
professional journals; it is also apparent in debates, discussions, and controversies dramatizing school
board and PTA meetings, and it is reflected and amplified by the involvement of the general public
through the mass media.
The controversies we refer to deal on an overt level with issues surrounding alternative schools,
conflicting roles of vocational and academic education in the school curriculum, concern with a student's
academic achievement in the "solid" subjects, educational admonitions to enable children to "learn how to
learn," purposes and uses of accountability procedures, and the use of input-output models of educational
practice. On a more fundamental level, however, the debates and conflicts generated by each of these
themes derive necessarily from the degree of incompatibility between the values and goals underlying
each side of the issue being debated. Controversy in educational discourse most often reflects a basic
conflict in priorities concerning the form and content of curriculum and the goals toward;which schools
should strive; the intensity of the conflict and the apparent difficulty in resolving it can most often be
traced to a failure to recognize conflicting conceptions of curriculum. Public educational discourse
frequently does not bother to examine its conceptual underpinnings.
To the student of curriculum, then, the richness of issues and values in the field provides an arena that
can be either a dynamic and stimulating resource or a conceptual jungle difficult to define and almost
impossible to manage. Students of educationboth those preparing for practical work in curriculum and
instruction and those already in the fieldmight find helpful a set of signposts that distinguishes between
conflicting orientations. Those in school administration, particularly those who in some ways link the
school and the community, might be better able to help their staff and the community understand the
issues at hand if they themselves could distinguish between the conceptual orientations of the different
alternatives presented to them.
 This book has been prepared to help identify the orientations that emerge from diverse alternative
prescriptions for the content, goals, and organization of the curriculum. We have tried especially to enable
both professional educators and lay people to recognize and evaluate these orientations in terms of the
goals and assumptions embedded within them; the articles reprinted here were selected to exemplify what
we consider to be the major orientations to curriculum that currently prevail in the literature.
The development of a set of distinctions concerning the content of published articles about
curriculum is somewhat arbitrary. The five general orientations that we have identified do not necessarily
exhaust the ways in which positions can be characterized or identified, and there is nothing sacred about
the labels or distinctions we offer. They can constitute a powerful tool for analyzing the implications of
an otherwise confusing body of arguments, however. The orientations refer to a range of distinct
conceptual biases that emerged repeatedly in a rather comprehensive survey of current literature in and
related to the field. The orientations, while not exhaustive, are comprehensive in that they identify a broad
range of very different approaches to questions persistently asked in the curriculum field: What can and
should be taught to whom, when, and how? The way these questions are answered is influenced largely
by the assumptions through which they ;are;approached in the first;place. These ,assumptions, and the-
regularity with which they emerge ~s distinguishable patterns, define the five orientations that have been
formulated: the cognitive processes .approach, curriculum as technology,-curriculum for self-actualization
.and consummatory experiences, curriculum for social reconstruction, and academic rationalism.
The answers to the major questions in curriculumand indeed the questions themselvesare most often
couched in terms of the assumptions embedded in each orientation. Before outlining the five orientations,
there is a brief indication of some of the considerations that went into developing them.

Some Viewpoints Not Treated Directly

Some important criteria may seem to have been neglected in defining the five orientations to
curricular thought offered below, but there were reasons for their exclusion. The first orientation to
compete for inclusion in the scheme is that continuum implied by the child-centered versus society-
centered" distinction. The child-centered orientation can be traced back to the ideas of Quintillian,
Comenius, Rousseau, and Pestalozzi, while the society-centered orientation emanates from the ideas of
Aristotle, Calvin, and Jefferson. In more recent times John Dewey and the progressives gave new life to
the distinction, and it has emerged full blown today with controversies over free schools, open
classrooms, and other humanist-oriented innovations in schooling. The assumptions underlying the child-
centered versus the society-centered distinction are crucial for understanding educational thought today
and can illuminate some of the problems in evaluating both the post-Sputnik push for the "solid" subjects
and the current movement in alternative education. The continuum is implicit in some of the distinctions
we have drawn. If we do not deal explicitly with this dimension, however, it is largely because the
distinction does not seem to contribute further insight into the complexity of current thought in
curriculum. Significant educational dialogue today does not speak as clearly in these terms as it once did;
the issues have shifted and become more refined; the child-society distinction today has lost the
crystalline character it enjoyed in the past.
It might also be defensible to organize educational writings along a spectrum that has values
education, on one end, and skills training, on the other, or moral education as opposed to the three R's.
This, too, is a salient distinction in education. It reflects the difference between seeing schools as an agent
for moral uplift and seeing the school as a purely functional means of providing the survival skills
necessary for the maintenance of civilization. This criterion would emphasize the difference between a
broadly optimistic vision of what the schools can be expected to do and the narrower interpretation of
their capacities; we see it in the difference between Aristotle's or Jefferson's faith in education as the
moral backbone of a democracy and Calvin's more immediate demand that schools teach the children to
read the Bible. More recently, the difference is reflected in the argument of Kohlberg that the schools
actively intervene in the development of moral judgment and that of Bereiter and others whose concern is
almost entirely with the transmission of basic skills. The former argument is value laden and urges an
ethical commitment; the latter argument claims to be functional and virtually value neutral. While this
distinction is useful in evaluating curriculum proposals, we refer to the value-skills dimension only
secondarily since curricular dialogue is seldom presented specifically in these terms. The distinction is
implicit in some of the differences among the five orientations, such as that between social
reconstructionism, on the one hand, and the cognitive processes approach, on the other.
Psychological models also differentiate between conceptualizations of schooling. Such differences
can often be reduced to a disagreement as to the model of learning presumed by each since any
conceptualization of education reflects some assumptions as to how children learnranging from
behavioral S-R models at one extreme to humanist or existential models at the other. But to specify a
psychological continuum would be hazardous since psychology itself is at least as multidimensional as
education and, furthermore, it is difficult to obtain agreement on the terminology. For these reasons we
have chosen not to differentiate explicitly the writings in curriculum by the psychological models to
which they implicitly refer. Nevertheless, it is clear that any comprehensive scheme of curriculum issues
must be able at least to accommodate these differences; the orientations we have formulated seem to
make such accommodation possible.
The present-future dimension is another reasonable criterion for differentiating curriculum thought. It
is possible to distinguish a set of curriculum orientations according to whether they refer to curriculum as
a present "lived in" experience, as an end, or whether they see curriculum as all instrument toward some
future goal, as a means. This dimension is a rich one; it refers partially to the distinction between child-
centered and society-centered education and can be linked conceptually to certain psychological; models
as well. The present-future distinction also suggests some criteria for viewing a curriculum proposal as
adaptive (fitting the child to deal with here and now), or as reconstructive (providing the tools for dealing
with and shaping the future). It is deliberately implied in some of the distinctions we draw in the selection
of articles. We have not used the present-future dimension as a major criterion for structuring these
readings, however, largely because the central issues in educational discussion do not revolve around the
time orientation itself. Though it is a useful descriptive device, it is not a fully salient criterion. The five
orientations presented in this short book, then, refer only secondarily to these distinctions, though they
should be flexible enough to accommodate them.
It is important to note that, in addition to the above distinctions, there are a number of what might
more properly be called pertinent educational issues or sensitive areas susceptible to curriculum policy
decisions to which the scheme does not directly refer. These issues include the debates over religious
education, cultural pluralism, community control of curriculum, and the "hidden curriculum" of the
school. Although these issues must be acknowledged as relevant aspects of the curriculum field, they are
essentially points of contention which must themselves ultimately be referred to the conceptualizations of
schooling underlying them. The reader may wish to work with them on his own; one test of the scheme
presented here may be to determine whether such issues can be profitably evaluated in terms of the
scheme.

Five Orientations to Curriculum

The development of cognitive processes. This approach to curriculum is primarily concerned with the
refinement of intellectual operations. It refers only rarely to curriculum content, focusing, instead, on the
how rather than the what of education. Aiming to develop a sort of technology of the mind, it sees the
central problem of curriculum as that of sharpening the intellectual processes and developing a set of
cognitive skills that can be applied to learning virtually anything.
 This approach is process oriented in two senses: it identifies the goals of schooling as providing a
repertoire of essentially content-independent cognitive skills applicable to a variety of situations, and it is
concerned with understanding the processes by which learning occurs in the classroom. The interactive
relationship between the learner and the material is of prime concern; "education" refers to the dynamics
of learning, and, as such, this conceptualization of schooling is necessarily open-ended and growth
oriented. Since it does not deal with specific content and therefore makes no reference to any content
"givens" in educational goals, the cognitive processes approach sees the learner as an interactive and
adaptive element in a system which, if given the correct intellectual tools, could grow almost indefinitely.
The problem of the educator and curriculum specialist, then, is to identify the most salient and efficient
intellectual processes through which learning occurs and to provide the setting and structure for their
development. Education is seen as an impartial enabling mechanism; specific intellectual skills are
secured as tools for adapting to and shaping future situations.
This orientation to curriculum focuses on the child and refers to the learning process per se rather
than to the broader social context in which it occurs. It aims to provide the student with a sort of
intellectual autonomy that will enable him to make his own selections and interpretations of the situations
encountered beyond the context of schooling. Though educational writers embracing the cognitive
processes approach may acknowledge that schooling has effects beyond intellectual development, they
assert that the proper concern of curriculum is still the development of cognitive skills, skills that
presumably transfer to a wide variety of situations outside of schools. An article by Carl Bereiter
illustrates this latter position: "Schools do not and cannot successfully educat, that is, influence how
children turn out in any important way. The most they can do successfully is provide child care and
training"where "training" means producing "a certain kind of performance in the child. What the child
does with his required skill, how it is integrated into his personality, is a concern that lies beyond
training."
The cognitive processes approach is a particularly salient orientation in curriculum thinking today,
and it seems to grow more potent as psychologists develop greater confidence in their ability to identify
the mechanisms through which thinking develops. Historically, this approach is related to the nineteenth-
century tradition of faculty psychology, which held that the key to learning lay in developing the muscles
of the mind as it were, and it assumed that strengthening the various mental "faculties" would enable the
individual to apply these cognitive abilities to learning any sort of content. This concern with building
generalizable intellectual skills has been greatly elaborated in recent years and is now most fully
expounded in the developmental psychology of Jerome Bruner and that of Robert Gagne. The cognitive
processes approach has stimulated the development of curricula such as the "science curriculum" of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, which was organized around the development of
specific cognitive processes. This approach illustrates the way in which assumptions about how children
learn influence the development of educational programs.
Curriculum as technology. This approach to schooling, like the cognitive processes approach, focuses
on process. It is also concerned with the how rather than the what of education. It conceptualizes the
function of curriculum as essentially one of finding efficient means to a set of predefined, nonproblematic
ends. As a process approach, curriculum technology differs from cognitive processes in its focus of
attention. It is concerned not with the processes of knowing or learning, but with the technology by which
knowledge is communicated and "learning" is facilitated. Making little or no reference to content, it is
concerned with developing a technology of instruction. The focus is less on the learner or even on his
relationship to the material than on the more practical problem of efficiently packaging and presenting the
material to him. A step removed both from the individuality of the learner and from the content which
defines the curricular experience, the technologists claim to be developing a value-free system.
The language of the curriculum technologist is as efficient as the system it hopes to produce. It is
concise, even terse, often skeletally logical, crystalline, and to the point. Articles reflecting this
orientation are very frequently only a page or two long. (The reader is referred to Educational
Technology for the fullest exposure to this mode of thought, though it appears elsewhere, also.) The
curriculum technology approach speaks the language of production; curriculum technologists see
curriculum as an input to supply and demand systems. They talk in terms of industrial systems,
accountability, or systems analysis. Their vocabulary is one of input, output, entry behavior, cybernetic
models, biofeedback mechanisms, stimulus and reinforcement, and systems to "produce" learning. Theirs
is a self-confident language. Although curriculum technologists do not claim to have all the answers, they
ask questions in terms that imply that answers do exist somewhere and need only to be discovered.
Curriculum is viewed as a technological process, as a means to producing whatever ends an industrial
model education system might generate. As Silverman states (also see Chapter 4),
the problems associated with teaching are interwoven with questions about the retention and transfer of

learning. Any model which purports to deal with learning must, if it is to prove useful, deal also with the conditions

that effect retention and transfer. In terms of the S-R reinforcement model, questions about retention become

questions about the conditions that control and maintain responses.

 The curriculum-technology approach rests on certain "stable" assumptions about the nature of
learning, namely that learning does occur in certain systematic and predictable ways and that it can be
made more efficient if only a powerful method for controlling it can be perfected. The learner is seen
neither as problematic nor as a particularly dynamic element in the system; the real task of the educator
arises in organizing the material sometime before the learner ever enters the classroom.
Because it does assume certain constants in the learner's role, however, this approach cannot be as
value-neutral as the exuberant language of the articles included here would indicate; indeed, it can be
argued that this orientation is highly value saturated since any commitment to method has inevitable
consequences for the goals and content of the education it would serve. The failure to articulate these
implications is perhaps as strong a value statement as any content bias might be, for to adopt the language
of technology without acknowledging the other value systems that have traditionally dominated
education, and that might therefore be in conflict with it, is too easily to discredit the possibility of
alternaltives. While this cautionary criterion applies to any conceptualization of schooling which believes
so robustly in the validity of its own convictions, it is particularly relevant to the sudden self-confidence
of educational technology. The three articles we have included in this volume offer an introduction to the
issues raised by this conceptualization of curriculum.
Self-actualization, or curriculum as consummatory experience. Strongly and deliberately value
saturated, this approach refers to personal purpose and to the need for personal integration, and it views
the function of the curriculum as providing personally satisfying consummatory experiences for each
individual learner. It is child centered, autonomy and growth oriented, and education is seen as an
enabling process that would provide the means to personal liberation and development.
This approach focuses sharply on content. Unlike the cognitive process or curriculum technology
approaches, the concern is very much for what is taught in school. It conceptualizes education as a
liberating force, a means of helping the individual discover things for himself. Schooling is seen as a vital
and potentially enriching experience in its own right, and content as present experience is a major focus
of concern. Interestingly, this orientation is concerned almost as much with process as the two preceding
orientations, but in a different sense. Rather than directing itself to how the curriculum should be
organized, it formulates the goals of education in dynamic personal process terms. It emphasizes personal
growth and, therefore, though it sees the curriculum as a consummatory experience in itself, it is also
necessarily somewhat reformist. It implies a need to break bonds, to change, for the development of
personal integrity and autonomy is seen as problematic in the face of broader social pressures to the
contrary. It is reconstructionist in a very personalized sense.
Unlike the more strictly process-oriented approaches considered so far, the self-actualizers assign
education a much grander task. They demand that schooling, through the curriculum, enter fully into the
child's life. They assume that it can do so, their criticism being that it has always done so, but without
acknowledging the responsibilities involved. They see education as a necessarily pervasive influence that
has been handled inadequately and very stultifyingly. They demand that the curriculum become better
orchestrated to fulfill its potential as a liberating process by providing integrated experience. As content,
then, the curriculum is seen as an end in itself. As a stage in the life process, education would provide
both content and tools for further self-discovery.
The language of this group of writers is rich and elaborate, dealing in levels of subtlety apparently
unimagined by technologists of either variety; it is broadly integrative, a language interwoven with the
language of humanism, of existentialism, and of existential psychology. Phenix represents this view very
clearly (also see Chapter 6):
A curriculum of transcendence provides the context of engendering, gestating, expecting, and celebrating the
moments of singular awareness and inner illumination when each person comes into the consciousness of his
inimitable personal being. It is not characterized so much by the objective content of study as by the atmosphere
created by those who comprise the learning community. Its opposite is the engineering outlook that regards the
learner as material to be formed by means of a variety of technical procedures.

The self-actualizers share a passionate orientation to education. We have included two articles, one
by Philip Phenix, quoted above, and another by Joseph Junell that questions the traditional, rationally
oriented basis of education. The reader is referred also to the excellent work by Maxine Greene, to
Abraham Maslowâs work relating humanistic psychology to educational programs, and to the work by
Fred Newmann and Donald Oliver and that by Kenneth Benne on the role of education in creating
community. All of these writers conceive of education as an integrative, synthesizing force, as a total
experience responsible to the individual's needs for growth and personal integrity.
Social reconstruction-relevance. With this orientation there is a strong emphasis on the role of
education and curriculum content within the larger social context. Social reconstructionists typically
stress societal needs over individual needs; the overall goals of education are dealt with in terms of total
experience, rather than using the immediate processes which they imply. Social reform and responsibility
to the future of society are primary.
The social reconstructionist orientation to curriculum is hardly new. The refrain runs through much of
the history of educational reform, and it is a characteristic of Western society that schools, more than any
other institution, are called upon to serve as an agent for social change. The social view of schooling
examines education and curriculum in terms of their relation to the social issues of the day. An approach
in which social values, and often political positions, are clearly stated, social reconstructionism demands
that schools recognize and respond to their role as a bridge between what is and what might be, between
the real and the ideal. It is the traditional view of schooling as the bootstrap by which society can change
itself. Within this approach to curriculum, there are two distinct branches; it embraces both a present and
a future orientation, both an adaptive and a reformist interpretation of social relevance. The psychological
model underlying both versions is a social-psychological one that views individual development and the
quality of the social context as interdependent. Both branches of the social reconstruction approach seek
to develop a better "fit" between the individual and society. The first and basically adaptive approach
views social issues and change as a crucial context for personal development. It foresees enormous
changes in society and asks that curriculum provide the tools for individual survival in an unstable and
changing world. This survival-oriented bias to the relevance issue defines relevance in personal terms,
advocating a curriculum that would make the individual better able to keep up and function effectively in
a rapidly changing world. This "adaptive" group includes educational technologists who would change
curriculum to correspond more closely to technological changes in information processing, and data
collection; reformists, such as those of the Parkway School in Philadelphia, who seek to have the
curriculum reflect current "real life" situations; and writers like John Mann (see Chapter 8), who demand
that current issues of political power be incorporated into the curriculum so that students can learn to deal
with them more effectively and creatively as such issues emerge. Mann writes: "What I envision· is a
movement to design a progressive curriculum specifically for these angry, radical students, in which the
study of educational policy formation and of the policies of schools would converge in and be reinforced,
corrected, refined and deepened in the practical experience of actually formulating educational policy and
struggling to enact it."
The reformist wing of the relevance orientation is more vigorous and demands more of schools. This
truly reconstructionist view demands that individuals be better equipped to deal with change but also that
they be educated to intervene actively to shape the changes. While all sides of the social reconstruction-
relevance orientation view curriculum as the means by which students learn to deal with social issues, the
adaptive group is more conservative, asking for survival instruments; the reformists are more aggressively
leadership conscious. This reconstructionist group includes, then, those who advocate adaptation as one
means of effecting smooth change and the more aggressively idealistic writers that are found in the
"futures" research groups, in "peace education" coalitions and in recent works by people like Michael
Scriven and Ivan Illich.
Academic rationalism. The most tradition-bound of the five orientations, academic rationalism is
primarily concerned with enabling the young to acquire the tools to participate in the Western cultural
tradition and with providing access to the greatest ideas and objects that man has created. Those
embracing this orientation tend to hold that since schools cannot try to teach everything or even
everything deemed worth knowing, their legitimate function is that of cultural transmission in the most
specific sense: to cultivate the child’s intellect by providing him with opportunities to acquire the most
powerful products of man's intelligence. These products are found, for the most part, in the established
disciplines. To become educated means to be able to read and understand those works that the great
disciplines have produced, a heritage that is at least as old as the beginnings of Greek civilization. The
curriculum, it is argued, should emphasize the classic disciplines through which man inquires since these
disciplines, almost by definition, provide concepts and criteria through which thought acquires precision,
generality, and power; such disciplines exemplify intellectual activity at its best. To construct a
curriculum that includes "practical" learning such as driver training, homemaking, and vocational
education dilutes the quality of education and robs students of the opportunity to study those subjects that
reflect man's enduring quest for meaning. The wise schoolmaster knows that not all subject matters are
created equal, and he selects the content of his educational program with this principle in mind.
Robert Maynard Hutchins has long advocated this approach, and he offered a classic statement of
academic rationalism in 1953:
Liberal education consists of training in the liberal arts and of understanding the leading ideas that have animated
mankind·the great productions of the human mind are the common heritage of all mankind. They supply the
framework through which we understand one another and without which all factual data and area studies and
exchange of persons among countries are trivial and futile. They are the voices in the Great Conversation that
constitutes the civilization of the dialogue.
Now, if ever, we need an education that is designed to bring out our common humanity rather than to indulge our
individuality.

The foregoing characterization has, however, undergone a significant evolution in recent years. A
glance at any high school curriculum will reveal that "the disciplines" still hold sway; what has changed is
the nature of the argument by which they are defended. Emerging in the curriculum literature currently is
a strong orientation toward "the structure of knowledge"a significant rethinking of the traditional
disciplines in an effort to determine what it is about their respective content that distinguishes them from
each other. This new questioning of the disciplines still assumes the validity of the subject matter
divisions, but, rather than merely identifying them, it asks why the divisions have held up for so long.
Writers such as Joseph Schwab and Robert Bridgham are beginning to rephrase the traditional academic
rationalist approach by examining the logical and structural bases for the division. The healthy spirit of
inquiry evidenced by their writings suggests that the traditional "disciplines" approach is questionable.
More significantly, however, the current controversy is adding a new dimension to this orientation. By
digging to find the structural bases of the disciplines, the structure of knowledge question is bringing a
new and sophisticated concern with process into a traditionally content-saturated conceptualization of
education. Dewey suggested long ago that the "logical" and "psychological" structure of content might be
two different things. Academic rationalism survived for centuries without recognizing this crucial
distinction, but recent work in refining subject matter curricula along structural lines, such as the School
Mathematics Study Group materials, indicates that this most traditional orientation to education is
undergoing substantial change.
Academic rationalism is alive and well. The problem is to understand why we are so defensive about
it, and many participants in educational enterprises are. The structure of knowledge orientation is a
dynamic new development within a very old field. A recognition of the sources and implications of this
orientation is essential in any educational dialogue that claims to understand the boundaries of the
curriculum field.