Wm. E. Doll, Jr.
Department of Curriculum and Instruction
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge, LA. 70803
Fall, 2003
Control, and by that I mean imposed control, has been a mainsometimes overt, sometimes hiddenaspect of American organizations in the twentieth century. In a sense, Frederick Taylor (1911/1947) found the beauty and power of this sort of control in his time-and-motion studies on pig-iron handlers at Bethlehem Steel Company in 1896. Through control of their motions, done with the precision of his stop-watch, Taylor (1911/1947, p. 43) not only increased their production almost 400%, (from 12 and 1/2 tons to 47 tons per day) he also established a paradigmthat of scientific management which dominated American social, industrial, managerial, and organizational thought for the next six or more decades, and continues to remain a force today.[1] It is not too much to say, as authors have done (Callahan, 1962; Kliebard 1986, 1992; Doll, 1993), that this concept of control became a major factor in the Progressive Movement in general and in the progressive educational movement in particular albeit with a degree of camouflage under the rubric of child-centeredness. American industry has used this concept of control to make our nation the most productive society the world has ever known. A by-product of this emphasis has been that what was overt in the 1890s, 1900s, and 1910s has now become natural to our way of thinking, actually buried deep within our understanding of what organization should be. Organization and control (overt, top-down, centralized) are virtually synonymous. In terms of educational organization, this sense of control has become, as I say elsewhere (Doll, 2002), the ghost in the curriculum.
In this paper I will look briefly at the role this sense of (industrial) control has played in the curriculum, at a deeper sense of control as methodization, at John Deweys attempt to find a sense of control neither externally imposed nor internally developed, and will conclude with a new view of controlone which does not represent imposition nor self-development but rather emerges from the dynamic interaction that constitutes all life. This last sense of control is oxymoronic in that it is control which depends upon change; it is control which operates not from a central locus but across a system as that system changes. Without the system changing this sense of control does not emerge (no change, no control). This view of control lies at the heart of process thought and complexity theory. I believe this view has much to offer curriculum thought, both as a challenge to the way we have conceived of curriculum and as an opportunity for new directions. Explicating this viewno easy taskwill be my personal challenge.
Control has been a central feature in American school organization ever since, as Herbert Kliebard (1986) points out, our educational focus, in the 1890s, shifted from the tangible presence of the teacher to the remote knowledge and values incarnate in the curriculum (p. 2). In the next century, curriculum became a national preoccupation (p. 3). A look at the writings of Ellwood Cubberley (1916) or Franklin Bobbitt (1918) reveal such:
The kind, amount, and order of the subject-matter to be learned, by all pupils, in all parts of the city, regardless of age, past experience, future prospects, or physical or mental condition, is uniformly laid down for all. (Cubberley, 1916, p. 281)
A statement like this shows that in these writers there is no hiding of the concept of control; it is recognized, accepted, honored. However, during the ensuing decades control became glossed over as American educators became mesmerized with the ideological myths of schools as democratic institutions, of science as value free inquiry, and of social problems as solvable through schooling. There is, of course, just enough truth in all these myths to make them myths. The result of all this was that, as a people, we began to see education, brought forth through curriculum, as a liberating, empowering force.
In the 1960s we were quite surprised (Dreeben, 1968) to find students not learning what we explicitly thought they were learning, that the formalized curriculum was not all we were teaching, and that anti-democratic control was evident. To use Philip Jacksons (1968) felicitous phrase, there were within the schools two curricula one stated, one hidden (p. 33). The stated curriculum, of course, was that published by state education departments, school boards, principals, teachers in their syllabi and lesson plans. These all espoused values of democracy, free inquiry, and personal choice; the hidden curriculum, rarely discussed in public and certainly not printed for distribution, taught conformity, fear of reprisal, obedience to others. Needless to say, the dichotomy between these curricula was disturbing to manyPaul Goodman (1964), Ivan Illich (1971), Colin Greer (1972), and John Goodlad (with Frances Klein, 1974), to name but a few.
Probably no one has done more to heighten our curriculum
consciousness as to what is being taught and learned through the hidden
curriculum than Michael Apple. Apple first raises the issue of the hidden
curriculum in William Pinars Curriculum
Theorizing: The Reconceptualists (1975). There Apple argues (pp. 95119)
that the hidden curriculum tacitly (and of course hiddenly) legitimates the
existing social order (p. 114). Put another way by another curriculum
theorist, Peter McLaren (1989): The hidden curriculum forces or at best induces
students to comply with the dominant ideologies and social practices related
to authority, behavior and morality (p. 184). Today these insights about the
nature of schooling and the political-social role the curriculum plays seem almost
too obvious to mention. This is a tribute to the work Michael Apple (1975,
1990), Herbert Bowles and Samuel Gintis (1976), Henry Giroux (1983), Linda
McNeil (1986), Peter McLaren (1989), Patti Lather (1991) have done over the
past few decades in raising our consciousness about the nature of schooling and
curriculum design.
Unfortunately, along with this much needed consciousness raising about schools and political power (my we were naive in the 1960s!) came an acrimonious, intense, scholarly, arcane, and indeed too precious debate (argumentation might be a better word) about the nature of ideology, hegemony, reproduction and resistance theories. A good summative history of this debate can be found in Pinar et al. (1995), Chapter 5, Understanding Curriculum as Political Text. A personal account by one of the combatants can be found in the Personal Biography section of Michael Apples Official Knowledge (1993).
I wish not to disparage the work these theorists have done, for we all are indebted to them; and indeed I am supportive of their own criticism of their earlier work as too narrow, too deterministic, and not human-agency enough oriented (see Apple, 1993, Pinar et. al, 1995). But I do wish to point out that in the esotericism of their debates they missed a key point, one Michael Apple (1975) made in his first essay on the hidden curriculum. There he says, prior to his statement about the curriculum legitimating the existing social order, that the curriculum in its hidden form also serves to reinforce basic rules by positing a network of assumptions that establishes the boundaries of legitimacy (p. 99). All societies need rules; they are, again as Apple says, the fundamental patterns which hold society together (p. 98). However, when the legitimacy of these rules and patterns is shrouded in mist then indeed control becomes a ghost. Light has been shed on that ghost, even if the ghost has not been exorcised,[2] but we have not given the attention I believe we must to the nature of and relationship between boundaries and networks. Boundaries are hard, to be crossed over only at ones peril; networks are soft, interrelational forms of communication. The control that lurks as the ghost in the curriculum will never be truly illuminated or exorcised until we wrestle with this fundamental distinctionwhether our curricula are to be hard and set or fluid and interactive.
So far the concept of control discussed is that of control in a political and social realm, particularly as such relates to our present societycapitalistic, democratic, industrial, patriarchal. Important as these aspects (and their inherent contradictions) are, there are also other aspects of our society and its educational system worth investigating, aspects which pre-date the industrial movement and which let us see that control lies deep within Western educational thought.
David Hamilton (1989, 1990, 1992, n.p., 2003, 2004) has done us all an immense service in resurrecting the educational origins of the word curriculum and its relation to the concept of methodization, a movement which began in the sixteenth century and certainly received much attention in the seventeenth before it became a natural (and indeed man-made) part of Western, intellectual thought. Having a methodJohn Dewey devoted a whole chapter to it in Democracy and Education (1916/1966)seems so natural to us, underlying as it does both Frederick Taylors and Ralph Tylers work, that even to mention it is to bring up the trite, the true, and the trivial. Such was not the case in the sixteenth century when the concept of uniform method was accused of going against the very essence of education. The idea of Gods method, the telos of the universe was, of course, a linchpin in Western thought. But this was His method, at best hazy to man [sic], and well outside the province of mans thought. The Protestant Reformation (really Revolution), influenced by the humanism of the Renaissance, changed this medieval relationship of man to Godnow every man became his own priest, no longer dependent on the religious interpretations of the (Catholic) Church hierarchy.[3] Method, especially the hermeneutic method of biblical interpretation became paramount. It was method that lay at the heart of the disagreement between Galileo and the Roman Church: he advocated a scientific/experimental method founded on the use of the telescope; it advocated a philosophical/theological one founded on interpreting the writings of Aristotle. The apocryphal but illuminating story contrasting these methods is that of a discussion between Galileo and the Bishop. Galileo encouraged the Bishop to look through the telescope to watch movement in the heavens, the Bishop declined saying he had no need of such an activity or instrument, having read Aristotle on the point three times. Of more substance is Galileos own writings (from his Opere, VII, p. 341) that while in every hypothesis of reason error may lurk . . . a discovery of sense [sensory experience] cannot be at odds with the truth. How could it be otherwise? (quoted in Burtt, 1967, p. 67). This is a dramatic pitting of the experimental/experiential against the rational, and in this contest a new method was emergingthe scientific. Control now began to shift from the authoritative interpretation of scripture to each persons own eyewitness account.
John Calvin was a man of method. Imbued with the protestant humanism of Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther,[4] he advocated that each person read the Bible individually. But he also wrote copiouslyInstitutes (1536 and 1559) and Commentaries (1540 1565)on how the Bible in all its simplicity was to be interpreted, especially regarding how it was to be influential in, indeed a model for, life. In short, he wanted his followers, his flock (to use a biblical metaphor) not to wander too far from the true and simple path he believed Christ trod. Throughout these writings and in his preachings, Calvin often referred to life as a race or racecoursecursus and stadium. In the final (1559) edition of the Institutes, he did appropriate, maybe from Cicero, curriculum (a racecourse similar to that at the Circus Maximus)to describe a path, course, way of life his followers were to follow. Vitae curriculum and vitae curriculo are the phrases he used, albeit not often (Hamilton 1989, pp. 48 49).
The sixteenth century had its share of turmoilMartin Luther did nail his Ninety-five theses to the church door in Wittenberg in 1517, the peasants revolted in Germany, Rome was sacked with thousands dying, the Reformation began earnestly in Scotland and France, Ignatius of Loyola founded the Jesuits as an order loyal and subservient to the Pope, Paul III established the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation began, and on St. Bartholomews Day two-thousand Huguenots were slaughtered in Paris. Along with political and social turmoil, it was a century in which intellectual thought began its shift from a medieval-Aristotelian-geocentric paradigm to a modernist-scientific-heliocentric one. The posthumous publication of Nicolaus Copernicus De Revolutionibus (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, 1543) may be considered a transition point in this shift. It was also a time when, as one observer has phrased it the mother Church of Rome gave birth to several daughter churches (Bratt, 1964, p. 63). Toward the end of the century it was also the beginning of the methodization movement and the first introduction of the word curriculum in educational literature. The birth of the daughter churchesthose of a Protestant bent was not an easy or natural birth; rather it was quite unnatural awful, painful, bloody (p. 63). These daughter Churches had hoped to remain within the mother fold, albeit they wished mother to reform her waysbreak her unholy alliance with secular princes, give up papal superstitions, mechanical ceremonies, and scholastic traditions (p. 12). Reformation was in the air but the Council of Trent (15451563) failed to reconcile mother with her daughters; so an irrevocable split occurred bringing Protestantism into direct conflict with Catholicism. Later in the century, Henry of Navarre (the IV) tried in his Edict of Nantes (1598) to give political and spiritual recognition to both Protestants and Catholics. But his assassination in 1610 by a frustrated candidate to the Jesuit order changed all that (Toulmin, 1990, p. 49). Shortly thereafter, John Donne penned his famous lines, which could apply to the social as well as intellectual situation:
And new Philo∫ophy cals all in doubt,
The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sun is loft, and thearth and no mans wit
Can well direct him, where to looke for it.
**************************************
Tis all in peeces, all cohaerance gone;
All ju∫t ∫upply, and all Relation:
Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinkes he hath got
To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.
(1633/1968, lines 205 218)
This sense of individualism (extreme for the time) of which Donne speaks and which both the Protestant Reformation and a spirit of rising commercialism encouraged was frightening to many, including Donne who penned the famous phrase no man is an islande. During this time of lost cohaerance when both the scientific and social worlds were seeking light, there was felt to be a need for methodological procedures. Uniform procedures were needed not only for commercial trade, they were also needed for scientific study and most of all for a sense of intellectual comfort in a time of chaos. Comfort is a somewhat odd word to use here for certainty (as Dewey points out, 1929/1960) was sought. Yet it was certainty, in the form of Romish doctrine and Aristotelian scholasticism, that Humanism challenged and dissenters and protesters rejected. While no man was an island, each was an individual reader and interpreter of the Bible. This crisis in intellectual thought and personal being drove Ren© Descartes from the passions and paradoxes of Paris into his solitary and visionary meditations where he developed the method of Rightly Conducting Reason for Seeking Truth in the Sciences (1637/1950). As I have already pointed out (Doll, 1993) the correlation between Descartes Four Rules and Tylers Four Questions is quite astonishing (pp. 3031). Thus, I argue, Americas penchant for scientific efficiency was an off-shoot (or sub-set) of a larger methodization movement[5] which began in the late sixteenth century, and received support from commercial interests, humanist thought, scientific advancement, and Protestant theologians. At the time, many considered this methodization movement, with its strong emphasis on reform (and reform schooling) to be anti-traditional and anti-educational. Such a schoolingeducation split (the practical vs. the theoretical) remains with us today, as does the key role method has played in the split (Hamilton, 2004).
The origin of universal schoolingsystematic instruction, applied to a broad class of peoplecan be traced to Pope Gregorys order in 1078 that all bishops have the arts of letters taught in their churches, followed by the Third and Fourth Lateran Councils mandates in 1179 and 1215 that every cathedral church shall maintain a master to give free instruction to clerics in the church and to needy scholars (Wertheim, 1995, p. 41). From these church or cathedral schoolsmale only since clerics were male onlycame the first European universities, Bologna (1190), Paris (1200), and Oxford (1210), also male only.[6] The method of instruction in these schools and universities was skill driven to acquire competence in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew and then tutorial driven in the reading and interpreting of the classic and biblical texts written in these languages. How long a student or scholar spent in these endeavors depended on how long one wanted to so spend his time, what scholars one wished to read with or study under, and how serious one was regarding eventual mastery of the material presented in order to stand before the university scholars and receive ones degreebachelor of arts, master of arts, or doctor of philosophy, law, literature or theology. Martin Luthers experiences are not uncommon for the day. He studied first at nearby Erfurt, a thriving medieval, university town (maybe of 20,000 souls) known as both a beer chamber and a house of prostitution but one that also possessed 2 endowed churches, 22 cloisters, 23 cloister churches, 36 chapels, and 6 hospitals (Schwiebert, 1950, p. 130). While there in his late teens, he read the Latin classics, struggled with Greek and Hebrew, acquired the skill of playing the lute quite well (p. 137) and was influenced by Humanistic thought through one of his masters, Trutvetter, who had him read widely in physics, metaphysics and the Bible. At the age of twenty-two, after receiving both his bachelors and masters degrees and beginning his study of law, Luther applied for admission to the Black Cloister of the Hermits of St. Augustine, whose cloister house was at Erfurt. He remained a monk for the next nineteen years. While so, he became first a priest (1507, age 24), then a lector in Bible studies. This latter was the first step toward receiving a doctorate in theology, which Luther did in 1512 (p. 149) at the age of 29. Although racked by doubts and much influenced by New Way thinking which emphasized faith alone in matters of Biblical interpretation, Luther did at the University of Wittenberg in the fall of 1512 stand for his doctorate, pay his fee, swear fealty to the Roman Church and on October 19th was sworn in as a Doctor of Theology with a chair at the University (p. 195).
The length of time it took Luther to become a doctor was short for the day, certainly not long for our doctorates today. But the frame was quite differentthe whole time (from the early twenties on) Luther was a monk, cloistered, celibate, studying (he rose at 4 am), and praying. Not all scholars, of course, were monks, nor were all so studious (although in acquiring a working, academic language Luther seems to have mastered only Latin). The big difference, though, was that Luther as representative of his time did not follow a curriculum (a set course of study)there was none.[7] Rather Luther, and those like him, studied with masters for as long as either party wished or until the master felt the student was ready to stand before the faculty for his disputation. As a scholar, Luther studied Aristotlethe pillar of the scholastic traditionwith additional readings from Augustine, Aquinas, Boethius and others. As a theologian he read, memorized, and interpreted the Bible. Then a student could and often did spend decades studying but never standing for a degree. The relationship was very personalall students at Erfurt had to spend a year living in cloistered arrangements with a master; then, for a degree, they were tested on their knowledge and appraised on their moral and spiritual values. Control was definitely present but it came through personal relations, institutional rules, loyalty and traditionit did not come in the form of a set curriculum. [Again, prior to the Calvinist universities of Leiden (1582) and Glasgow (1633) there was no curriculum as we know the word or concept.] The social-political control we call hidden in the twentieth century was open and overt (and theological) in the sixteenth.
The rise of Protestantism with its individualism, commercialism with its formation of a middle class, and scientism with its new methodology brought a new sense to education, a sense interested in and committed to simplicity and method. As Grafton and Jardine (1986) say:
The individualism, verging on hero-worship of [the great teachers], of early humanism gave way in the early sixteenth century to an ideology of routine, order, and above all, method. (p. 123)
Two of the great methodizers of this time were Peter Ramus and John Comenius. With their methodizing they were, as Ive said, accused by the traditionalists of vulgarizing the noble art of dialectic and of virtually ignoring the arts of grammar and rhetoric (these three formed the trivium) in favor of the more content (letter) oriented subjects of the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy). In all this, the traditionalists believed the methodizers were going against the very essence of learning. The battle between the traditionalists and the methodizers was indeed bloody Ramus lost his life in the St. Bartholomews Day Massacre (1572) but his teachings lived on, for no less than 250 editions/adaptations of his Dialectic were published in the 100 years between the mid 1500s and the mid 1600s (Hamilton, 1992, p. 9). [This averages to two and one-half editions per year for approximately a century.] Teaching, under the Ramist method, changed from being a personal, dialogical art to a lettered, methodological, uniform and almost commercial process. Curriculum now appeared (1576) as an educational word. Thomas Fregius of Basle, a Protestant professor-printer-publisher, used the word in presenting a Ramist map of knowledge (Hamilton, 1989, pp. 2627; 1992, p. 9).[8]
Peter Ramus, hired-fired-hired professor at the University of Paris in the sixteenth century, is probably a good bifurcation point to mark the change from the traditional, scholastic, Aristotelian teaching to the new methodized teaching. Indeed, Ramus own name means branching in Latin, and the word ramification (to break into branches, or spread out) came into use in the sixteenth century during Peter Ramus lifetime (Hamilton, 1990, p. 26; O.E.D., 1989, vol. xiii, p. 156). It was ramification or branching which characterized Ramus methodology, furnishing students with a universal skeleton key which, if properly applied, could unlock any of the arts or sciences (cited in Hamilton, 1990, p. 26). [No wonder Ramus Dialectic sold so well.]
Strange as it may seem to us, imbued with the naturalness of both linear and categorical order with their implicit forms of control, prior to Ramus and his method, knowledge (as that which we teach) was not curricularized. It was not put into a set, sequential form. Nor was it handled comprehensively. Authors had listed subjects they felt were important and Boethius trivium and quadrivium was prominent, especially with the Jesuits. But how these were to be studied or whether they actually constituted a full course of something was not addressed. Curriculum, as a full course to be run, was not yet existent. Ramus changed all this, he provided a map of all knowledge (we would call it a chart, with categories and branching subcategories) and this map was carefully and definitely ordered in such a way that,
that enunciation is placed first which is first in
the absolute order of knowledge, that next which is next and so on: and thus
there is an unbroken progression. (Dialectic,
1569, pp. 46566; also in Hamilton, 1989, p. 46)
This is Ramus Method and it swept Europe in the latter sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, giving us a method still in use today.[9]
Two points stand out, I believe, in this quote. The first is the (implied) belief in ordering knowledge comprehensively. Ramus method is to apply to all knowledge at all times. Ramus was not dealing with his or generic mans view of knowledge, he was dealing with all knowledge. In short, he had a method for all timesa universal methodology. This same sense of a universal methodologystill extant to a great degree in our curriculum methods coursessurfaced in Descartes method for rightly conducting reason for seeking truth. The second point, an off-shoot of the first, is that there is an absolute order of knowledge. What we have here is a metaphysical assumption about epistemology. Believing that knowledge is organized in a logical form, Ramus also believed in the value of mapping this knowledge (in our parlance, building a chart or spread-sheet). Since knowledge is organized logically, Ramus played up the art of dialectic (a form of logic) and played down the art of rhetoric (communication). This emphasis on the value of a clear presentation of ideas rather than the effective communication of thesethe former subsuming the latteris with us today. If we have taught an idea well (how can one teach an idea?), they, the students, will have learned it well. In fact, as absurd as this sequitur (or non-sequitur) is, this is precisely what Ramus believed. Looking at Ramus reforms, Hamilton (1990) comments:
In proposing these educational reforms, Ramus included two additional, and sweeping, claims about his method: first, that it could be used not only in philosophy but also in all other fields of human endeavor [it was indeed a skeletal key to all knowledge]; and secondly, that it was nothing less than the externalization of the mental processes of human cognition. (p. 26).
This second point essentially asserts that learning is done best logically and uniformly not experientially and personally. The history of learning theory from the sixteenth through the twentieth century is replete with this assumptionit shapes the logicalness and uniformity of our teaching, methods of presentation, and curriculum design. This methodology, of course, is an oversimplification of a most complex process but like all oversimplifications appeals because of its simplicity. Only now, through the development of neural research (Freeman, 1991; Triche and St. Julien, 1995; St. Julien, n.p.) are we beginning to see the chaotic complexity of learninga complexity, Dewey, in his marvelous paper on The Reflex Arc (1896/1972) saw was highly interactive, requiring attention not only to the clarity of presentation but also to the natural organizational powers of the learner. Those enmeshed in constructivist curriculum design (see NCTM, Monograph, No. 4, 1990; Educational Researcher, 1994) are much aware of the importance of this point. In terms of control, this means a curriculum shift in focus from the relatively simple, logical organization of knowledge to a complex interaction between and among text, teacher, taught. This shift will be explored more in this papers concluding section on complexity theory.
As has been said, the word curriculum, as a course to be run, first appeared in educational literature as part of one of Ramus maps printed in 1576. (See Appendix, attached). In school settings, it appeared in the university catalogues of Leiden (1588) and Glasgow (1633); again, both Protestant universities, indeed Calvinist ones.
Johann Amos Comenius, born two decades after Ramus death, was not only a great methodizer but probably the one we know best as developing the ideas behind our modern concept of schooling. As Hamilton points out (1992; n.p.), Comeniusa Protestant preacher and schoolmasterplayed a direct role in moving education from a sense of study to a sense of teaching and learning, or from pedagogics to didactics. In a wonderful, pithy statement, another history of schooling researcher has remarked Comenius cared naught for study; teaching and learning were his thing (McClintock, 1972, p. 178). To understand this statement we need to remember that prior to the methodization movement (Hamilton calls it methodologising, n.p., p. 17), education was essentially studying (reading, reflecting on, interpreting) the great biblical and classical texts. This was done individually or with others but it was not done in a schooling situation. Schooling, with its sense of an ordered curriculum and a uniform instructional methodology, was concerned with getting learning into the child or learner, and with keeping the learner present before such knowledge (p. 13). Our time on task is but a variation [dare I say ramification] of this methodization-schooling movement. The whole purpose of the movement was to provide a short-cut to learning[10]again, one is reminded of the teacher in Joseph Mayer Rices book (1893/1969) who shouted to her student Dont think. Tell me what you know (p. 175). As Hamilton (1992) accurately and succinctly says:
Human beings learned long before they were taught, or even taught themselves. They learned with the aid of their sense organs and their minds, not with the help of their textbooks and their teachers. (p. 161)
But with the advent of curriculum-methodization-didactics, learning gradually became associated with, and shaped by, the external activity we know as teaching . [T]eachers gradually became schoolteachers and learners gradually became schooled (p. 161). Learning now appeared as a direct effect of methodized teaching while control, as a ghost, appeared in the form of curriculum and instructionnarrow, confining, limiting.
The use of the word didactics here has an interesting history to it, one much aligned with the concept of instruction as a part of, not apart from, curriculum. The curriculum/instruction debateunited versus separateis an American, not a European, thing. This cultural distinction is due mostly to the influence Johann Amos Comenius has had in Europe but not in America. Comenius was both a preacher and a schoolteacher. In a sense, he was the methodizer who most brought the movement into the school field[11]Ramus being more an academic than a schoolmaster.¦ Comenius great methodizing work in curriculum is called The Great Didactic (1657/1896). It definitely addresses school issuesi.e. how a teacher is to teach a class. In Chapter Nineteen, The Principles of Conciseness and Rapidity in Teaching, Comenius laments that under current conditions no fixed landmarks were set up, which might serve as goals to be reached, nor no method was known by which instruction could be given to all the pupils in a class at the same time (pp. 313314). He then goes on to offer remedies: (1) only one teacher in each school, (2) only one author for each subject, (3) the same exercise given to the whole class, (4) all subjects taught by the same method, (5) everything taught be done so thoroughly, briefly, and pithily, that understanding may be, as it were, unlocked by one key (p.316). Indeed, here we do have the origins of modern-day schooling.[12] Infused into these school issues, though, is Comenius metaphysical philosophy of pansophie[13]an interconnection of all things through education. Through education all peoplewomen as well as menwould come to see and recognize all points of view (Comenius, 1967, p. 6). As a theologian-metaphysician, this sense of harmony that pervaded the universe was Comenius own cosmology. As a preacher-teacher he believed awareness of this harmony could, indeed would, come through educationeducation which had a definite didactic bent to it. As a preacher he wished to use rhetoric to help others see Gods lighthere, as Hamilton (1992) points out, Comenius is being pietist, neo-humanist, and prescient of the coming Enlightenment (p. 168). As Ramus had emphasized the dialectical-logical aspects of the trivium, believing education should be curriculum oriented in the way fields of knowledge were ordered, so Comenius emphasized the rhetorical-didactical aspects of the trivium, believing that instruction should be included with curriculum (a la Ramus) and that for instruction a preachers ability to declaim rhetorically and didactically was needed by the schoolmaster. To this day, in the north European and Scandinavian countries, curriculum and didactic are seen as one, curriculum and instruction.[14]
In American education no one has been more concerned with and curriculum and instruction, child and curriculum, experience and education, democracy and educationthan John Dewey.[15] Regarding the sense of a uniform methodology for all, Dewey (1916/1966) says:
Methods authoritatively recommended to teachers, instead of being an expression of their own intelligent observations have a mechanical uniformity [and are] assumed to be alike for all minds. (p. 168)
He goes on:
Nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater disrepute than the belief that it is identified with handing out to teachers recipes and models to be followed in teaching. (p. 170)
And concludes:
Probably the chief cause of devotion to rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy, accurately measurable, correct results. (p. 175)
Deweys suggestion, of course, is to integrate methods with subject matter and to allow both the teacher and the student to use their own native tendencies, acquired habits and interests, and intelligent observations. In short, Dewey is suggesting that control in method shift from a pre-set pattern or even from the teacher per se to an interaction (really a transaction) between and among teacher, taught, text.[16]Regarding the other main point in the methodists emphasis, that of transferring directly the logical ordering of knowledge (as shown in a Ramist map of knowledge) to a learning subject, Dewey says:
[N]o thought, no idea, can possibly be conveyed as an idea from one person to another Only by wrestling with the conditions of the problem, at first hand, seeking and finding ones own way out, does one think. (pp. 15960)
But as has already been stated, the Ramist method was interested in teaching and learning, not in thinking. One of the subtle controls which has operated in our modernist-methodized concept of curriculum is that it limits thinking.
All his life Dewey worked to develop a pedagogy and a practice which enhanced, not limited, thinking. He actually wrote his book How We Think (1971) twice, in 1911 and again in 1933. Enhancing thinking, Dewey knew, required control, direction, or guidance. Of these three words, guidance, he says, best conveys the idea of assisting through cooperation the natural capacities of the individual (1916/1966, p. 23). However, it is with the word control that he works most and comes very close to positing the type of control now starting to emerge in complexity theory. [As Alfred North Whitehead, with his emphasis on nonlinear relations and process, has been called a forefather of mathematical chaos theory, so it may be posited that John Dewey, with his emphasis on interaction, transaction, emergence and with hints at self-organization, is a forefather of complexity theory.]
Control, Dewey (1916/1966) says, subordinates a persons natural impulses to anothers end; indeed, control as we use the term, has a flavor or coercion or compulsion about it (p. 24). To operate in such an impositional manner is neither good nor practical; it does not lead to growth, it is too restrictive. Yet a type of control is needed; Dewey calls this the other more important and permanent mode of control (p. 27). This other mode is not the self-control of mere imitation. In fact self-control is probably not a good word to describe the control Dewey calls intellectual not personal (p. 33), that which is a guiding of activity to its own end (p. 24, emphasis added). While this guiding is partly our own doing from our habits of action-reflection-action it is also true much of the control lies beyond us individually. To quote Dewey: the basic control resides in the nature of the situations developing (p. 39).[17] In this sense of control residing in the situations themselvesin the betweens and amongs, in the dynamic inter/transactionsDewey gives a hint of self-organization.
Complexity theory is the study of order, obviously of complex orderof order that is dynamic, changing, emerging; finally, order that is self-generating or self-organizing. If complexity theory is about anything, it is about the development of self-organizing structures. In a very real sense it is about how life at the cosmic, evolutionary, cultural, human, molecular levels occurs. For centuries it was believed (and by many still is believed) that human life was a gift from Godhumans made by God in Her image, as it were. Darwinism offered a rather devastating alternative to this scenarionatural selection acting on random variation.[18] In this view, we become a mere historical accidentfor evolution is no more than randomness caught on the wingto use Jacques Monods (1971) sweet, lyric phrase (p. 98; Kauffman, 1995, p. 97). Obviously, a number (a goodly number) were not happy with this conclusion nor with the dilemma of choosing between external creation and random chance. In Deweyan terms, this sense of either-or extremes is limiting. Are these the only choices available? Is this really the way the universe was constructed?
Evolutionary biologistsparticularly C.H. Waddington and Jean Piaget searched for a third way, a tertium quid to use Piagets phrase. Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead and theologians such as Charles Hartshorne, John Cobb, and David Griffin proposed a different cosmologyone that either posited or allowed for creativity as a prime process. Physicists, too, joined inPaul Davies probably being the most notable. It is, though, the chemist-metaphysician Ilya Prigogine who has brought self-organization to the fore and begun talk of a new type of ordercomplex order or chaotic order, if one wishes to be playful.[19]
A literature is developing about complexity theory: Roger Lewin and Michael Waldrop have written popular books, (both are named Complexity and both were published in 1992). The Santa Fe Institute, founded by the atomic scientists at Los Alamos, New Mexico, has devoted the most time and scholarly attention to complexity theory and of this group it is Stuart Kauffman (1993, 1995), I believe, who is doing the most to investigate and speculate on the origins of order. This investigation-speculation draws heavily on and integrates the fields of evolutionary biology, nonlinear mathematics (chaos mathematics it is usually called), thermodynamic chemistry, and speculative metaphysics (or process philosophy). Kauffman is the individual on whom I will base my analysis and speculations.[20]
Currently a MacArthur Fellow working at the Santa Fe Institute, Kauffman has always been a bit of a maverick in his thinking, challenging the conventional. He began college (Dartmouth) wanting to be a Great Playwright but then switched to being a Great Philosopher (B.A. in Philosophy and a year at OxfordLewin, 1992, pp. 2326). Convinced greatness for him did not lie in philosophy, he decided to enter medical school and work on embryologythe development of living organisms. With a background in poetry, literature, philosophy, he felt the randomness of Darwinian selectionthe accidentalness of all lifewas just too simple. Not wrong, just too simple. The phenomenal order in nature, often expressed mathematically as in the Fibonacci sequence, was too pervasive to be accidental.[21] Something else had to be present in the cosmos. Natural selection had to have a companion. He found that something in the creativity of self-organization: which he has explored in computer generated mathematics via Boolean networks, has applied to embryology in regard to cells self-forming, and has speculated on in social systems. At the cosmological or metaphysical level, Kauffman is looking for a new marriage of self-organization, selection, and accident (1995, p. 150). There is a spiritual but not necessarily a religious quest to Kauffmans search. In some ways Kauffman is taking for study Alfred North Whiteheads (1929/1978) remark, It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity (p. 21). Kauffman is studying both the complex unity and the entering into of this statement.[22]
A Boolean network, named after the mathematician George Boole, is a dynamical system of interconnecting parts. That is, it is a system or network of parts wherein the system as a whole changes as the parts undergo change. A simple example would be a square board with anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 light bulbs interconnected in a random mannerone does need computers to make this example work. Each light bulb would be connected to one or more other light bulbs. On a random basis, some light bulbs would go on when its connecting bulb(s) is/are lit; others would not go on or would receive mixed signals switching back and forth between on and off. Since each bulb is connected with other bulbs one might well expect that a switch of the current to ON would produce a random maze of blinkingchaos would reign as the bulbs get mixed signals. This is a fine modernist prediction and a true one sometimes. The interesting feature is that under certain conditions the blinking bulbs settle down to a pattern of changei.e. order and harmony emerge at the system level as the bulbs cycle through change from one state to another. Kauffman calls this order for free (1995, Chapter Four), as it is an order neither imposed nor random but rather emerging under certain conditions from the interactions going on within the system itself. Here lies the key concept of his cosmological thesisthe organization of life is the natural result (neither imposed nor random) of a dynamical system acting under certain conditions. It is these certain conditions which Kauffman continues to explore and which hold heuristic value, I believe, for curriculum thought and theory.
I will not go into the leap Kauffman makes from the operations of Boolean networks with computers to the origins of life in the universe, except to say that he finds remarkable correspondences between the operation of such networks and the embryological problem of how cells are able to both differentiate and reproduce. As he poetically says: How can a single cell, merely some tens of thousands of kinds of molecules locked in one anothers embrace, know how to create the intricacies of a human infant? (1995, p. 93). Those interested in this issue I refer to his Chapters Five, Six, Seven. Instead, I will concentrate on the conditions or circumstances needed for order (and control) to emerge. What methods, what sense of control are needed to have this occur?
The conditions for emergent order are really quite simple, almost naively so. But they are extremely important: without the conditions present, order (as we recognize such) does not emerge. These conditionsall combined in an integrated and interactive mannerare a critical mass (light bulbs for the computer model used), a few connections (each light bulb connected with only two or so others), and simple rules (light bulbs connected in either an AND relationship or an OR relationshipi.e. both light up, only one lights up).[23] This integration of critical mass (fairly high) and connections (few) with rules (simple) produces what Kauffman and others refer to as order emerging at or near the edge of chaos. In Kauffmans (1995) own words
What we have found for the modestly complex behaviors we are requesting is that the networks do adapt and improve, and that they evolve, not to the very edge of chaos, but to the ordered regime, not too far from the edge of chaos. It is as though a position in the ordered regime near the transition to chaos affords the best mixture of stability and flexibility. (p. 91)
It is this mixture of stability and flexibility which Kauffman believes may emerge as a kind of universal feature of complex adaptive systems in biology and beyond (p. 91).
Systems that are stable and flexible! On the one hand this sounds almost trite hardly worthy of a book or even of a chapter. Yet the curriculum model we have inherited from Calvin-Ramus-Comenius does not include BOTH stability AND flexibility; nor, indeed, do most teachers think of these two as a necessary combination. But this is just Kauffmans point, regarding the origins of life, and mine, regarding an alternative way to view curriculum. We have viewed stability-flexibility in either-or terms. As Dewey (1938/1963) says: Humankind, with its penchant for extreme opposites, is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either-Ors (p. 17). The uniqueness of a complexity theory approach (its radicalness from a modernist perspective) is that it replaces either-or with both-and.[24] The dynamic integration of stability and flexibility sends us not to the very edge of chaos, but to the ordered regime, not too far from the edge, very close to the transition to chaos. Our curriculum challenge, if we wish complexity theory to be heuristic and generative, is to combine stability with flexibility, flexibility with stability, in such ways that we operate near but neither on nor over the edge of chaos.
There are, of course, many ways to accept this challenge. Personally, I look at my 4Rs of a good curriculum (Richness, Recursions, Relations, Rigor) and try to set a framework that is rich in interconnections and problematic ways of viewing but has the flexibility of letting groups decide how the material presented is handled. There is no linear, atomistic, simple syllabus. Presently masters level students in one of my courses are reading three booksby myself, by William Pinar, by C. A. Bowers. How they are handling the material in the books is a decision each group is making. How the groups will interact with each other and how I and a graduate assistant will interact with both the class and the groups is still forming. Control is present but it is not imposed, it emerges from the interactions present. This is but one example. In California, a few years back, frustrated in using a linear approach to help six graders solve math problems, I (with the advice of a colleague, Samuel Crowell) had the students make up their own problems and hand them to another group. The ability to do the math problems they could not solve before improved dramatically. In Deweys terms, the learning occurred naturally and indirectly as a result of active involvement.[25] These are but two examples of my working with a framework (complex and nonlinear) that is Both stable And flexible.
In this essay I have had two foci. One, I have looked at the history and origins of that we call curriculum; two, I have explored a bit the relevance complexity theory (and its attendant notions of chaos) might have for a view of curriculum different from the modernist one we now embrace. Regarding the first, I have argued that the naturalness of our curriculum and instructional methodstheir embedded sense of order and controlis an historical artifact. There is nothing necessary about these methods, they are the result of particular people operating in a particular culture with particular ideologies. Alternatives are allowable. Regarding the second, complexity theory and its usefulness, the time is yet too soon for us to make an assessment. Such an assessment, of course, will need to be made on its curricular successes/failures not on its mathematical or biological ones. Presently, though, I am excited enough by its implications to try organizing my classes in a manner that allows for, indeed depends on, stability and flexibility.
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[1] It is
interesting to note that as a social reformer and practical businessman, Taylor
believed that all classes of men are not only willing, but glad to give up all
ideas of soldering, and devote all their energies to turning out maximum work
possible, providing [sic] they are sure of a suitable permanent reward. The
reward Bethlehem Steel gave Schmidt (Taylors first class man) was an
increase in pay from $1.15 per day to $1.85 per day (Taylor, 1911/1947, pp.
4546). Once this new production schedule was established, Taylor, as a
progressive, considered it his moral duty to be certain the pig-iron was now
loaded at the new rate with the men paid extra premium (p. 43; Doll, 1993, p.
40). [With progressive thinkers like that it is no wonder the union movement
spread.]
[2] Along these lines it is interesting to read Jacques Derridas Specters of Marx (1994), a fascinating reappraisal of Marx and the role of Marxism in the history of intellectual thought.
[3] Every man his own priest is important in Margaret Wertheims (1995) argument that womens exclusion from the new mathematics and physics arising in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due to the Catholic Churchs reforms from the eleventh and twelfth centuries on (and certainly intensified by the Protestant challenge) which followed Pope Gregorys decree that all bishops were to have the the arts of letters taught in their churches followed by the Third and Fourth Lateran councils, a century and century and one-half later, decreeing that every cathedral church shall maintain a master to give free instruction to clerics in the church (p. 41). Clerics were males. Women were categorically excluded from the Renaissance of knowledge in the late Middle Ages and the following scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In fact, women were not allowed into the colleges of Oxford until late in the nineteenth century. It is not too much to say that from the twelfth century through the nineteenth, the control of Western knowledge lay in male minds.
[4] I am using a small p with Protestant here for in its early stages this movement was indeed a reform from within the Roman Churchboth Erasmus and Luther were priests and Augustinian monks. They wished not to break with Rome but to reform it of its too worldly and sophisticated and unholy ways. Such hope was short lived and by the 1530s, Protestantism adopted its own, simpler, form of worship (Bratt, 1968).
[5] This methodization movement, I have just begun to explore (Doll, forthcoming). It began, educationally, in the 16th century with the curriculum reforms developed by men such as Peter Ramus and Johann Amos Comenius. Quickly it spread to the fields beyond education/schooling to those of literature, philosophy, science, and theology, to name but a few. Peter Dear (1995), speaking of this time, comments that Method served an analogous function to that of the Holy Spirit in the Catholic tradition because it identified the hidden source of a traditions legitimacy (p. 121).
[6] I wish to emphasize again Wertheims (1995) point of how making the church schools and universities accessible to men only disenfranchised women. From the twelfth through the nineteenth centuries (when universities did become co-ed and womens colleges did develop) the big broad intellectual movements that have defined Western intellectual thought and culturethe Renaissance, humanism, the scientific revolution and its practical applicationswere carried on almost exclusively in relation to these schools and universities. For these seven to eight centuries women were excluded from participating actively in these movements or as in the salons of Paris had to approach these movements in an extra-curricular manner. In 1732, Laura Bassi became the worlds first woman professor, at the University of Bologna but could lecture only when the (male) faculty decided she could, namely at special public occasions [when she was] put on display to attract fame and attention (p. 138). Mary Somerville in the early 1800s translated Laplaces monumental book on celestial mechanics into English with copious notes and mathematical derivatives. The book became and stayed for a century the standard text for advanced physics students at the University of Cambridge. Yet she, herself, was not allowed admission to its hallowed halls (p. 166). The story of Marie Curie is well known. The worlds first twice honored Nobel recipient she became, in 1906 (two centuries after Laura Bassi and almost one after Mary Somerville), the University of Paris first female professor but in spite of these honors was never accepted into the French Academy of Sciences (p. 173). One cannot say the list is endlessit is really quite short.
[7] Shortly after Luthers day, the Jesuits began (in the mid1500s) their series of colleges and since no uniform system existed (Fitzpatrick, 1932, p. 28) they began their ratio studiorum (rules of study [and administration]). The first fully formed expression of these rules appeared in 1599 but the Jesuits had been working on them since 1584 and drew them from Jesuit teaching experiences since the mid- 1500s. Hamilton (n.p.) believes that much of the didacticism conventionally associated with Jesuit practice may have come later through post-Comenian interpretations (p. 24). See also Doll, 2002).
[8] Much of my history of education (with particular reference to the origin of the concepts curriculum and schooling) in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe is indebted to the published and unpublished writings of David Hamilton of the University of Liverpool, England. See also Triche and McKnight, 2004.
[9] This (new) methodsequential, ordered, efficient (Ong, 1958, p. 225)was not without its critics. Francis Bacon, in the Preface to his Novum Organum (1620/1899), complained that those who have assigned so much to logic [the Ramists] [have] tended more to confirm errors, than to disclose the truth. Our only remaining hope and salvation is to begin the whole labor of the mind again (p. 312).
However, in this fresh start on the concept of understanding, Bacon asserts that we must not leave the mind to itself but must be directing it perpetually from the very first, and attaining our end as it were by mechanical aid (p. 312). Thus, a mechanistic methodology was used not only by the Ramists but even by its critics. As an interesting aside, it is worth noting that the seriation of food servingcourses one, two, three as in a four or seven course mealcame into being around the mid-1600s. Prior to that food was laid out more in a smorgasbord style. See Peterson, 1994, passim, especially part I.
[10] Ramus was indeed, to use Hamiltons phrase, the high priest of [shortcutting,] method, or, to use Walter Ongs appropriated phrase, the greatest master of the short-cut the world has ever known. This teaching movement, strong from the 1510s on, shifted the intellectual emphasis in education from the classical ideal of a perfect orator, etc. to the classroom ideal of a methodology based on textbooks, teaching manuals, drills (Hamilton, 1990, p. 2326; Ong, 1958, p. 3). A. N. Whiteheads (1967/1929) warning is relevant here: to text-book knowledge of subjects . . . marks an educational failure (p. 29).
[11] There were, of course, other methodizers: Charles Hoole and his A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole (1660) and the Jesuit Orders school manual, Ratio Studiorum (1599) stand our in this regard. All of these contributed to the substitution of didactics (rhetorical declamations on teaching and learning) for pedagogics (advice on introducing children to the adult world).
[12] Hamilton (1992) strongly makes the point that the work of the methodists (Comenius and his contemporaries) was not merely an extension, even a ramification, of past patterns; rather they created new educational patterns (maybe even a paradigm) utilizing two new ideas: curriculum and didactics. Now, three hundred years later these patterns are being challenged by a new set of assumptions that prefigure another educational order (p. 157). Like Hamilton, I see this new order emerging from complexity theory. The latter part of this paper will introduce complexity theory and muse on the educational (curriculum and instruction) possibilities inherent in this new order.
[13] In his A Reformation of Schooles (1642, pp. 71ff.), Comenius talks of The Temple of Christian Pansophie to be erected and framed according to the rules, and lawes of Almighty God the supreme Architect, [wherein] by a moft exact forme of Method [and under a] Christian Catholique Church mans mind turning to every side, may with pleasing contemplation, looke upon every thing in the world, visible and invisable, temporall and eternall, so farre as they are revealed (pp. 7172).
[14] A fine example detailing this ongoing connection can be found in Bj×rg Gundem (1992), Notes on the Development of Nordic Didactics, and in her 1995 Oslo conference on curriculum and didactics. See also Tero Autio (2002).
[15] A good development of this both/and rather than either/or theme in Deweys writing can be found in Chapter Four of Jeanne Robertsons doctoral dissertation: Reconstructing Educational Experience: A Postmodern Perspective (n.p.).
[16] Michel Serres (1995) makes an insightful comment about between when he says it is an unexplored space, an interdisciplinary ground, occupied by conjunctions (p. 70). His comment here comes from a section on Method, one in which he looks at method from a mathematical-chaos point of viewi.e. one in which method is nonlinear.
[17] There are those who will say I have read too much into one quotationbasic control resides in the nature of the situations. But no one would argue that Dewey is advocating enforced control and to emphasize individualness exclusively or strongly in Dewey (as some do) is to miss his whole search for an alternative method of developmentan alternative [that] is not just a middle course or compromise between the two procedures [but] is something radically different from either (1934/1964, p. 8). I am arguing that Dewey believed this something radically different to lie in the inter/transactional nature of situations themselves. This frame Dewey proposes (of basic control residing in the nature of the situations themselves) is quite akin to Jean Piagets evolutionary and developmental tertium quid, to C.H. Waddingtons genetic landscape, and to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varelas autopoietic system, and, of course, to Alfred North Whiteheads famous dictum: It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity (see, Doll, 1993, pp. 8185; Whitehead, 1929/1978, p. 21 ), all of which are, I believe, forerunners to the concept of self-organization. See also Stuart Kauffman (2000).
[18] For one view of, and introduction to, the debate surrounding the randomness of evolution, see Doll, 1993, Chapter Three.
[19] More detailed comments about these authors and their views can be found in Doll, 1993, Chapters Three and Four, especially. For more on this rapidly developing field see also Gell-Mann (1994), Cilliers (1998), and Sole and Goodwin (2000). See also almost any of the numerous works by Michel Serres.
[20] I also wish to give recognition to Nicolis and Prigogine (1989), Bechtel and Richardson (1993), Cowan, Pines, and Meltzer (1994), and Cohen and Stewart (1994).
[21] This issue of the relationship between the abstractness of mathematics and the realness of nature is a key (and controversial) point in Kauffmans cosmology. Fibonacci numbers are those ordered in the pattern of 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34 etc.always the two previous summing the third. Obviously this is a mathematical abstraction, one of thousands if not of millions. What is interesting about this sequence is how often it is replicated in naturein the swirls on pine cones, in the branching of trees, in the petals of sunflowers. The phenomenon is well known enough to warrant a namephyllotaxis (Kauffman, 1995, pp. 151 & 185). Indeed this phenomenon could be looked upon as merely accidental. But for Kauffman and others it is more; it signifies a fundamental tenet (law if one likes) of the nature of development. The patterns of this development shows up in both Boolean networks and in life itselfat the genetic level and at the cultural level. The patterns of this emergent development while not yet well known are, Kauffman believes, natural not mysterious. They interweave self-organization, selection, chance, and design (pp. 185186). Studying this interweaving is Kauffmans project; mine is to look at its curriculum implications.
[22] I am also reminded here of Gregory Batesons (1987) comment that there is a certain sacredness to the organization of the biological world (p. 8).
[23] Mapping this Boolean network pattern onto genetics is, I believe, complicated enough to not include here. Those wishing to study such are referred to Kauffmans Chapter Five, The Mystery of Ontogeny, in his At Home in the Universe (1995). The simplicity of it all is why Kauffman repeatedly uses the phrase we the expected; not we the accidental.
[24] I am indebted to Jeanne Robertson (n.p.) for introducing me to the phrase and illuminating the thinking allied with Both/And.
[25] Too often the active involvement present in our modernist classrooms is a false active involvementit is all rigged and too tightly controlled; the flexibility needed is not present. Regretfully, the discovery method of a few years back was plagued with this disease.