Peter S. Hlebowitsh is an associate professor in the Division of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education of the University of Iowa, N256 Lindquist Center, Iowa City, IA 52242-1529,USA. He is author of Radical Curriculum Theory Reconsidered(Teachers College Press, 1993), co-author of American Education: Purpose and Promise (Wadsworth, 1997) and co-editor of the Annual Review of Research for School Leaders (Scholastic,1996). He is editor of the John Dewey Society journal, Education and Culture.

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Much has been written about the robust conceptual variance that the American field of curriculum studies has recently gained from its many ideological skirmishes. What was once seen as a field of study allegedly stuck in the procedural interplay between behaviouristic objectives and instructional judgments is now supportive of forays into hermeneutics, feminist theory, psychoanalytic inquiry, deconstructionism, and a wide range of postmodern and post-critical concerns. Some scholars have been impressed enough with this new display of diversity to announce that the US field has undergone a fundamental reconceptualization. Once-common metaphors referring to the death of curriculum studies have themselves died. A new life-giving variance, embodied in the so-called 'reconceptualization', has apparently helped to cure the disease of traditionalism and denied it the throes of death.

But while the curriculum literature (its journals and conference papers) clearly reflects new concerns, mostly emerging from the academic left, the actual conduct of the US school curriculum has remained relatively unaffected. The waters ripple with rhetoric about counter-hegemony, critical consciousness and psychoanalytic understanding while deep old-world currents continue to move the school in predictable directions. One has to wonder about the character of this so-called reconceptualization when one views it in the light of school practice. It is fair to say that the reconceptualization of the field has occurred in the playground of the abstract, created in the academic cloister, largely removed from the perturbations of school life. It has given us some perspective, but it has not give us a body of curriculum theory that is responsive to the social and political realities of the school. Too often it has promulgated criticism as theory, but it has left 'theory' in a ghettoized state &endash;without a school constituency and without a compass for action.

If such a pattern continues, a blight likely awaits the study of curriculum itself. There are already casualties on the North American scene. In the USA the very idea of curriculum design, which has historically given purpose and function to curriculum theory, has been forsaken as an oppressive and imperialistic construct by a good share of the curriculum theory community. Curriculum theory, such thinkers contend, exists to inform the intelligence and creativity of practitioners, and should not manifest itself programmatically as design. What is forgotten, however, is that design questions can be built on principle, not programme, and are still very much needed to give overall shape and direction to the schools, not only in adjudicating what knowledge, experiences and values are most worthwhile but also in making decisions over a schedule of time and place. Without a deliberate design, the very force of American public education is relativized, its historic civic purpose made optional, replaced, in the end, by a belief in alternativeness and its accompanying focus on meeting individualistic and familial mandates. It is telling that, in terms of curriculum development, the best that anyone can seem to do in the USA these days is to call for parental choice and the role of the market in improving the schools, a sign of debility in the curriculum field if there ever was one. Remarkably, this collapse on the idea of choice has actually occurred from within both the conservative and radical ranks of curriculum studies, a position that I argued elsewhere (Hlebowitsh 1993).

The commitment to variance in curriculum studies has also had repercussions in the field's sense of itself, and in its capacity to build upon its own heritage. Daniel and Laurel Tanner (1980) have argued that the study of the curriculum in North America rests on a paradigmatic framework that is historically rooted in John Dewey's conception of the educative process and supported by consistent views found in various landmark curriculum documents. But the pieces to this paradigm still seem to be very much missing, not because they do not exist but because no one can seem to agree on their actual characteristics. The community itself resists talk of paradigms, or the less threatening idea of a consensual framework, mostly out of fear of committing the instrumentalist's sin. Negativity is embraced as a protection against encrusted traditions and status quo reasoning, but nothing provides a centre of gravity. In fact, the commitment to negativity or oppositional thought, which grew out of the critical theory community, has been like an immune system gone haywire, destroying the good with the bad, ignoring any conserving agendas in the conduct of the school and eventually undermining various life-sustaining principles in the field.

All that remains in such an arrangement is ideology. Dewey (1938; vi-vii), it should be said, once warned against the dangers of allowing ideology to take on a prominent role in a field, noting how overt ideological thinking is often tied to 'a movement that thinks and acts in terms of isms', eventually becoming 'so involved in reactions against other isms that it is unwittingly controlled by them'. One, of course, has to concede the role of ideology in curriculum thinking. Everyone has one! But there is a difference between having an ideology and intentionally placing it at the very forefront of truth and understanding. Biases need to be recognized and minimized. They need to be mediated by a method of intelligence, and placed in the open air of discussion rather than used as the weaponry of truth and reality.

The penchant for the 'isms' has clearly wreaked its share of damage in curriculum studies, especially in that it has confused our idea of the past. In the USA, for instance, much of curriculum studies is still marked by wildly varied points of historical interpretation that occur not at the fringes but at the very core of the field. Herbert Kliebard and Daniel Tanner, two widely read scholars, disagree on virtually every major point of analysis regarding the Cardinal Principles (Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education 1918), the 26th Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (NSB) (Rugg 1927), the Eight Year Study, the legacy of Ralph Tyler's work, life-adjustment education, and the comprehensive high school (to name a few). Radically inclined scholars have confidently proclaimed the field of curriculum to be rooted in the soil of coercive social control and social efficiency, while scholars working out of a more liberal-progressive perspective have pointed to the social activism of the early progressive period, the high regard placed on curriculum experimentation, and the effort to liberate human intelligence through the school. The matter almost seems to boil down to making an ideologically based choice. Michael Apple's well-known Ideology and Curriculum(1990), an important book now in its second edition, chooses a history of social control for its account of the field of curriculum. As Arthur Foshay (1991: 79) observed, 'For Apple, the curriculum field seems to be defined by Bobbitt and Charters, by Popham, and by a single book of Tyler's'. Other scholars, such as William Pinar, have helped to proclaim are conceptualization for the field that has essentially drawn a line between those who walk with Tyler and those who have walked away from Tyler. The effect has been schism. Many of us, in fact, who have worked out of an experimentalist-progressive line of work, continue to be labeled as 'traditionalists' who are caught up in the task of designing oppressive environments for youth (Slattery 1995). Similarly, how one might view the work of such US curriculum thinkers such as Jesse Newlon, Ralph Tyler and Hollis Caswell has much to do with which historical version is accepted. Each, for instance, has been cast as a social efficiency expert intent on imposing unreasonable methods of procedural consensus on the school, while also being portrayed as running against the grain of social efficiency and traditionalism and providing practical curriculum insight through wide ranging school-based experimentation. These portrayals could hardly be more clearly opposed.

Even John Dewey, who has been mostly recently embraced by the academic left, has been subjected to wide-ranging treatments that have characterized his work as child-centered (even anarchic) at one end and as conservative life-adjustment at the other. Robert West brook's (1991) intellectual biography of Dewey has gone a long way toward showing the radical-liberal side of Dewey, and various curriculum theorists on the left now see Dewey as a social deconstructionist. This is,however, only a decade or so after various historical revisionists propounded Dewey's work as advancing the interests of corporate America and its thirst for an obedient and yielding industrial work order, a conclusion taken quite seriously by several curriculum scholars.

These interpretations are the startling side-effects of a field gone mad with overtly ideological constructions, a fictionalized field that looks for a history to suit its ideology, that educates its rising generation of scholars inversions of history, and that, in the end, continues to lose its centre of gravity. We have variance &endash; which is good &endash; but we do not have a centre for community and communication.

In 1926, Harold Rugg, under the sponsorship of the NSSE, put together several forums dedicated to discussing central questions pertinent to the idea of curriculum design. Rugg's questions were at the very core of connecting theory with practice. Participation in the forums was inclusive including scholars such as George Counts, W. W. Charters, Ernest Horn, Franklin Bobbitt, Jesse Newlon, William Bagley, Stuart Courtis, and William Kilpatrick. The byproducts of these inquiries and discussions were published in the 26th NSB Yearbook, a work that helped to acknowledge fundamental differences in the field and that searched for new bases of professional commonality and community. It was among the few curriculum documents that catalogued and reviewed the theoretical divergencies of its day and that brought forward the major thinkers of the time for a discussion aimed at cultivating a sense of understanding and unity. One could debate the worth of the composite statement of unity on the foundations of curriculum-making forged in the Yearbook, as others naturally have, but few would question the worth of trying to find some reorientation and balance in the field, one that strikes the chord of conversation and common unity (community). To paraphrase Dewey, there is more than a verbal tie between the words common, community and communication. It is time, perhaps, to begin again the project of unity and reconciliation that Rugg attempted several decades ago with a modern agenda designed to deal with both theoretical and practical curriculum issues.

The questions asked in such an undertaking might involve perennial curriculum concerns regarding what knowledge is most worthwhile, what learning and teaching patterns are most appropriate, and what evaluative mechanisms can best capture the effects of the curriculum experience. Whatever their nature, they should stimulate commentary on basic theoretical and practical considerations, all for the expressed purpose of representing differences and attempting to find common ground. The diversity of the field cannot be viewed as a strength until some unity can be derived from it.

But could it be that the time has passed for this? Is it possible that we cannot even agree on the kinds of questions to ask, or even agree that curriculum theory should be tied into school practice? Will the idea of achieving a sense of consensus, even if vested in diversity, continue to be seen as inimical to progress? If so, how can we see ourselves as a field?Where have we gone and what have we done with what our progenitors have given us?

Apple, M. (1990) Ideology and Curriculum (New York: Rout ledge).

Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (1918) The Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education  (Washington: US Government Printing Office).

Dewey, J. (1938) Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan).

Foshay, A. (1991) Making the given problematic: review of Ideology and Curriculum by Michael Apple. Educational Forum, 56 (1), 77-80

Hlebowitsh, P. (1993) Radical Curriculum Theory Reconsidered (New York: Teachers College Press).

Rugg, H. O. (ed.) (1927) Curriculum-making: Past and Present, 26th Yearbook, Part 1, of the National Society for the Study of Education (Bloomington, IL: Public School Publ.).

Slattery, P. (1995) Curriculum Development in the Postmodern Era (Hamden, CT: Garland).

Tanner, D. and Tanner, L. (1980) Curriculum Development (New York: Macmillan).

Westbrook, R. (1991) John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).