Curriculum History of the United States Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Curriculum History of the United States - Essay warningtes formal education system experienced a relative period of stabilization that allowed institutions to come unitedly under a common ideal (Zais 1976). Even as curriculum development began to gain structure form, initial developments occurred through the gradual accumulation of diverse subjects mathematics was followed by an array of sciences, including botany, anatomy, physics, astronomy, and geology. Soon afterward this subjects for non-college bounds students were added, such as typewriting, woodworking, and metallurgy. However, the ultimate array of subjects remained haphazard, unlike the well-structured form it progressively attained.Recognizing the haphazard curriculum, in 1892 a famous committee was formed to help add structure to the loosely formed curriculum. The sort out was termed the Committee of Ten and was headed by the President of Harvard at the time Charles Eliot. The committee understood that the unstructu red fix up of the current education system was pernicious to societal development, so they set out to bring pasture to the chaos (Zais 1976). Eliot and the committee determined that the greatest means to accomplish this would be to have the curriculum hold fast to the already established college structure and function solely to prepare students for higher education. As a result, the center of attention courses that had come together immediately after the Civil War were kept and substantiated, yet the elements of the curriculum intentional for students not college-bound was discarded as unnecessary. Historians and educational theorists regard this last point as especially pertinent to the changing view of learners over time, as its underlining assumption was that these core courses, even if they didnt target ad hoc vocational aspects of the learners development, would have the ultimate benefit in preparing them intellectually for whatever confinement they undertook.Even as th ese earlier curriculum formulations considered the development of the human, it wasnt