CURRICULUM

CURRICULUM in most countries emanates from the national government, but in the United States control of public school curriculum resides with the states, and in practice much of the responsibility for developing curriculum is delegated to local school districts. In an official sense, then, in the United States it is not possible to speak of a national curriculum. If diversity with respect to what is taught is an obvious fact of life in American schools, however, it is possible to discern an American curriculum.

Perhaps the greatest influence on curriculum is a sense of what is appropriate to teach, which in the United States has traditionally been drawn from the Western intellectual tradition, which means such subjects as mathematics, history, English language and literature, and science. Such traditional subjects are often supplemented by subjects that reflect national concerns. For example, the United States is unique in including driver education in the high school curriculum. Other subjects that reflect national concerns, such as sexually transmitted diseases, race relations, alcoholism, drug abuse, and unwanted pregnancies, frequently find their way into the curriculum of U.S. schools. In fact, this sheer breadth of courses has often been a source of considerable controversy, with some critics charging that schools are undertaking responsibilities they cannot successfully address or are offering courses that in some sense intrude on the responsibilities of other social institutions such as the family.

A second major influence on the American curriculum has been the programs of the U.S. Department of Education, which usually originate in congressional legislation. Federal aid to education in the mid-1990s is about 10 percent of national public school costs, but the way in which such aid is distributed—with specific stipulations regarding how school systems can spend the money and frequent requirements that states match federal dollars, thus effectively multiplying the amount of money spent on federal programs—frequently has a large effect on the curriculum of schools. Perhaps the most visible example is the prominence of vocational education. Since passage of the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, the federal government has supported vocational education and home economics. In 1958 the National Defense Education Act provided millions of dollars for mathematics, science, and foreign languages. Although many of the curriculum reform projects supported by that legislation achieved a certain measure of success, the effects on the American curriculum were not as long-lived as in the case of vocational education. Apart from these nationalizing tendencies, the curriculum is also subject to political influence in communities as well as state departments of education.

The 1960s saw a new wave of progressive education in the United States, and in general curricula opened in response to issues raised in the civil rights and women's movements. Then, in the 1970s, a "back to basics" movement gained momentum, with many states adopting minimum competency tests in reading, writing, and mathematics. These and other standardized tests gained increasing importance over the next three decades, spurred by the federal government's increased role in education, its attempts to gauge the success of its investment, and its goal of holding school systems accountable by requiring that they report scores publicly. In the mid-1980s, the issue of a shared national core curriculum became heated following the formation of the Core Knowledge Foundation by E. D. Hirsch, eventually leading the state governors to adopt, in 1988, the National Education Goals. Stressing math and science, Goals 2000 established shared standards in the different subject areas, provoking numerous controversies about what they should (and should not) include.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

———. The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them. New York: Doubleday, 1996.

Kliebard, Herbert M. The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.

Marshall, J. Dan, James T. Sears, and William H. Schubert. Turning Points in Curriculum: A Contemporary American Memoir. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Merrill, 2000.

Herbert M.Kliebard/c. w.

See alsoEducation ; Education, Higher: Colleges and Universities ; Multiculturalism ; Pluralism .