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What Is Curriculum Theory? (Studies in Curriculum Theory Series)

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Thinking is a necessary and complicated characteristic of a democratic society. Pinar's questions facilitate, much like Socrates, an opportunity--time, place, and context--for educators to reclaim the art of education and their significant role in building a landscape of thinkers for a flourishing democratic society. As a parent, teacher, community worker, tax-payer, and citizen of the United States of America, I recommend Pinar's What is Curriculum as as a resource for thinking more about what is the purpose of education in a democratic and free society.

According to the introduction of this book, curriculum reform and school standardized testing demanded by parents and politicians are nothing but a right-wing racialist ploy. Read for yourself:

"In this primer for teachers (prospective and practicing), I offer an interpretation of the nightmare that is the present. Our nightmare began in the 1950s, when gendered anxieties over the Cold War and racialized anxieties over school desegregation coded public education (not for the first time) as "feminized" and "black." The vicious character of politicians' and many parents' criticisms of public education is intelligible only as a recoding of these gendered and racialized anxieties, "deferred and displaced" from the originary events onto "school reform" (see chap. 2).

While the origins of our present political difficulties began with the exploitation of public education as a Presidential campaign issue in 1960 by a liberal Democratic candidate, subsequent exploitations have been made by candidates mostly on the right (see chap. 3). What is at stake in right-wing reform--which has converted the school into a business, focused on the "bottom line" (test scores) --is control of the curriculum, what teachers are permitted to teach, what children are permitted to study. At least from the 1960s, the right-wing in the United States has appreciated that its political ascendancy depends on controlling how and what Americans think. "