Reconceiving Curriculum: An Historical Approach

This book reconceives curriculum using an historical approach that employs Wittgenstein s later philosophy. The curriculum field is concerned with the broad intellectual and ideological ways a society thinks about education. The school curriculum''s current focus on specific learning outcomes offers a selective historical view of knowledge. The concept of curriculum emerged at the end of the Renaissance from Peter Ramus refinement of the art of dialectic into a pedagogical method of logic. During the 1970s, curriculum theorists began disrupting curriculum''s rational foundations by reconceptualizing curriculum using philosophies developed outside of education. Wittgenstein s later philosophy is used to further disrupt the school curriculum s rational underpinnings. Using a Wittgenstein approach suggests that education is an indirect activity that teaches students what he calls language-games. Wittgenstein suggests that educating students indirectly more closely resembles the kinds of playful activities in which children engage in their everyday lives. As such, a Wittgensteinian approach reconceives curriculum as an act of language-play.