Science, Schooling, and Society: Toward an Integrated Curriculum

Those of us who have participated in the curriculum movement over the past decade have seen a profound change in the orientation of curriculum makers during this period. In the wave of science-based curriculum projects that followed the launching of Sputnik in 1957 there was little explicit attention given to the social purposes of instruction. The emphasis in those years was on the transmission of knowledge in the most economical form through the identification of central ideas, and on the invention of pedagogical techniques that supported and reinforced the child\u27s natural curiosity and desire to learn. One of the most influential thinkers of the period, Jean Piaget, turned the attention of curriculum makers almost exclusively to the child\u27s processes of cognitive growth, and to individual differences in learning style. Another, Jerome Bruner, wrote an immensely popular book, The Process of Education, that stressed the most effective ways of organizing the transmission of knowledge, while making only passing reference to the social purposes of instruction