The following is taken from Hacking Minds: Curriculum Mentis, Noosphere, Internet, Matrix, Web (pp. 16-17). It is a co-written chapter with Stephen Petrina in Hacking Education in a Digital Age. I continue to be interested in curriculum history and theory, especially as it relates to technology and theology.
Metaphysics of Curriculum
One of the more pressing questions of curriculum is its origins, originality, and manifestations in ancient history and metaphysics. From history emerges or manifests four substantive meanings or significations of curriculum:
- A carriage, chariot, conveyance, or vehicle and attendant parts, arenas, circuses, crowds, and infrastructure (e.g., curriculum artis and
currus igneus). - The run or race, autobiography, career and works, experience, journey,
or life (curriculum vitae and currere). - The sphere or extension of the mind (curriculum mentis).
- A course of study (e.g., cursus studiorum).
Curriculum, obtained as a loanword, had not passed into English language common use until the 1830s (e.g., Buchanan, 1846, p. 258). Interdependencies among the four manifestations evolve while articulations give depth or obscure meanings and understandings over time. Since the early 1900s with progressive education’s focus on students’ experiences and the course of studies, and the reappearance in the 1970s with reconceptualization and postreconceptualization’s focus on currere and autobiography (Pinar, 1975), the second and fourth meanings have been dominant in curriculum studies. With the history and metaphysics of curriculum neglected or atrophied, we have little to no understanding of the balance of manifestations (Doll, 2002; Quinn & Davis, 2002). Consequently, there is a misunderstanding of curriculum. As an object of analysis, the first manifestation is debased to what the idealist Royce (1908/1951) called “trivialities of mere instrumentalism”… “fragmentary hints and transient expressions” of the second and fourth senses of curriculum (p. 96). The third manifestation is neglected altogether. It does not help that a cosmic or social extension of consciousness and mind risks charges of “mere metaphysical verbiage” (Bawden, 1904, p. 66).
References
Bawden, H. H. (1904). The necessity from the standpoint of scientific method of a reconstruction of the ideas of the psychical and the physical. Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, 1(3), 62–68.
Buchanan, W. M. (1846). Curriculum. In A technological dictionary (p. 258). London, England: Tegg & Company.
Doll, W. E. (2002). Ghosts and the curriculum. In W. E. Doll & N. Gough (Eds.), Curriculum visions (pp. 23–72). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Pinar, W. (Ed.). (1975). Curriculum theorizing: The reconceptualists. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.
Quinn, M., & Davis, D. J. (2002). Holy vision, wholly vision-ing: Curriculum and the legacy of the chariot. In W. E. Doll, Jr. & N. Gough (Eds.), Curriculum visions (pp. 232–242). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Royce, J. (1951). The problem of truth in the light of recent discussion. In D. S. Robinson (Ed.), Royce’s logical essays (pp. 63–97). Dubuque, IA: Wm. C. Brown Company. (Original work published 1908)