Value bases for curriculum decisions

The Western mind typically conceptualizes in dualistic terms. The antithesis of subjective and objective is one example. Curriculum designs are often thought of as beginning at either of these points and proceeding toward other. In general, whole history of Western educational ideas may be interpreted as a series of emphases and overemphases on either sociological direction of informing from without or psychological process of unfolding from within. For instance, John Locke, positing mind as a tabula rasa, advocated empirical approach to learning based on axiom, nothing in mind that is not first in senses. Curricular developments based on this or some similar philosophy face problem of adding knowledge to mind through experience, task of putting something into student's cognitive make-up which was not previously there. To cite a contrasting example, Jean Jacques Rousseau began with philosophical premise that man, the noble savage, begins with an innately good nature which education must protect from contamination by external social inputs. Thus, education takes psychological direction of unfolding good already within rather than adding something to correct an existing inadequacy. A curriculum based on such intellectual foundations takes on characteristics of what has been called permissivism in distinction from disciplinarian approach of Lockean, or sociological, direction from outside in

Antithesis · Contradiction · Curriculum · Education theory · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept · Higher education · Nothing · Pedagogy · Philosophy of education · Premise · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Computer Science · Education and Critical Thinking Development · Law · Philosophy · Psychology

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