The Relationship of the School to the Needs of Students

title of my Ph.D. dissertation-a document now lost in the mists of time after some thirty years-is The Development of Courses in Physical Science Adapted to the Needs of Students at the Junior College Level. What I had actually done in the course of the research was to devise a conventional inorganic chemistry curriculum that emphasized applications to agriculture and examinations that tested the achievement of its objectives, which were formally stated and required to demonstrate insights into the role of chemistry in dairy production, plant and animal nutrition, and the like. These students, and a control group I also taught who were taking the conventional course and were matched to mine on entrance criteria, took examinations for both courses, as did another set of matched pairs of who were taught by a more conventional instructor. As I recall, the outcomes were favorable to the course to the needs of students because the regular couldn't make any sense at all out of the experimental course examinations whereas, since freshman chemistry is freshman chemistry, the experimental did fairly well on the conventional examinations. I cannot recall that I have since been capable of such sustained banality in my work or, indeed, in any aspect of my life. At the time, I was quite pleased with what I was doing, which seemed to me appropriate and meaningful if not very original. And I remained a devotee of the idea that the program of schools should be adapted to the needs of their students, as far as possible. But I am no longer much interested in the issue, because the terms in which I conceive the problem of education have changed so markedly that the idea of schools meeting the needs of seems to me, on the whole, absurd. It is absurd on many grounds: historical, sociological, and, especially, political. But it did not seem so in the nineteen thirties and forties, when I was being initiated into the folkways and competing ideologies of the educa

Curriculum · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Recall · Set (abstract data type · Chemistry · Computer Science · Psychology · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory