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Understanding Curriculum: An Introduction to the Study of Historical and Contemporary Curriculum Discourses
By William F. Pinar, William M. Reynolds, Patrick Slattery, & Peter M. Taubaum
New York: Peter Lang, 1995. xviii+1143 pages. ISBN 0 - 8204 - 2601 - 6 (pbk.)
REVIEWED BY MURRAY ELLIOTT, UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
Comprehensive, exhaustive, synoptic, encyclopedic, and, at times, overwhelming! How, other than by such words, can a reviewer respond to a volume of this magnitude, one which includes 166 pages of references and 109 pages of indices?
The authors set out to provide a comprehensive yet introductory treatment of curriculum discourses as they have developed over the last two centuries in North America. Beginning with The Yale Report on the Defense of the Classics (1828), Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, and Taubaum provide for beginning students a "first glimpse at the history and present state of the field of American (and to an extent North American) curriculum studies" (p. 63). In the volume, "curriculum" is a term encompassing both substance and presentation as well as selected educational policy issues that have direct, indirect, or sometimes only tangential significance for the matter and the manner of school learning and teaching. As the authors declare at the outset, the general field of curriculum is "the field interested in the relationships among the school subjects as well as issues within the individual school subjects themselves and with the relationships between the curriculum and the world" (p. 6). A reader might well ask whether anything could not appropriately fall within such a broadly defined field of study.
Following the historical background of some 172 pages (really, a book - length survey in itself), the authors trace the post - 1980 development of curriculum discourses. A central thesis displayed, developed, and detailed in this part of the work is that "the general field of curriculum ... is no longer preoccupied with development ... [but] with understanding" (p. 6); the book both tells the story of how this transformation has happened and also...