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1 Introduction

Most science educators are familiar with Joseph Schwab because of his contributions to the school reform movement in biology in the United States in the 1960s, especially through his connection to the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS) (see, e.g., DeBoer 1991). Schwab brought terms like “rhetoric of conclusions” and “narrative of enquiry”Footnote 1 to the discussion of school science, and he contributed to the reform of science education as chair of the Teacher Preparation Committee at BSCS and as author of the Biology Teachers Handbook (Schwab 1963a). But most of Schwab’s work in science education was not focused on the school curriculum, rather on the undergraduate science program while he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago. His ideas about the nature of the science curriculum were shaped as he and his colleagues at Chicago worked out the details of a comprehensive program of general educationFootnote 2 for the undergraduate college. It was at Chicago that his professional career began and where it ended 36 years later, and it was at Chicago that he thought and wrote about science education, first for undergraduate students and then later as part of the precollege science curriculum reforms of the 1950s and 1960s.

Joseph Schwab was born in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1909; matriculated as an undergraduate at age 15 at the University of Chicago in 1924; and graduated with degrees in physics and biology in 1930. He earned a doctorate in genetics from Chicago in 1939. In 1937, he spent a year at Columbia University Teachers College, where he was influenced by both John Dewey and Ralph Tyler. Schwab came to Chicago as an instructor in 1938, and he retired as professor of education and the William Rainey Harper professor of natural sciences in 1974. He then joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, founded by Robert Maynard Hutchins, in Santa Barbara, California, where he continued to think and write about curriculum. He died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1988.

He began his graduate work at Chicago just as Hutchins was beginning his long tenure, first as president (1929–1945) and then as chancellor of the university (1945–1951). This was also the time that the college was beginning to embark on its decadelong experiment in general education. Hutchins was a vigorous advocate of the Great Books approach to general education and a promoter of liberal education as the best preparation for informed, responsible citizenship (Hutchins 1936). Hutchins believed that undergraduate education should focus on a student’s intellectual development through a careful study of classic works of Western civilization, taught through a dialectical Socratic method, rather than on the development of practical skills and professional training, which tended to characterize higher education at that time. His approach was intended to develop citizens with the independence of mind suited for life in a democratic society. The study of a core body of great works would also provide a common educational experience so that citizens could communicate beyond their areas of specialized interest.

Hutchins was joined in 1930 by Mortimer Adler and, with Adler, went on to found the Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation in 1947 (http://www.greatbooks.org/about/history). But the faculty rejected Hutchins’ plan for a Great Books approach for the undergraduate college, and the program never became the model of undergraduate education at Chicago that it did at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. However, its focus on the intellectual heritage of Western civilization did influence the spirit and forms the general education program took at Chicago, and the approach was used in the university’s adult evening extension college, which Schwab chaired when he joined the faculty in 1938.

Although Schwab’s primary interest and responsibility was organizing the science curriculum for the general education program at Chicago, the integrative nature of general education also gave him opportunities to think about the role of the social sciences and humanities in general education and the boundaries between those subject areas and the sciences. He had a passion for psychology, social sciences, religion, and humanities, and he addressed issues from these disciplines in his writing on education. In addition to being a member of the science faculty, Schwab was also a respected education theorist. In 1949 he was appointed to the university’s education department, where he taught courses in the philosophy of education. And later he did curriculum work at the Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he helped develop materials to teach character education to students attending Jewish summer camps.

He had an especially strong interest in psychoanalysis, undergoing analysis himself. In Eros and Education (1954) Schwab wrote about the nature of the interactions between faculty and students during classroom discussions from a Freudian perspective. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, his attention shifted to the school science curriculum reform movement through his work with BSCS. In 1969, his attention shifted back to higher education as the student protest movement gained momentum. In response to the protests, he published the College Curriculum and Student Protest (Schwab 1969a), in which he focused again on the role of liberal education in society, especially on ideas of “community, of moral choice, and of deliberation and decision-making” (Westbury and Wilkof 1978, p. 30). His final contributions to the field of education were to curriculum development in general. Through a series of papers on the advantages of a practical rather than theoretical approach to curriculum study, he became well known among curriculum theorists for his claim that “the field of curriculum is moribund” (Schwab 1970, p. 1).

2 The Undergraduate College at Chicago

Throughout the 1930s, a group of University of Chicago faculty pressed forward on a plan to create a coherent and well-integrated approach to general education for the undergraduate college. In 1937, a four-year program of undergraduate study, completely devoted to general education, was officially approved by the university (Schwab 1950a). When Schwab joined the faculty in 1938, he took a leading role in the development of the science component of the program as chair of the natural sciences sequence in the undergraduate college, and it was his efforts to conceptualize that program to which he devoted most of his professional career.

The early to mid-twentieth century was a time of vigorous debate about the role of undergraduate education at colleges and universities in the United States. At its beginning, higher education in the United States had had a classical character, with a focus on classical literature and languages. But by the mid to late nineteenth century, the model of the German university, with its emphasis on specialization and empirical investigations in the sciences, began to take hold in the United States and elsewhere. By the late nineteenth century, that model began to predominate in universities like Chicago. As Daniel Bell put it:

The American university, as it emerged in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, brought with it a new religion of research. Even scholarship in the traditional disciplines was conceived, within that purview, as being concerned with detailed and specialized problems. The reaction of the liberal arts college was to strike out against specialism. (Bell 1966, p. 51)

Questions began to be raised in universities across the United States about the appropriate role of the undergraduate experience, coming as it does between the high school and the professional and graduate schools: Should the undergraduate years be spent in preprofessional training for those planning to enter the professional schools, should it focus on early scholarly preparation for those going on to graduate school, or should it simply be preparation for informed citizenry? What, if any, is the importance of having students develop an appreciation for the cultural artifacts that the society thinks a cultivated person should be familiar with, to become aware of basic principles that guide moral behavior, or to gain an understanding of how knowledge is organized and revised? And how important is it for citizens in a democratic society to have a shared intellectual experience that provides them with a common ground for deliberation and debate regardless of their life work or specialization? These were the questions that were being debated.

The programs of general education being developed at Chicago, along with those at places like Columbia and Harvard, became models for colleges throughout the country. (See Bell (1966) for a discussion of the Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard experiments in general education.) Although these programs differed in detail, they all had a commitment to certain general principles and purposes. As Bell said in his study of general education, the function of a general education program in the undergraduate college was:

…to teach modes of conceptualization, explanation, and verification of knowledge. As between the secondary school, with its emphasis on primary skills and factual data, and the graduate or professional school, whose necessary concern is with specialization and technique, the distinctive function of the college is to deal with the grounds of knowledge: not what one knows but how one knows. The college can be the unique place where students acquire self-consciousness, historical consciousness, and methodological consciousness. (Bell 1966, p. 8)

General education programs such as this had as their stated purpose the development of enlightened and responsible citizens for life in a free society. They emphasized personal growth and individuality and a universal rather than a provincial or nationalistic world view. Programs usually focused on the humanities and classics, particularly the study of Western civilization, and they avoided connections with utilitarian and vocational aims and with career preparation. But programs were not all the same. They differed in the emphasis they placed on developing moral men and women versus providing students with a broad understanding of multiple ethical perspectives, the importance they placed on learning about the heritage of the society versus studying the contemporary world, and how much they valued the acquisition of a broad base of knowledge across the curriculum compared to providing students opportunities to develop skills as independent thinkers.Footnote 3

For example, the stated purpose of the Chicago program was to develop the intellect. It was not primarily about the knowledge one acquired, but rather the ability to think, to contemplate, and to consider alternatives. To do that well, one had to learn about the complexities of the world in relation to each other. The most important job of the college was to introduce students to positions other than their own and to help them develop the power to form judgments. In the Chicago program, that thinking would take place in the context of cultural elements (works of art, music, literature, and science) that were deemed to be most important by society. The task of curriculum developers was to create curricular content and learning activities that allowed students to investigate these cultural elements thoroughly and in context. The Chicago program also took an analytical approach to knowledge rather than the historical approach that often characterized general education programs. Especially in the sciences, and largely through Schwab’s influence, the goal of the curriculum developers was, in Bell’s words, “to find the controlling principles of ‘classification’ in the definition of subjects or of disciplines within fields” (Bell 1966, p. 33). Referring to the difference between these two approaches in the context of science, Bell said:

…the question is whether one wants to emphasize historicism, with its doctrine that the understanding of an event can be found only in its unique context, or the analytical approach, which finds meaning in a phenomenon as one of a type-class, and seeks, further, a sense of invariant relationships. …Does one teach science through its history, or by analysis of its models of inquiry? (p. 62)

At Chicago, general education meant learning the special modes of conceptualization that characterized each discipline, not simply reviewing the historical development of a field. Historical texts were read and examined, but the purpose was not just to familiarize students with the knowledge these texts contained but to teach students how different forms of knowledge were created and how the students themselves could be analytical and critical of those intellectual methods and products.

At Chicago, this was to be accomplished by means of an interpretive (hermeneutic) approach in which students extracted meaning from selected written texts, pieces of music, works of art and architecture, and reports of scientific investigations, taking into consideration not only the cultural artifacts themselves but also the purposes and intentions of the creator of those artifacts. Nothing was to be taken as given, but always open to analysis and interpretation. In science, the texts that were subjected to interpretation were original scientific research papers, and the pedagogical approach for teaching them involved having students examine those papers to become familiar with the particular knowledge claims that were made, the investigative methods used, and the broader intellectual and practical contexts in which each investigation was conducted (Schwab 1950a).

The challenge that Schwab and his colleagues faced was how to create an educational experience that would lead to intellectual growth so that students would be open-minded, skeptical, able to think for themselves, and prepared to take on positions of leadership in society. The education that was envisioned emphasized the integration of knowledge from multiple disciplines and a search for and an appreciation of fundamental principles that define human experience, accomplished not through memorization but through discussion and deliberation.

But, even as efforts were under way in places like Chicago to build general education programs, the overall trend in undergraduate education was toward specialization, professional and preprofessional training, and the accumulation of knowledge. As Schwab noted, a “rhetoric of conclusions” dominated undergraduate teaching, where students were presented with knowledge of the disciplines without being required to think critically or make judgments about that knowledge. Many of these issues were addressed in the scholarly writing that Schwab was engaged in while he was the chair of the science program in the undergraduate college at Chicago, and it is to that work that we turn in the next several sections of this chapter.

3 The Place of Science in Liberal Education

3.1 A Taxonomy of Types of Science

In 1949, Schwab published a paper titled The Nature of Scientific Knowledge as Related to Liberal Education. In that paper he argued that all students should be exposed to the breadth and variety of science both in its content and its methods. Science should not be treated monolithically but as a complex and varied study. To accurately represent the complex nature of the physical world and the methods used to study it, liberal education should use pedagogical approaches that reflect that complexity. Diversity exists in the content and methodologies of the separate fields of science, and diversity exists in how philosophers of science view the nature of science, including the nature of causality, the nature of induction, the role of hypothesis testing, and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and the physical world. Schwab argued that because of this diversity of methods that are used and views that are held about the nature of science, no one single set of “epistemic or metaphysical presuppositions” concerning science can cover the variety of ideas that exists (Schwab 1949, p. 248). An accurate portrayal of the nature of science as part of a liberal arts education requires that this diversity of scientific methodology and interpretation be taught as fully as possible.

Schwab proposed a taxonomy of scientific investigation that could serve as an aid to the teaching of science in a general education program, both to support the choice of subject matter and how that subject matter could be examined by students. He identified four types of scientific investigations, which differ from each other in the kind of knowledge that is generated, the kind of data that are collected, and the form of validation that is used in each. The four types, which he believed encompassed most forms of scientific inquiry, were taxonomic science, measurement science, causal science, and relational or analogical science.

Taxonomic science involves the creation of classification schemes for organizing objects and events in the world. These classification schemes exist in virtually all fields of science, including the classification of disease for diagnostic purposes, categorizing living organisms to study their degree of hereditary relatedness, or the classification of types of chemical molecules on the basis of their molecular structures. All of these classification schemes were developed for a purpose, and all of them require difficult decisions at the margins. For the purpose of liberal study, “…a given taxonomic system is understood when it is seen as one of several alternatives” and when “…some of the doubtful areas of the taxonomy are seen and some of the reasons for their doubtful status understood” (Schwab 1949, pp. 255–256).

Measurement science involves measuring and relating changes in two or more objective quantities. Familiar examples include the relationship between the intensity of light and distance from the light source, the frequency of vibration of a plucked string and the length of the string, or the degree of sinking of an object and its density in relation to the density of the medium it is immersed in. For general education purposes, it is important that students understand that assumptions are made when reporting these relationships in a mathematical form, such as the assumption that there is a point source of light (which is an idealization of the real world). Students should also be aware of the possible effects of abstracting only certain variables of interest from a more complex set of related variables that could be studied.

Regarding causal science, Schwab argues that much of what is thought of as “causal science” can actually be placed in the other three categories, but even after doing that, there remains a separate type of investigation that deals with systems of mutually interacting and mutually determined parts acting as a whole. He cites physiological and social systems as examples. The defining features of these causal systems involve “interaction, mutual determination, and concerted action” (Schwab 1949, pp. 258). The challenge for students is to grasp the nature of the interacting parts of the system and their relationship to the whole organism or system. Of necessity, because these systems are too complex to be studied as a unity, their parts and pieces must be studied in isolation. For general education purposes, the student:

…must be prepared to discover, in the records of such research, answers to the questions of what kinds of “parts” are being treated, what analysis of “functions” are related to the parts and functions of other related researches, and how, if at all, the researcher in question relates his discovered functions and parts to one another to constitute larger units more nearly approaching the unity of the organism as a whole. (Schwab 1949, p. 260)

Finally, Schwab identified relational science as a fourth type of scientific inquiry. Regarding this type of inquiry, which relies on models, analogies, and forms of representation, Schwab said:

By “relational science” I mean those patterns of inquiry which are most fully understood as aiming toward knowledge which attempts to “explain” or “account for” matters previously known by inventing co-related quantities which do not have one-to-one correlates among the phenomena to be accounted for, or by inventing mechanisms not directly accessible to observation but so conceived and applied to the phenomena to be explained that it can be said that certain things behave as if these mechanisms existed. (Schwab 1949, p. 260)

These borrowed relationships of relational science, which are applied to the new observations, may come from either physical models or from abstract mathematical and conceptual models.

The educational imperative of these diverse approaches to scientific investigation is that students should have enough familiarity with them to analyze actual research studies in each category and make comparisons between them. Instruction should “…educate, encourage, and exercise the student in applying appropriate canons of comprehension and evaluation to…examples of scientific inquiry” (Schwab 1949, p. 264). This enables students to make judgments about which of a number of possible alternatives is the most appropriate approach to collecting data, drawing conclusions, and linking evidence to conclusions, which in turn will give students a more honest and accurate picture of the physical world and how it is studied. When the nature of science itself is chosen as the subject for students to study, then a variety of historical, philosophical, and methodological interpretations of science should be read, discussed, and analyzed in the same way.

3.2 The Tentative Nature of Science

Also key to an understanding of science for liberal education purposes was to appreciate “the ongoing, unclosed character of science” (Schwab 1949, p. 263). Yet, as Schwab observed, colleges still taught “the conclusions of science and definitive solutions to its problems” (p. 263). Teaching the tentativeness of conclusions did not, however, argue for naïve relativism to Schwab. It meant simply that in order to be honest about the nature of science, differences in how the world is viewed by individuals studying the same problem needed to be treated thoroughly. Instruction must teach students “the disciplines of comparison, contrast, choice, and synthesis appropriate to the field in which the diversity takes place” (p. 264).

The pedagogical challenge of such an intellectually sophisticated approach to teaching science was how to get students familiar with and to contemplate the relevance of each these diverse modes of scientific inquiry in the limited time allotted. To Schwab (and his colleagues at Chicago), the answer lay in the analysis of carefully chosen scientific research papers. A scientific research paper is the “bearer of a portion of scientific knowledge in its field,” and “…it ‘illustrates itself’ as an example of scientific investigation” (Schwab 1949, p. 265). All that is required is that the student knows what questions to ask, including what problem is being addressed, the appropriateness of the data, difficulties in obtaining data, how the data were treated, any phenomena that were excluded, and the validity of the conclusions. Each paper “would serve simultaneously to impart subject-matter content and to illustrate aspects of the nature of scientific knowledge at many different levels—from the most specific level at which the paper falls…to the level of science-as-a-whole” (Schwab 1949, p. 251). In the plan developed at Chicago, students would be presented with sets of such papers and with a framework for analyzing them so that they would gain practice in studying those investigations as instances of scientific inquiry, especially how each was similar to and differed from the others.

3.3 Science as Constructed Theory

In Science and Civil Discourse (Schwab 1956), Schwab elaborates further on the nature of inquiry in science and its importance in liberal education. He says that inquiry is constructive in the sense that conceptions “must be invented…by the investigator” in order to determine what his subject matter and his data will be from the great “complex of things and events” (Schwab 1956, p. 132). According to Schwab, through this process of problem and data selection, the content is inevitably “distorted” and “made incomplete.” Therefore, because of this selecting and narrowing of the problem and consequent narrowing of what is observed, a conclusion in science must be thought of as a “taken something, not an objectively given something” (Schwab 1956, p. 132).

This constructive character of scientific knowledge has implications for the liberal arts curriculum. Schwab argued that if a theory is to be taught as a theory about some aspect of the world, it is also important to be clear about which aspects of the subject are not incorporated into that theory:

We must have something more in the materials of our curriculum than the theories themselves, for the restrictions which define what the theory is about are not readily found in the theory itself. The theory is only the terminal part of an inquiry. We need what comes before the end…to discover what the theory is a theory of…. (Schwab 1956, p. 133)

This means that the student needs to know that scientific problems are constructed out of a much larger array of possibilities, and they should come to appreciate the choices that are made by scientists in the selection of problems, the selection of observations to be made and data to be collected, and how the data are interpreted in terms of existing theory.

3.4 Structure of the Disciplines

Although much of Schwab’s work involved efforts to integrate scientific knowledge throughout the liberal arts curriculum by showing the interconnections between subject matters across disciplinary boundaries, he also acknowledged the importance of the separate academic disciplines for curriculum development. In fact, Schwab is often associated with the “structure of disciplines” movement, an effort that became popular in the 1960s to describe the structure of knowledge and the relevance of that structure for school curriculum development and content organization. But Schwab’s ideas about “structure” were at least as much about disciplinary modes of thought as they were about how content should be organized. Schwab published a number of essays on the topic, including Structure of the Disciplines: Meanings and Significances (Schwab 1964). He found support for the idea of disciplinary structure in Aristotle’s distinctions between the theoretical, practical, and productive disciplines and in Auguste Comte’s hierarchy of scientific disciplines, starting with physics and progressing to chemistry, biology, and finally the social sciences (Schwab 1960). But he also appreciated that these diverse formulations of disciplinary structure provided support for the truism that “if we classify any group of complex things, we are faced with a wide choice of bases of classification” (Schwab 1964, p. 15). In other words, organizational schemes can be helpful for thinking about the curriculum, but they should not be considered to be fixed and absolute.

Schwab distinguished between the substantive structure of the disciplines (their conceptual organization) and their syntactical structure (how knowledge is generated in each field). He argued that because the two structures are necessarily interconnected, students should be taught the conceptual structure of scientific knowledge in the context of the methods of inquiry that produced that knowledge, and they should be taught the methods of inquiry in terms of the conceptual structures:

In general then, enquiry has its origin in a conceptual structure… It is this conceptual structure through which we are able to formulate a telling question. It is through the telling question that we know what data to seek and what experiments to perform to get those data. Once the data are in hand, the same conceptual structure tells us how to interpret them, what to make of them by way of knowledge. Finally, the knowledge itself is formulated in the terms provided by the same conception. (Schwab 1964, p. 12)

But in no way do these structures represent a fixed body of knowledge or a fixed way of organizing that knowledge:

The dependence of knowledge on a conceptual structure means that any body of knowledge is likely to be of only temporary significance. For the knowledge which develops from the use of a given concept usually discloses new complexities of the subject matter which call forth new concepts. These new concepts in turn give rise to new bodies of enquiry and, therefore, to new and more complete bodies of knowledge stated in new terms. The significance of this ephemeral character of knowledge to education consists in the fact that it exhibits the desirability if not the necessity for so teaching what we teach that students understand that the knowledge we possess is not mere literal factual truth but a kind of knowledge which is true in a more complex sense. (Schwab 1964, pp. 13–14)

And if we do choose to teach just one conceptual structure, Schwab argues that we should at least be honest about what we are doing:

But if we do, let it be taught in such a way that the student learns what substantive structures gave rise to the chosen body of knowledge, what the strengths and limitations of these structures are, and what some of the alternative structures are which give rise to alternative bodies of knowledge.

If students discover how one body of knowledge succeeds another, if they are aware of the substantive structures that underlie our current knowledge, if they are given a little freedom to speculate on the possible changes in structures which the future may bring, they will not only be prepared to meet future revisions with intelligence but will better understand the knowledge they are currently being taught. (Schwab 1964, pp. 29–30)

Regarding the specific conceptual structures that should be taught in a liberal arts course in science, Schwab admitted that the topics that he was advocating for the Chicago course showed “no notable departure from those which might be found in one or another conventional ‘survey’ course” (Schwab 1950a, p. 150). For example, the physical science portion of the course included simple Archimedean laws of equilibrium and the lever, phenomena involving chemical and physical change, molecular and atomic theories, and the periodic table. It included concepts of energy, the kinetic molecular theory, the theory of special relativity, and ideas about radiation. In the biological sciences portion of the course, topics included transport and regulation of respiratory gases and the regulation and utilization of food material, the structure of the heart and circulatory system, the levels of organization of organisms, and issues of health and disease. Also included were the developmental history of organisms, Darwinian evolution, Mendelian genetics, embryonic development, and various concepts from the field of psychology.

The reason there were no radical departures from what was traditionally taught in introductory science courses was because the primary focus of the Chicago program was not the content itself but the interconnectedness of knowledge and the nature of scientific inquiry. Much of the content that was taught in traditional survey courses would suffice as long as connections were made between topics and the content was taught in the context of the scientific inquiry that produced it. In the case of physics and chemistry, for example, he said that because concepts of energy are related to various phenomena involving chemical change, “a relation between a problem in physics and one in chemistry is established as illustrative of the unifying function of scientific inquiry” (Schwab 1950a, p. 150). Also, as already noted, original papers would be used to introduce students to both the core ideas of science and to their methods of inquiry, through actual accounts of scientific research. The point is that the science content was seen primarily as a vehicle for teaching about the nature of scientific inquiry rather than as an end in itself. Schwab’s interest in the structure of the disciplines had as much or more to do with the modes of thought that characterized science as it did with the products of that inquiry.

4 Eros and Education

Although Schwab’s work at the undergraduate level is most often associated with efforts aimed at intellectual development through the liberal arts, he also appreciated the importance of the affective dimension in education, both as a means to achieve intellectual goals and as a proper educational goal itself. In Eros and Education (Schwab 1954), he draws on the concept of Eros as the psychic energy of creating and wanting that drives students’ desire to learn what is placed in front of them and supplies them with a love of knowledge that makes them want to learn throughout their lifetime. Schwab’s notion of Eros is akin to Freud’s idea of the fundamental life instinct that drives humans to create and be productive (Freud 1975/1920). It also bears similarities to Jung’s notion of Eros as “psychic relatedness,” particularly as Schwab used the idea to describe the interactions between students and teacher during class discussions (Jung 1982, p. 65).

Schwab believed that Eros could be nurtured in an educational setting through classroom discussion. To him, discussion was the embodiment of the intellectual skills that define a liberal education. At its best, classroom discussion draws upon an interpersonal relationship between student and teacher that is characterized by liking and respect. The respect of student for teacher comes from the belief on the part of the student that the teacher has something of value to offer that will enable the student to grow toward intellectual maturity. For both student and teacher, the liking and respect comes from shared participation in a problem of genuine interest to the two of them. When done well, classroom discussion stimulates a love of learning that can last a lifetime.

Schwab argued that the truly educative discussion has three functions: the substantive, the exemplary, and the stimulative functions, representing three liberal education aims of knowledge, power, and affection. First, there must be a specified object of knowledge that the discussion is intended to address. Second, the discussion must involve an activity that leads students to an awareness and appreciation of the method of inquiry employed in the generation of the knowledge. Finally, each discussion must serve to motivate students to engage in the activity so that learning can in fact take place.

Discussion satisfies its substantive function when it is focused on a clear knowledge goal. It satisfies its exemplary function when it engages students in an examination of a variety of methods suitable to the questions being addressed, and the students recognize that people can arrive at differing answers to a problem because of differences in how they formulate the problem, differences in the data they collect relevant to the problem, and differences in how they draw conclusions from those data. Discussion satisfies its stimulative function when the Eros is activated, as when a teacher inspires students through accounts of personal experience or allows students to share their own insights and opinions. The result of such a balanced approach is the education of students who have both a creative impulse and a desire to engage in a search for knowledge. Schwab noted that the discussions he envisioned share little in common with the all too familiar undergraduate experience in which the discussion is no more than a reorganizing and rearranging of what the students already know with little new knowledge added.

5 Character Education

In addition to recognizing the important connection between intellect and emotion in an educational setting, Schwab was also interested in the role of intellect in the development of personal values, ethical behavior, and character. In an early paper titled Biology and the Problem of Values (Schwab 1941), he analyzed the relationship between the teaching of biology and the teaching of values in the context of general education. Schwab began by acknowledging that people have a variety of attitudes about criteria for making value judgments. He said there are some who argue that there are no useful criteria for judging which of many ethical systems to choose from, others who say that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s, and still others who choose to follow the ethical position of the majority. Instead, Schwab says, ethical judgments can be made rational and subject to rational test. Value judgments can be made rational to students by having them learn how to think through and analyze ethical problems in the same way that they think through scientific problems. He says:

…we can take a leaf from the scientist’s notebook. A good scientist does not go into the laboratory “cold” to solve a problem. Instead, he reads the available literature by experts in the field—not to believe, of course, nor to reject but to weigh, consider, and verify.

The same can be done in the field of ethics—we can read the experts from Plato and Aristotle, through Bentham and Hobbes, to Dewey; read then, not to swallow what they have to say, nor to reject it—but to see and evaluate the thought and insight and logic…. (Schwab 1941, p. 94)

One way to teach students this connection between the intellectual and the ethical in science classes is to provide them with controversial issues (Schwab suggests soil and water conservation or other bio-economic issues) and to:

…take them apart for the student to show him that such programs of action involve both data as to means and judgments as to ends, to let him see what ethical principles must be used to decide the issue, and to give him an opportunity to deduce for himself the appropriate application of these principles to the particular problem. (Schwab 1941, p. 96)

In a later paper (Cohen and Schwab 1965), the idea of an intellectual dimension to value judgments, ethical decision making, and character development was applied in the context of religious education. In that paper, Schwab and his coauthor describe efforts to design curricular activities for character development for students in Jewish summer camps while Schwab was chairman of the academic board of the Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological Seminary. The authors begin by affirming the connection between character and intellect:

We suspect that one of the chief reasons why educators have been thwarted in devising methods of character education is their failure to consider the possibility that there may be means of advancing the student’s character development through his intellect. (Cohen and Schwab 1965, p. 23)

The approach they used was to teach students a familiar set of ethical principles derived from the Bible (e.g., thou shalt not stand idly by while an evil is being committed) and then to ask students to relate these ethical principles to life situations by means of “practical logic” (Cohen and Schwab 1965, p. 24). To Schwab, practical logic involves weighing alternative ethical positions within a logical framework in order to choose the best one. The logical framework provides a structure for deciding which ethical principle is applicable to a particular set of circumstances or for deciding between two or more equally valid but apparently irreconcilable ethical principles.

In one activity, students confront the Biblical dilemma that all of creation is sacred, but yet humans have been given dominion over the earth. They are given a series of situations and asked if they think the action that is described is more consistent with the idea that everything was created for human use and satisfaction or with the idea that everything in nature should be protected by humans because it is sacred and inviolable. The positions that they evaluate range from “every city should have a zoo so that people will have a place to go for picnics” to “we should not…build a dam if this will destroy a beautiful natural vista or displace…wildlife” (Cohen and Schwab 1965, p. 25). These structured activities were meant to provide students with analytical skills that would be useful to them as they applied their logical reasoning to ethical questions. It would give them practice in thinking through real-world cases and experience in using specific analytical structures to identify issues they could then consider when making ethical choices.

Schwab did not believe that there was a single ethical standard that could be used for making value judgments. Rather, ethical inquiry uses the same kind of intellectual approach that empirical inquiry uses. Humans can make ethical judgments using their practical intelligence and in consideration of the consequences of the choices they make.

In 1969, Schwab published College Curriculum and Student Protest as a practical example of ethical decision making and the role the college can play in character development. The book was written in response to the student protests of the 1960s and was an attempt to use curricular revision to solve the problems he believed had been created by the existing curriculum. College Curriculum and Student Protest takes an analytical approach to solving the problem of student unrest. Who are the protesters? What is it about their education that they are protesting? What could be done differently—both in terms of the content of the curriculum and the way it is taught—to give students greater satisfaction with their college experience or, at least, a more intelligent and informed basis for protest. To each of these questions, he systematically lays out an array of possible answers. He then proposes many of the approaches that he had advocated in his earlier writings. In particular, and especially relevant to the teaching of science, he describes the dissatisfaction that results from “…the neatness and air of inevitability with which we invest our accounts in science textbooks and lectures of the evidences which lead to current theory” (Schwab 1969a, p. 8). As a solution to the alienation that students felt from their college experience, he proposes making better use of the students’ own intellectual capabilities by focusing less on the assimilation and use of the products of inquiry and more on how knowledge in each field is acquired. Speaking of how students were being taught, he says:

Instead of giving experience of the kinds of problems and modes of enquiry characteristic of the field, they provide the student with the experience of assimilating, applying, or otherwise using the fruits of enquiry in the field. Yet these two—assimilation and use as against pursuit of a body of knowledge—are often radically different in the competences they require and the satisfactions they afford. (Schwab 1969a, p. 10)

What students needed, according to Schwab, was experience in the practical art of thoughtful deliberation, opportunities for sharing experiences and ideas, and skill in mutual criticism. Materials should be presented to them not as unqualified assertions but as genuine questions for investigation. And those inquiries should be presented side by side with other inquiries, posing different but similar problems and using different data and arguments so that the student could see the questions, arguments, and conclusions in a broader intellectual context. And students should also have opportunities to engage in the messiness of practical problem solving, not just be presented with problems and the variety of ways of examining and drawing conclusions about those problems. As Schwab put it: “This is essentially the problem of facing the student with ‘reality,’ that is, of discovering to him the sense and extent to which real cases are not mere instances of general rules or mere members of classes” so that the student can appreciate that “principles are brought to bear on cases only approximately and with great difficulty” (Schwab 1969a, p. 116).

Schwab also argued for having students experience “works in progress,” both their own and those of others: “It is one of the most powerful ways—perhaps the only way—to afford experience of the ground of all enquiry: the originating problem, the first idea, the nascent plan, the seminal purpose, from which flow research and scholarship worth the doing” (Schwab 1969a, p. 210). A study of finished products, on the other hand, does not provide a sense of aspects of a problem that are only “half-known” before the project has begun.

Finally, he says, the goal of curricular reform should be to provide students with an intellectual challenge and the opportunity to develop skills in “recovery, enquiry, and criticism appropriate to each discipline.” In the sciences, social sciences, history, and philosophy, this means “no ‘truth’ without the evidence and argument which supports it or from which it grows” (Schwab 1969a, p. 183). This includes the presentation of alternative principles, evidence, and interpretation that give fields of study their competing theories and uncertainties. Instead, the curriculum that protesters were reacting to omitted uncertainty and how decisions are made about what evidence should be counted and which theories should be preferred. “Little wonder,” Schwab concludes, “that anxieties, persecution feelings and a wearisome spate of intemperate, stereotyped protest should flood from students’ mouths. Still less should we wonder that they so often cite their unexamined impulsions as sufficient ground for choice and, indeed confuse the one with the other” (Schwab 1969a, p. 16).

6 Applying Lessons Learned at Chicago to School Science

Beginning in 1959, after more than 20 years of efforts to integrate science into the liberal arts core curriculum at Chicago, Schwab had an opportunity to contribute to the reform of school science through his association with the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS). BSCS had been organized by the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 1958 to reform biology teaching in the country. Schwab became chairman of the Teacher Preparation Committee at BSCS and was responsible for developing plans for the preservice and in-service training of teachers who would be teaching new courses that were part of the reform initiative. Under his leadership, the committee produced a Teacher’s Commentary to accompany each of the three versions (blue, yellow, and green) of the BSCS biology texts (Hurd 1961), and he authored the first Biology Teacher’s Handbook for BSCS in 1963.

Also in keeping with his interest in precollege science education, Schwab was invited to deliver the Inglis Lecture at Harvard University in 1961. The talk, published as The Teaching of Science as Enquiry (Schwab 1962), serves as a summary of his thinking about the nature of science and the teaching of science at the school level. The lecture focused on the nature of scientific investigation, on ways for students to develop an appreciation for science as a process of inquiry, and the intellectual skills involved in inquiry. There were three main themes: First was the importance of offering students a realistic portrayal of the nature of science so that as citizens they would understand that scientific investigations yield theoretical constructions that are tentative and ever-changing. The second focused on the pedagogical approaches that would give students practice in the intellectual skills involved in inquiry so they would be capable of independent critical reasoning throughout their lifetimes. And the third was the idea that science is not just an intellectual activity but also a study of actual events in the world. An educational program, therefore, needs to link the scientific principles and intellectual skills taught in the school curriculum to concrete phenomena in the physical world.

Schwab also argued that schools could play a role in educating the public about the importance of science in society. For citizens to be supportive of science, they must first understand why scientific knowledge continues to shift and why ideas that were once thought to be true may later be discarded. If the public is expected to support science, they need to understand the revisionist nature of science and appreciate that much of the language of science describes ideas and models, not actual physical reality. To Schwab, the key to having students develop an accurate picture of science was for them to understand that science rests on “conceptual innovation” (Schwab 1962, p. 5) and that scientific understanding changes as new ideas are conceived. This view of science cannot be achieved if students are taught in ways that suggest to them that knowledge is fixed and certain.

In many ways, these ideas about the nature of science are mirrored in Thomas Kuhn’sFootnote 4 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1962), published the same year as Schwab’s The Teaching of Science as Enquiry. Just as Schwab was deeply involved in developing the liberal arts core at Chicago beginning in the 1940s, Kuhn taught a comparable course for undergraduates at Harvard in the 1950s as part of its General Education in Science curriculum. Schwab’s thinking did not go quite as far as Kuhn’s notions about the incommensurability that results from “paradigm shifts,” but a similar idea that significant conceptual shifts occur that make previous thinking obsolete can be seen in Schwab’s writing:

With each change in conceptual system, the older knowledge gained through use of the older principles sinks into limbo. The facts embodied are salvaged, reordered, and reused, but the knowledge which formerly embodied these facts is replaced. There is then, a continuing revision of scientific knowledge as principles of enquiry are used, tested thereby, and supplanted. (Schwab 1962, p. 15)

In Schwab’s terms, science enjoys periods of “stable enquiry,” during which agreed upon fundamental principles are used to guide research. But occasionally a shift occurs during which the principles that previously guided scientific investigations no longer are relevant. These periods of change are periods of “fluid enquiry.” Fluid enquiry is not about filling in the missing pieces of the earlier models and conceptions. Instead, it involves the creation of new conceptions to guide scientific research (Schwab 1962).

Schwab thought that all citizens, not just future scientists, needed to be educated to think in this critical and creative way and that this was a contribution that schools could make to an informed citizenry. Drawing on his experience with undergraduate education at the University of Chicago, he believed this approach to school science would produce leaders who would both understand the nature of scientific inquiry and be able to think reflectively and creatively themselves.

For this approach to be successful, students would have to be active learners, fully engaged intellectually in the study of science. Rather than being told that the textbook and teacher are unquestioned sources of authoritative information, students would be encouraged to challenge teacher and text and to view what was said by them as something to be analyzed and critiqued. The student’s attention should not be on scientific statements as words and assertions to be learned, but on “…what the words and assertions are about: the thoughts and the actions of a scientist which have gone into the making of a piece of scientific research” (Schwab 1962, p. 66). It is the responsibility of the teacher to teach the students how to engage in these intellectual activities—what to look for, the kinds of questions to ask, and when to ask them.

To increase the breadth of their thinking about the various ways that scientific statements can be interpreted, students should also be asked to compare answers from different students and make judgments about those answers based on the evidence that is provided in support of them. In this way, the student learns that “…there is room for alternative interpretations of data; that many questions have no ‘right’ answer but only most probable answers or more and less defensible answers; that the aim of criticism and defense of alternative answers is not to ‘win the argument’ but to find the most defensible solution to the problem” (Schwab 1962, p. 70).

As he did when writing about undergraduate education at Chicago, Schwab proposed class discussion as the best way to engage school students in challenging intellectual discourse. And as he did for undergraduate students, Schwab suggested that original scientific papers offered “the most authentic, unretouched specimens of enquiry which we can obtain” (Schwab 1962, p. 74). His primary goal for students at the precollege level as with undergraduate students was the development of broad intellectual competence.

7 The Practical in Curriculum Development

Toward the end of his long academic career—which included efforts to create a program of liberal studies at the University of Chicago, his work with the Great Books Program with Hutchins and Adler, his work at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his contributions to curriculum reform in school science at BSCS—Schwab wrote a series of six essays (four were published) that synthesized his understanding of the essential processes involved in curriculum development (Schwab 1969b, 1970, 1971, 1973, 1983). The first, The Practical: A Language for Curriculum, was written for the National Education Association’s Center for the Study of Instruction and was published in 1969 (Schwab 1969b, 1970). The last was published in 1983, nine years after Schwab had retired from Chicago. That essay was titled The Practical 4: Something for Curriculum Professors to Do.

In The Practical: A Language for Curriculum, Schwab begins with an indictment of the present state of the curriculum field:

The field of curriculum is moribund. It is unable, by its present methods and principles, to continue its work and contribute significantly to the advancement of education. …The curriculum field has reached this unhappy state by inveterate, unexamined, and mistaken reliance on theory. (Schwab 1970, p. 1)

According to Schwab, whether theories are borrowed from disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, or sociology or constructed explicitly as educational theories of curriculum and instruction, they are “ill-fitted and inappropriate to problems of actual teaching and learning” (Schwab 1970, p. 1):

Theory, by its very character, does not and cannot take account of all the matters which are crucial to questions of what, who, and how to teach; that is, theories cannot be applied, as principles, to the solution of problems concerning what to do with or for real individuals, small groups, or real institutions located in time and space—the subjects and clients of schooling and schools. (Schwab 1970, pp. 1–2)

Simply put, to Schwab education is much too complex an activity to be captured by a unified theory of teaching and learning. Inevitably, all theories create abstractions or idealizations of the particulars of the real world. And, because human behavior—which is what educational theories theorize about—is so complex, educational theories of necessity leave out much of the variation that occurs in the world. Schwab says: “It follows that such theories are not, and will not be, adequate by themselves to tell us what to do with actual human beings or how to do it” (Schwab 1970, pp. 28–29).

In an earlier essay, On the Corruption of Education by Psychology (Schwab 1957), Schwab demonstrated how certain theoretical positions from psychology create problems when applied in educational settings. The three theories he focused on were group dynamism, non-directivism, and autonomism. In the case of group dynamism, the group becomes the determiner of knowledge and the central focus of education; in the case of non-directivism, it is the individual who is supreme as a knowledge maker; and in the case of autonomism, the emphasis is on individuals’ struggle for autonomy against the hegemony of society. According to Schwab, in each of these three cases the application of the theory goes well beyond what is reasonable or useful, and leads to practical conclusions that are opposite the others. “All three doctrines, beginning as normative or descriptive views of behavior, end by inventing an epistemology which tailors the intellectual aims of the curriculum to fit the terms of their incomplete theories of behavior” (Schwab 1957, p. 44).

He suggests, instead, that education should be seen as a practical enterprise, having many individual components that need to be analyzed separately, not as a unified activity that can be explained by and organized around a single all encompassing theoretical position. These ideas about the practical in curriculum are consistent with his ideas about the use of practical rationality that pervade all of his work.

It’s not that Schwab thought that educational theory was useless or irrelevant, but rather that theory needed to be used judiciously to explain individual aspects of the educational enterprise and without overreaching in its attempt to create a grand synthesis.

He proposes three related and overlapping alternative approaches to a purely theoretic approach: what he calls the practical, the quasi-practical, and the eclectic. First is the practical. About the practical, he says: “The subject matter of the practical…is always something taken as concrete and particular and treated as indefinitely susceptible to circumstance, and therefore highly liable to unexpected change: this student, in that school…” (Schwab 1970, p. 3). The method of the practical is deliberation, which is a “complex, fluid, transactional discipline” (Schwab 1970, p. 5). Deliberation involves the use of practical rationality by paying attention to particular events in particular places, recognizing the importance of the particular context in which education takes place, and having an openness of mind about the range of possible explanations for what takes place in each educational setting.

The quasi-practical approach shows particular awareness of the diversity that exists in schools and school communities. It is “an extension of practical methods and purposes to subject matters of increasing internal variety” (Schwab 1970, p. 5). It is quasi-practical because of its added complexity, which sometimes renders it less effective and, therefore, less practical, than what was desired. A practical solution might be found for a problem in one part of the system, only to find that it was not really a solution at all because of unforeseen and undesirable effects that the solution has on another part of the system. Thus solving a practical problem in the science portion of the curriculum may create problems in another part of the curriculum. Therefore, solving practical problems in complex systems requires coordination of efforts and sharing of information and expertise beyond what is required in simpler systems.

Finally, the eclectic approach is an approach that pays attention to a variety of theories or parts of theories that might be used in a practical analysis to inform particular aspects of curricular decision making, while at the same time being aware of the limitations of those theories. To Schwab, it is not that all theory is useless. But because of their enthusiasm to explain human behavior in general terms, educational theorists often inappropriately use theories to explain more than they in fact do explain, and they recommend or prescribe educational practices that are not warranted. It is important to know what a given theory can explain and what it cannot explain. With an understanding of the limits of each theory, it may be possible to use those theories to explain various parts of the educational experience.

8 Schwab’s Legacy

Schwab can rightly be called a humanist, a constructivist, and a Deweyan progressive, and he lent his considerable support to those streams of thought in his educational writing. Regarding his humanism, according to Eliot Eisner, Schwab, along with educators such as Phillip Jackson (Life in Classrooms, 1968), helped to initiate a trend toward the “humanization of educational inquiry” through practical rationality, by his acknowledgement of the idiosyncrasies of educational contexts and his valuing of deliberation as “the exercise of the human’s highest intellectual powers” (Eisner 1984, p. 204). He was a constructivist in how he viewed scientific theory as resulting from conceptual innovation, a process by which theoretical structures are constructed and revised in the context of still larger bodies of interconnected observation and theory. Schwab believed that scientists, operating in a milieu of interconnected theory, make choices about what to study, what data to collect, and which theoretical framework to use to make sense of their data. Schwab’s writing in this area is still viewed as exemplary. Regarding his progressivism, Schwab showed great admiration for Dewey’s work, as he shows in Dewey: The Creature as Creative (Schwab 1953) where he praises Dewey’s ideas about the human role in generating truth in both philosophy and science. He also took on the role of apologist for Dewey, explaining misunderstood concepts as he did in The “Impossible” Role of the Teacher in Progressive Education (Schwab 1959) where he explains and defends Dewey’s notion of the dialectic. Schwab himself was a Deweyan progressive in how he valued informed and reflective practice, in his belief in intellectual growth through the continuous reconstruction of experience, and the importance he placed on science as a way of thinking about the world rather than simply as a body of knowledge of the world.

When we look at his legacy at a finer grain size, the success of some of his more specific proposals for science education is somewhat mixed. Schwab devoted a lifetime to thinking and writing about the role of science in a liberal arts setting, first for undergraduate students and then for students at the precollege level. His recommendations were for rigorous intellectual preparation in science so that students could come to know what is known about the world and how the natural world works, but even more important, how we know what we know. His hope was that such an education would give students the capability and desire to learn throughout their lifetime. Among science educators whose interest is the precollege level, he is most well known and appreciated for the application of these ideas to the school curriculum, especially the work he did at BSCS during the 1960s and his very well-received The Teaching of Science as Enquiry (Schwab 1962).

On the surface, it is fair to say that his contributions to general education at the college level were short lived. Efforts to create a common experience for undergraduate students at Chicago and to organize the undergraduate college around that common experience eventually gave way to an organization of the curriculum around the disciplines and a requirement that students specialize in one of those disciplines, the very concerns that motivated the general education movement in the first place. The Chicago plan, which was one of the most radical experiments in general education, initially offered a complete program of general education courses in the undergraduate college, but the pressures for specialization led to a reorganization of that program in 1957, and under the reorganized program students were required to major in one of four academic divisions as a requirement of the degree (Bell 1966).

In a 1963 editorial comment, A Radical Departure for a Program in the Liberal Arts, Schwab acknowledged the failure to achieve the goals of general education: “It need hardly be said that the most formidable barrier to an effective program of liberal education at the moment is constituted of the concerted pressures toward specialization” and that “the pressure toward specialization has resulted in acute curtailment of the time allotted to a liberal arts program” (Schwab 1963b, no page number). Schwab offered what he saw as a “radical proposal” that the liberal arts could still be communicated to students through a student’s area of specialization if they were offered seminars that focused on the development of core ideas in each of those specialties. Not surprisingly, given the courses he had helped to develop in the 1940s, his radical proposal included the idea that the study of the development of core ideas in each field of science could be accomplished by way of the students’ own examination and comparison of original papers. But, for the most part, that kind of intellectual treatment of the sciences did not find its way into the undergraduate curriculum in any significant way. The products of science, organized by disciplines, or sometimes through interdisciplinary study, continue to be the primary content of the vast majority of undergraduate level science courses today.

Chicago was hardly alone in its inability to maintain a comprehensive program in general education. By 1950, there had been significant erosion of most general education programs, and by the end of the 1950s, those large-scale, comprehensive efforts had for the most part been abandoned.Footnote 5 As Daniel Bell pointed out in The Reforming of General Education (1966), Harvard’s program, whose development was stimulated by the 1945 publication of General Education in a Free Society (Harvard Committee 1945) and mandated by the faculty to take effect in 1949, began to come apart almost immediately. Instead of being required to take common courses in each of the humanities, social science, and natural science and mathematics divisions, as initially proposed, students were given lists of courses in each area that could be taken to meet the general education requirement. As Bell observed, the failure was most evident in the sciences:

The change from the original intention was sharpest in the sciences. In 1949, a faculty committee headed by Jerome Bruner repudiated the idea that the teaching of science could be done through the history of science or by a case-method approach. Instead of a historical emphasis, the Bruner Committee proposed that a student be given a “knowledge of the fundamental principles of a special science,” and an “idea of the methods of science as they are known today.” The difference between a general education and a departmental course in science would consist, then, only in the selection and coverage of topics, not in approach. (Harvard Committee 1945, p. 48)

Although the Bruner Committee’s arguments revealed a fundamental ideological difference in what the nature of the educational experience in the sciences should be, according to Bell (1966) these grand schemes for general education that Schwab was part of were done in as much by practical problems of staffing as they were by intellectual concerns. It was just too difficult to find faculty who were willing to devote their careers largely, if not completely, to teaching undergraduate students the relationships between knowledge in science and the ways that knowledge was generated. In his commitment to do just that, Schwab was unique.

But even though the general education movement that he was a central part of did not last much beyond mid-century, as a thinker in this area, Schwab’s ideas had lasting impact. One of the strongest testaments to his work came from Bell who pointed to two books that were most important to him in thinking about the development of the college curriculum for his 1966 work on general education: “One is Ernest Nagel’s (1961) The Structure of Science, which lays out a ‘logic of explanation’ dealing with the nature of inquiry. The other is Joseph J. Schwab’s The Teaching of Science as Enquiry, which discusses in a wonderfully lucid way the dependence of science upon conceptual innovation, and applies these ideas to the problems of teaching” (Bell 1966, p. xxiv). There is much wisdom to glean from Schwab’s writings on a liberal arts approach to the study of science, especially in the value he places on the development of human intelligence through a study of the complexities of human thought and inquiry.

Concerning his contributions to precollege science education, especially the curriculum reforms of the 1960s, some of Schwab’s ideas still resonate with us today, but others have been overtaken by ideas that he argued against. For example, his description of the nature of science and its implications for science teaching that appears in his 1961 Inglis Lecture (Schwab 1962) is one of the best expositions that we have, and it can still serve as a model of what science is and how it should be taught. But other of his ideas have been overridden by an emphasis on standardization and accountability, ideas that have recently taken hold as dominant themes of school science education. Beginning in the 1980s, science educators in the United States began to create, with much more precision than they had ever done before, detailed specifications of what all students should know in science and to hold students accountable for those ideas through standards-based assessments. The first national efforts to describe what all students should know began in 1989, in mathematics, with the publication of Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989) and, in science, with the publication of Science for All Americans by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS 1989).

The primary goal of these publications was to provide more clarity about what the goals of the curriculum in these areas should be, including an appreciation for the methods and processes of inquiry that were used in science, but they also helped move science education in the United States toward a standardization of content, at least at the state level. Federal legislation required that all states develop explicit statements of what students should know and to develop tests to assess that knowledge. Although the national level documents included recommendations for the inclusion of the methods and processes of science along with the subject matter content, most state standards and state assessments focused on the details of the content and not on an examination of scientific inquiry.

At first glance, Schwab’s writing seems to offer support for such a focus on subject matter. After all, Schwab is linked to the “structure of the disciplines movement,” which typically gives primacy to subject matter and how it is organized. But Schwab’s focus was not on prescribing particular conceptual structures for students to learn as much as having them analyze competing knowledge structures and how those competing knowledge structures were created. The implication of his approach for curriculum development is that subject matter should be seen as useful, in fact critical for curriculum development, but that is not the only thing to be considered. As Fox (1985) put it:

Schwab argues that it is not the role of curriculum to simplify or to parrot a favored or accepted conception of a discipline, but to reflect on what contribution the various conceptions within a discipline can make to the thinking, the feeling and the behavior of the student.

Thus, he establishes the basis for his distinction between subject matter and subject-matter-for-education. (Fox 1985)

To Schwab, it is true that the selection of subject matter is critical because it is central to understanding a particular field of study and because of its cultural significance. But, when thinking about subject matter for education, curriculum makers also should take account of the demands of the learner, the teacher, and the school environment (milieu) when deciding what to teach. Schwab argues for a balanced approach to curriculum development and warns against the possible corruption of education by placing too much emphasis on subject matter alone (Schwab 1973).

Therefore, although subject matter is essential to understanding the nature of a discipline, the particular details of that subject matter can and should vary depending on the capabilities of the teacher, the interests of the student, and the constraints of the educational environment. What should be included is subject matter that can act as a vehicle for teaching students the syntactic structure of the disciplines, that is, the ways in which particular knowledge has been generated from a range of possible alternatives. Using this approach, students learn that conceptual structures are dynamic and that there is a knowable logic to the decisions that scientists make about the problems they study, the theories they use to drive their investigations, the data they collect, and how they interpret their findings in terms of the theories that drive those investigations. In such a system, students are challenged to appreciate the complexity of scientific knowledge, the range of existing competing theories, and the variety of methodologies used to generate knowledge in the various science fields. As with his recommendations for undergraduate science education, these ideas about how precollege students should learn science are not generally reflected in the dominant mode of instruction in most schools today, where the focus continues to be largely on the content per se.

Schwab was also concerned about the “objectives” focus that was beginning to drive curriculum development. Objectives were a way of specifying with a high degree of precision what all students should know and be held accountable for in various areas of the curriculum (see, e.g., Mager 1962). The approach was often linked to the psychological theory of behaviorism as applied to education. In 1983, after he had retired from the University of Chicago, Schwab published the fourth in his series of essays on the “practical.” In that essay, he identified three limitations of using learning objectives to drive curriculum. First, was that objectives tended to:

…anatomize matters which may be of great importance into bits and pieces which, taken separately, are trivial or pointless. Lists of objectives…anatomize, not only a subject-matter, but teachers’ thoughts about it, the pattern of instruction used to convey it, the organization of textbooks, and the analysis and construction of tests. (Schwab 1983, p. 240)

Second, he believed that the lists of objectives were of little use if consideration was not also given to the means and materials available for their implementation: “…reflection on curriculum must take account of what teachers are ready to teach or ready to learn to teach [and] what materials are available or can be devised” (Schwab 1983, pp. 240–241). Third, there must be consideration paid to the unintended consequences that might result from pursuing those objectives, “…not merely how well they yield intended purposes but what else ensues” (Schwab 1983, p. 241). In sum, none of this can be accomplished unless “…ends or objectives are tentatively selected and pursued. Hence, curriculum reflection must take place in a back-and-forth manner between ends and means.” According to Schwab: “A linear movement from ends to means is absurd” (p. 241). Here, too, curricular development in the United States is more likely to follow a linear approach than the tentative, iterative, back-and-forth approach that Schwab recommended, in which ends and means are continuously reexamined in relation to each other.

Schwab’s criticisms about assessment were similar to those he had for curriculum development, and they were equally broad in scope and practical in nature. He questioned, first, whether it is even possible to create an assessment that is both highly valid in that it conforms to the content of the curriculum and is useful at the same time. He said that such a test lacks “usefulness” because it tells the teacher nothing of what else besides the prescribed curriculum the student might be learning, what alternative constructions of the curriculum might be possible, or how other forms of testing might produce different results. He proposed the use and comparison of different types and forms of testing, which could then serve as multiple embodiments of, or reflections on, the ends and outcomes of education. Testing can communicate information about the curriculum and, therefore, should not be “…mere ‘valid,’ and therefore static, measures of a static curriculum, but as centers of and foci for the discussion and improvement of…the curriculum, including tests” (Schwab 1950b, p. 281, cited in Westbury and Wilkof 1978). He concluded his essay on testing and the curriculum by saying:

The end of such analysis is, however, simple. It is to bring into the vivid meaningfulness afforded by contrast what it is that each participant curriculum does and does not do for its students. The ultimate aim is the same as before: to initiate thought, experiment, and improvement of the participating curriculums. (Schwab 1950b, p. 286, cited in Westbury and Wilkof 1978)

Once again, for the most part, this dynamic approach to assessment that Schwab recommended, as a tool for evaluating not only the students’ knowledge but also the effectiveness of the curriculum and classroom instruction, is not the approach that is currently used.

9 Conclusion

Joseph Schwab was an important figure in science education. He tackled difficult subjects, often in a forceful way. Sometimes he was successful and sometimes he was not. He was often critical of mainstream ideas and the status quo. But in everything he proposed, he tried to make us more open to alternative ideas and more practically rational in how we see the world. As Elliot Eisner said of his former teacher: “He tries to make [life] more intelligent” (Eisner 1984, p. 201). When it came to the content of the science curriculum, he was not concerned so much with the particular subject matter that was learned as that people would continue to love and pursue knowledge throughout their lifetimes and that they would have both the intellectual skills needed to analyze the artifacts of our culture and the ability to analyze the claims that experts and fellow citizens make. Whether aimed at the undergraduate college or at precollege education, his writings leave us with a wealth of ideas about how science education could be better and with a good deal to think about.