Summer affords all educators some much-needed time to reflect upon and improve our practice and industry. Like many of you, I am bent on mastering the art and science of teaching and my latest quest for answers took me to a book that most would find terribly dense and boring: The Struggle for the American Curriculum from 1893-1958 by Herbert Kliebard. It’s a book for those curriculum nerds like me who want to understand why we teach what we teach. It’s a short history of the key curriculum changes in American secondary schools during the early 1900s. Kliebard begs to explain why we do what we do and he names the men (very few women voices were heard in the 1920s and 30s) whose philosophies shaped…
