The Curriculum based on Authority versus the Living Curriculum
The six preceding chapters, which have dealt with the curriculum, make no pretense of presenting formulated courses which can be given to classes. Some reader may have been impatient because he did not find there an outline of arithmetic or geography or Latin or English. It has been the purpose of these chapters to deal only with general principles and general problems. The fact is that it would be absolutely futile to lay down a curriculum and say of it that it is the true curriculum. The curriculum of a school is a living thing. It is constantly undergoing readjustments. Its content is drawn from the social life to which it introduces pupils, and its arrangement depends on the ability of pupils of different ages and different capacities to grasp this constantly readjusted content.
There are some teachers who prefer to have the course of study handed down to them by some superior authority. There are many fifth-grade teachers, for example, who prefer to have the superintendent tell them just how many pages of geography to cover each week and how many minutes to devote to this subject. There are many Latin teachers who are satisfied to take from some college catalogue a statement of the number of pages to be read in Cæsar, to divide this number by the number of days during which the class meets, and then to plod through the assignments. The day of such teachers, unfortunately, is not yet past, but it is passing. The course in geography or Latin is not a quantitative matter; it is not a static affair; it is an organized body of material which grows and changes with the development of society. To the intelligent teacher a course of study is a subject of constant scrutiny and revision. Every detail must be weighed as to its importance and as to its relations to the whole series of topics and to the needs of pupils.