Curriculum as Outcomes and Cultural Reproduction
Curriculum as Outcomes and Cultural Reproduction
Image 3: intended learning outcomes
- Shifts emphasis from means to ends.
- Purposes are stated as specific outcomes, not vague rhetoric.
- All teaching and activity serve the acquisition of those ends.
Image 4: cultural reproduction
- Curriculum reflects the society’s culture.
- Schooling passes salient knowledge and values to the next generation.
- The community, state, or nation names what is to be taught; educators turn it into curriculum.
The difference
- Outcomes look forward to specified ends.
- Cultural reproduction looks back to a heritage worth carrying on.
The third and fourth images point in opposite directions in time. One asks where learning should arrive, fixing its eyes on the future. The other asks what a society needs to carry forward, keeping one eye on the past. Both are useful, and the tension between them runs through many curriculum debates.
Image 3: curriculum as intended learning outcomes
This image shifts the emphasis from means to ends. Instead of describing what learners will do, it describes where they should end up. The curriculum becomes the set of outcomes the school intends learning to reach.
The key move is precision. Older purposes were often stated in grand, vague language, such as “an appreciation for our cultural heritage.” That sounds fine but gives a teacher little to work with. The outcomes image replaces the grand phrase with a structured series of specific ends. Once the ends are set, everything else lines up behind them: all activities, all teaching, and even the design of the room serve the acquisition of those specified outcomes.
The strength of this image is that it makes purposes concrete and checkable. Its risk is that it can squeeze out anything that is hard to state as a clean outcome.
Specific ends, stated precisely
It moves the focus from means to ends. Vague aims like “appreciate our heritage” are replaced by a structured series of outcomes, and all teaching and activity serve to reach them.
Image 4: curriculum as cultural reproduction
The fourth image sees the curriculum as a mirror of a society’s culture. On this view, the curriculum is, and should be, a reflection of the culture it serves. Schooling exists to reproduce the knowledge and values that matter most, passing them to the next generation so the culture continues.
Who decides what those are? The community, the state, or the nation takes the lead. It identifies the skills, the knowledge, and the appreciations worth teaching. The job of professional educators is then to take that selection and transform it into a curriculum that can actually be delivered to children and young people.
There is a practical reason this matters in a developed, industrial society. Parents there hold specialized jobs and rarely have the time, and sometimes not the knowledge, to teach their children all the complicated capabilities modern life demands. The school steps in to do what families on their own cannot, carrying the culture forward on behalf of everyone.
The school passes a society’s knowledge and values to the next generation
The curriculum reflects the culture. The community or nation names what is worth teaching, and educators turn that into a deliverable curriculum, doing what busy, specialized parents cannot do alone.
Outcomes look forward; cultural reproduction looks back
The outcomes image fixes on future ends to reach. The cultural-reproduction image fixes on a heritage worth carrying forward. One specifies where to arrive, the other what to preserve.
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