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Curriculum Development
Paradigms of Curriculum
Modern Paradigm

Doll's Modern Paradigm

📝 Cheat Sheet

Doll’s Modern Paradigm

The worldview

  1. Individualistic, mechanistic, and progress-driven.
  2. Control and domination of the environment, competition, and directly perceived reality.

The themes

  1. Efficiency, linearity, rationalism.
  2. Empirical knowledge, scientific method, measured outcomes, standardization.

The curriculum and the educator

  1. Engineered, goal-driven, and segmented by discipline.
  2. The educator delivers the curriculum so goals set by others outside the classroom are met.

The modern paradigm was the dominant one of twentieth-century European and American education, and its mark is everywhere still. Where the pre-modern paradigm looked to eternal truths, the modern one looks to progress, measurement, and control. It treats education as something to be engineered.

The worldview and its themes

The modern paradigm rests on a particular picture of the world. It is individualistic, mechanistic, and progress-driven. It values the control and domination of the environment, prizes competition, and trusts a directly perceived reality, the world as it appears to careful observation.

Out of that worldview come its recurring themes:

  1. Efficiency.
  2. Linearity, doing things in a straight, ordered line.
  3. Rationalism.
  4. Empirical knowledge and the scientific method.
  5. Measured outcomes.
  6. Standardization.

These themes describe a curriculum that can be planned, measured, and compared, the same content delivered the same way and checked against the same standards everywhere.

The raw-material image. At its sharpest, the modern paradigm portrays students as raw material to be shaped into products for the benefit of society and industry. The image is worth noticing because it reveals the paradigm’s blind spot: a learner reduced to a product is a learner whose own purposes have dropped out of view.
❓ Pop Quiz
Which set of themes belongs to Doll's modern paradigm?
Flashcard
What is the worldview behind Doll's modern paradigm?
Tap to reveal
Answer

Individualistic, mechanistic, and progress-driven

It values control of the environment, competition, and directly perceived reality. Its themes are efficiency, linearity, rationalism, empirical knowledge, measured outcomes, and standardization.

The curriculum and the educator

The modern paradigm describes a curriculum that is engineered, goal-driven, and segmented into separate disciplines. It is built like a machine: define the goals, lay out the parts in order, and run learners through them.

This sets the educator’s role tightly. The educator’s job is to deliver the curriculum and to provide the right experiences, so that the prescribed goals, created by others outside the classroom, are met. Notice where the goals come from. They are set elsewhere, by experts or authorities away from the room, and the teacher carries them out. This is the same picture as the engineering view of implementation met earlier, and it is the picture the next paradigm rejects.

❓ Pop Quiz
In the modern paradigm, where do the goals a teacher works toward come from?
Flashcard
How does the modern paradigm describe the curriculum and the educator's role?
Tap to reveal
Answer

An engineered, goal-driven, discipline-segmented curriculum the educator delivers

The educator provides the right experiences so that prescribed goals, created by others outside the classroom, are met. The teacher carries out goals rather than setting them.

❓ Pop Quiz
A curriculum is built by defining fixed goals, breaking content into separate subjects, and running learners through in order. Which paradigm does this reflect?

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Last updated on • Talha
Pre-Modern ParadigmPostmodern Paradigm