Doll's Pre-Modern Paradigm
Doll’s Pre-Modern Paradigm
The ideal
- Order, symmetry, balance, and harmony.
- Education means learning essential and eternal truths, and principles for how to live.
How it changed over time
- Earlier: a conservative view that knowledge is unchanging and people must know their place.
- In the twentieth century it took on a more democratic vision.
Content and practice
- A course of study to create well-rounded, wise individuals.
- Educators transmit traditional knowledge, beliefs, and values.
William Doll, in 1993, sorted the history of curriculum thinking into three paradigms: pre-modern, modern, and postmodern. An important point comes first: these developed over time, but they also exist at the same time, and no one of them has completely replaced the others. A school today may run on any of the three. This article takes the oldest, the pre-modern.
The ideal of order
The pre-modern paradigm sets forth an ideal of order, symmetry, balance, and harmony. It pictures a well-ordered world and a well-ordered education to match. Learning, in this frame, means striving to grasp essential and eternal truths, or principles for how a person should live in the world. The aim is timeless wisdom, not changing skills.
In its earlier form, this was a conservative worldview. It held that knowledge is unchanging and that society has a fixed order in which each individual must know their place. As the paradigm evolved into the twentieth century, though, it softened. It came to contain a more democratic vision, loosening the old idea of fixed social rank while keeping its respect for enduring truths.
Order, symmetry, balance, and harmony
Education means striving to learn essential and eternal truths and principles for living. Educators transmit traditional knowledge, beliefs, and values to form wise, well-rounded individuals.
Content and practice
In the pre-modern paradigm, the curriculum is a course of study aimed at creating well-rounded and wise individuals. The educator’s role is to transmit traditional knowledge, beliefs, and values to learners. Teaching is an act of handing on what has been judged worth keeping, generation to generation.
This is a transmission model at heart. The valuable knowledge already exists; the job of education is to pass it along intact. That makes the pre-modern paradigm strong on continuity and weak on change, which is exactly why later paradigms pushed against it.
To transmit traditional knowledge, beliefs, and values
It is a transmission model: the valuable knowledge already exists, and education hands it on intact to form well-rounded, wise individuals. This makes it strong on continuity, weak on change.
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