1

Joseph J. Schwab: His Work and His Legacy

George E. DeBoer

American Association for the Advancement of Science

1200 New York Ave

Washington, DC 20005

gdeboer@aaas.org

Abstract

This chapter highlights the contributions of Joseph J. Schwab to the field of science education

through a discussion of some of his most important published work. Schwab began his career on

the faculty of the undergraduate college at the University of Chicago in the 1930s at a time when

the college was engaged in a radical experiment in general education. Schwab believed that the

undergraduate experience should develop an appreciation in students for the modes of thought

used in scientific investigation through critical reading of original scientific papers and Socratic

discourse with the goal of preparing them for a lifetime of learning and informed decision

making. He later brought the lessons learned at Chicago to the 1960s era reform of school

science.

Introduction

Most science educators are familiar with Joseph Schwab because of his contributions to the

school reform movement in biology in the United States in the 1960s, especially through his

connection to the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS). Schwab brought terms like

“rhetoric of conclusions” and “narrative of enquiry”1 to the discussion of school science, and he

contributed to the reform of science education as chair of the Teacher Preparation Committee at

BSCS and as author of the Biology Teachers Handbook (Schwab, 1963a). But most of Schwab’s

work in science education was not focused on the school curriculum, rather on the undergraduate

science program while he was on the faculty at the University of Chicago. His ideas about the

nature of the science curriculum were shaped as he and his colleagues at Chicago worked out the

details of a comprehensive program of general education2 for the undergraduate college. It was at

Chicago that his professional career began and where it ended 36 years later, and it was at

Chicago that he thought and wrote about science education, first for undergraduate students and

then later as part of the pre-college science curriculum reforms of the 1950s and 60s.

Joseph Schwab was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1909, matriculated as an

undergraduate at age 15 at the University of Chicago in 1924, and graduated with degrees in

Physics and Biology in 1930. He earned a doctorate in genetics from Chicago in 1939. In 1937,

he spent a year at Columbia University Teachers College, where he was influenced by both John

Dewey and Ralph Tyler. Schwab came to Chicago as an instructor in 1938 and he retired as

1 Schwab preferred “enquiry” to “inquiry,” but in his writing the spelling varies depending on where the work was published. In

this chapter, the spelling that actually appeared in a publication will be used, and all my discussions of his work will use the word inquiry. 2 The terms general education and liberal education will be used synonymously in this chapter to describe non-specialized and

non-vocational programs of study that offer students a broad base of experience with various modes of thought and knowledge of their culture.

2

Professor of Education and the William Raney Harper Professor of Natural Sciences in 1974. He

then joined the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, founded by Robert Maynard

Hutchins, in Santa Barbara, California, where he continued to think and write about curriculum.

He died in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in 1988.

He began his graduate work at Chicago just as Hutchins was beginning his long tenure,

first as president (1929-1945) and then as chancellor of the university (1945-1951). This was

also the time that the college was beginning to embark on its decades-long experiment in general

education. Hutchins was a vigorous advocate of the Great Books approach to general education

and a promoter of liberal education as the best preparation for informed, responsible citizenship

(Hutchins, 1936). Hutchins believed that undergraduate education should focus on a student’s

intellectual development through a careful study of classic works of Western civilization, taught

through a dialectical Socratic method, rather than on the development of practical skills and

professional training, which tended to characterize higher education at that time. His approach

was intended to develop citizens with the independence of mind suited for life in a democratic

society. The study of a core body of great works would also provide a common educational

experience so that citizens could communicate beyond their areas of specialized interest.

Hutchins was joined in 1930 by Mortimer Adler, and with Adler went on to found the

Great Books of the Western World program and the Great Books Foundation in 1947

(http://www.greatbooks.org/about/history). But the faculty rejected Hutchins’ plan for a Great

Books approach for the undergraduate college, and the program never became the model of

undergraduate education at Chicago that it did at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland.

However, its focus on the intellectual heritage of Western civilization did influence the spirit and

forms the general education program took at Chicago, and the approach was used in the

university’s adult evening extension college, which Schwab chaired when he joined the faculty

in 1938.

Although Schwab’s primary interest and responsibility was organizing the science

curriculum for the general education program at Chicago, the integrative nature of general

education also gave him opportunities to think about the role of the social sciences and

humanities in general education and the boundaries between those subject areas and the sciences.

He had a passion for psychology, the social sciences, religion, and the humanities, and he

addressed issues from these disciplines in his writing on education. In addition to being a

member of the science faculty, Schwab was also a respected education theorist. In 1949 he was

appointed to the university’s Education Department, where he taught courses in the philosophy

of education. And later he did curriculum work at the Melton Research Center of the Jewish

Theological Seminary, where he helped develop materials to teach character education to

students attending Jewish summer camps.

He had an especially strong interest in psychoanalysis, undergoing analysis himself. In

Eros and Education (1954) Schwab wrote about the nature of the interactions between faculty

and students during classroom discussions from a Freudian perspective. In the late 1950s and

early 60s, his attention shifted to the school science curriculum reform movement through his

work with BSCS. In 1969, his attention shifted back to higher education as the student protest

movement gained momentum. In response to the protests, he published College Curriculum and

3

Student Protest (Schwab, 1969a), in which he focused again on the role of liberal education in

society, especially on ideas of “community, of moral choice, and of deliberation and decision-

making” (Westbury & Wilkof, 1978, p. 30). His final contributions to the field of education were

to curriculum development in general. Through a series of papers on the advantages of a

practical rather than theoretical approach to curriculum study, he became well known among

curriculum theorists for his claim that “the field of curriculum is moribund” (Schwab, 1970, p.

1).

The Undergraduate College at Chicago

Throughout the 1930s, a group of University of Chicago faculty pressed forward on a plan to

create a coherent and well integrated approach to general education for the undergraduate

college. In 1937, a four-year program of undergraduate study, completely devoted to general

education, was officially approved by the university (Schwab, 1950a). When Schwab joined the

faculty in 1938, he took a leading role in the development of the science component of the

program as chair of the natural sciences sequence in the undergraduate college, and it was his

efforts to conceptualize that program to which he devoted most of his professional career.

The early to mid-20th

century was a time of vigorous debate about the role of

undergraduate education at colleges and universities in the United States. At its beginning,

higher education in the U.S. had had a classical character, with a focus on classical literature and

languages. But by the mid to late 19th

century, the model of the German university, with its

emphasis on specialization and empirical investigations in the sciences, began to take hold in the

U.S. and elsewhere. By the late 19th century, that model began to predominate in universities

like Chicago. As Daniel Bell put it:

The American university, as it emerged in the latter decades of the nineteenth century,

brought with it a new religion of research. Even scholarship in the traditional disciplines

was conceived, within that purview, as being concerned with detailed and specialized

problems. The reaction of the liberal arts college was to strike out against specialism.

(Bell, 1966, p. 51)

Questions began to be raised in universities across the U. S. about the appropriate role of

the undergraduate experience, coming as it does between the high school and the professional

and graduate schools: Should the undergraduate years be spent in pre-professional training for

those planning to enter the professional schools, should it focus on early scholarly preparation

for those going on to graduate school, or should it simply be preparation for informed citizenry?

What if any is the importance of having students develop an appreciation for the cultural artifacts

that the society thinks a cultivated person should be familiar with, or to become aware of basic

principles that guide moral behavior, or to gain an understanding of how knowledge is organized

and revised? And how important is it for citizens in a democratic society to have a shared

intellectual experience that provides them with a common ground for deliberation and debate

regardless of their life work or specialization? These were the questions that were being debated.

The programs of general education being developed at Chicago, along with those at

places like Columbia and Harvard, became models for colleges throughout the country. (See

Bell, 1966 for a discussion of the Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard experiments in general

4

education.) Although these programs differed in detail, they all had a commitment to certain

general principles and purposes. As Bell said in his study of general education, the function of

the general education in the undergraduate college was:

…to teach modes of conceptualization, explanation, and verification of knowledge. As between

the secondary school, with its emphasis on primary skills and factual data, and the graduate or

professional school, whose necessary concern is with specialization and technique, the distinctive

function of the college is to deal with the grounds of knowledge: not what one knows but how one

knows. The college can be the unique place where students acquire self-consciousness, historical

consciousness, and methodological consciousness. (Bell, 1966, p. 8)

General education programs such as this had as their stated purpose the development of

enlightened and responsible citizens for life in a free society. They emphasized personal growth

and individuality and a universal rather than a provincial or nationalistic world view. Programs

usually focused on the humanities and classics, particularly the study of Western civilization, and

they avoided connections with utilitarian and vocational aims and with career preparation. But

programs were not all the same. They differed in the emphasis they placed on developing moral

men and women versus providing students with a broad understanding of multiple ethical

perspectives, the importance they placed on learning about the heritage of the society versus

studying the contemporary world, and how much they valued the acquisition of a broad base of

knowledge across the curriculum compared to providing students opportunities to develop skills

as independent thinkers.3

For example, the stated purpose of the Chicago program was to develop the intellect. It

was not primarily about the knowledge one acquired, but rather the ability to think, to

contemplate, to consider alternatives. To do that well, one had to learn about the complexities of

the world in relation to each other. The most important job of the college was to introduce

students to positions other than their own and to help them develop the power to form judgments.

In the Chicago program, that thinking would take place in the context of cultural elements

(works of art, music, literature, and science) that were deemed to be most important by society.

The task of curriculum developers was to create curricular content and learning activities that

allowed students to investigate these cultural elements thoroughly and in context. The Chicago

program also took an analytical approach to knowledge rather than the historical approach that

often characterized general education programs. Especially in the sciences, and largely through

Schwab’s influence, the goal of the curriculum developers was, in Bell’s words, “to find the

controlling principles of ‘classification’ in the definition of subjects or of disciplines within

fields (Bell, 1966, p. 33). Referring to the difference between these two approaches in the

context of science, Bell said:

3 See The Emergence of the American University by Lawrence Veysey (1981) for an extended discussion of the

history of the American University during the time period in question.

5

…the question is whether one wants to emphasize historicism, with its doctrine that the

understanding of an event can be found only in its unique context, or the analytical approach,

which finds meaning in a phenomenon as one of a type-class, and seeks, further, a sense of

invariant relationships. …Does one teach science through its history, or by analysis of its models

of inquiry? (p. 62)

At Chicago, general education meant learning the special modes of conceptualization that

characterized each discipline, not simply reviewing the historical development of a field.

Historical texts were read and examined, but the purpose was not just to familiarize students with

the knowledge these texts contained but to teach students how different forms of knowledge

were created and how the students themselves could be analytical and critical of those

intellectual methods and products.

At Chicago, this was to be accomplished by means of an interpretive (hermeneutic)

approach in which students extracted meaning from selected written texts, pieces of music,

works of art and architecture, and reports of scientific investigations, taking into consideration

not only the cultural artifacts themselves but also the purposes and intentions of the creator of

those artifacts. Nothing was to be taken as given, but always open to analysis and interpretation.

In science, the texts that were subjected to interpretation were original scientific research papers,

and the pedagogical approach for teaching them involved having students examine those papers

to become familiar with the particular knowledge claims that were made, the investigative

methods used, and the broader intellectual and practical contexts in which each investigation was

conducted (Schwab, 1950a).

The challenge that Schwab and his colleagues faced was how to create an educational

experience that would lead to intellectual growth so that students would be open-minded,

skeptical, able to think for themselves, and prepared to take on positions of leadership in society.

The education that was envisioned emphasized the integration of knowledge from multiple

disciplines and a search for and an appreciation of fundamental principles that define human

experience, accomplished not through memorization but through discussion and deliberation.

But, even as efforts were underway in places like Chicago to build general education

programs, the overall trend in undergraduate education was toward specialization, professional

and pre-professional training, and the accumulation of knowledge. As Schwab noted, a “rhetoric

of conclusions” dominated undergraduate teaching, where students were presented with

knowledge of the disciplines without being required to think critically or make judgments about

that knowledge. Many of these issues were addressed in the scholarly writing that Schwab was

engaged in while he was chair of the science program in the undergraduate college at Chicago,

and it is to that work that we turn in the next several sections of this chapter.

The Place of Science in Liberal Education

A Taxonomy of Types of Science.

In 1949, Schwab published a paper titled The Nature of Scientific Knowledge as Related to

Liberal Education. In that paper he argued that all students should be exposed to the breadth and

6

variety of science both in its content and its methods. Science should not be treated

monolithically but as a complex and varied study. To accurately represent the complex nature of

the physical world and the methods used to study it, liberal education should use pedagogical

approaches that reflect that complexity. Diversity exists in the content and methodologies of the

separate fields of science, and diversity exists in how philosophers of science view the nature of

science, including the nature of causality, the nature of induction, the role of hypothesis testing,

and the relationship between mathematical knowledge and the physical world. Schwab argued

that because of this diversity of methods that are used and views that are held about the nature of

science, no one single set of “epistemic or metaphysical presuppositions” concerning science can

cover the variety of ideas that exists (Schwab, 1949, p. 248). An accurate portrayal of the nature

of science as part of a liberal arts education requires that this diversity of scientific methodology

and interpretation be taught as fully as possible.

Schwab proposed a taxonomy of scientific investigation that could serve as an aid to the

teaching of science in a general education program, both to support the choice of subject matter

and how that subject matter could be examined by students. He identified four types of scientific

investigations, which differ from each other in the kind of knowledge that is generated, the kind

of data that are collected, and the form of validation that is used in each. The four types, which

he believed encompassed most forms of scientific inquiry, were taxonomic science,

measurement science, causal science, and relational or analogical science.

Taxonomic science involves the creation of classification schemes for organizing objects

and events in the world. These classification schemes exist in virtually all fields of science,

including the classification of disease for diagnostic purposes, categorizing living organisms to

study their degree of hereditary relatedness, or the classification of types of chemical molecules

on the basis of their molecular structures. All of these classification schemes were developed for

a purpose, and all of them require difficult decisions at the margins. For the purpose of liberal

study, “…a given taxonomic system is understood when it is seen as one of several alternatives”

and when “…some of the doubtful areas of the taxonomy are seen and some of the reasons for

their doubtful status understood” (Schwab, 1949, pp. 255-256).

Measurement science involves measuring and relating changes in two or more objective

quantities. Familiar examples include the relationship between the intensity of light and distance

from the light source, the frequency of vibration of a plucked string and the length of the string,

or the degree of sinking of an object and its density in relation to the density of the medium it is

immersed in. For general education purposes, it is important that students understand that

assumptions are made when reporting these relationships in a mathematical form, such as the

assumption that there is a point source of light (which is an idealization of the real world).

Students should also be aware of the possible effects of abstracting only certain variables of

interest from a more complex set of related variables that could be studied.

Regarding causal science, Schwab argues that much of what is thought of as “causal

science” can actually be placed in the other three categories, but even after doing that, there

remains a separate type of investigation that deals with systems of mutually interacting and

mutually determined parts acting as a whole. He cites physiological and social systems as

examples. The defining features of these causal systems involve “interaction, mutual

7

determination, and concerted action” (Schwab, 1949, pp. 258). The challenge for students is to

grasp the nature of the interacting parts of the system and their relationship to the whole

organism or system. Of necessity, because these systems are too complex to be studied as a

unity, their parts and pieces must be studied in isolation. For general education purposes, the

student:

…must be prepared to discover, in the records of such research, answers to the questions

of what kinds of “parts” are being treated, what analysis of “functions” are related to the

parts and functions of other related researches, and how, if at all, the researcher in

question relates his discovered functions and parts to one another to constitute larger

units more nearly approaching the unity of the organism as a whole. (Schwab, 1949, p.

260)

Finally, Schwab identified relational science as a fourth type of scientific inquiry.

Regarding this type of inquiry, which relies on models, analogies, and forms of representation,

Schwab said:

By “relational science” I mean those patterns of inquiry which are most fully understood as

aiming toward knowledge which attempts to “explain” or “account for” matters previously known

by inventing co-related quantities which do not have one-to-one correlates among the phenomena

to be accounted for, or by inventing mechanisms not directly accessible to observation but so

conceived and applied to the phenomena to be explained that it can be said that certain things

behave as if these mechanisms existed. (Schwab, 1949, p. 260)

These borrowed relationships of relational science, which are applied to the new observations,

may come from either physical models or from abstract mathematical and conceptual models.

The educational imperative of these diverse approaches to scientific investigation is that

students should have enough familiarity with them to analyze actual research studies in each

category and make comparisons between them. Instruction should: “…educate, encourage, and

exercise the student in applying appropriate canons of comprehension and evaluation

to…examples of scientific inquiry” (Schwab, 1949, p. 264). This enables students to make

judgments about which of a number of possible alternatives is the most appropriate approach to

collecting data, drawing conclusions, and linking evidence to conclusions, which in turn will

give students a more honest and accurate picture of the physical world and how it is studied.

When the nature of science itself is chosen as the subject for students to study, then a variety of

historical, philosophical, and methodological interpretations of science should be read, discussed,

and analyzed in the same way.

The Tentative Nature of Science.

Also key to an understanding of science for liberal education purposes was to appreciate “the

ongoing, unclosed character of science” (Schwab, 1949, p. 263). Yet, as Schwab observed,

colleges still taught “the conclusions of science and definitive solutions to its problems” (p. 263).

Teaching the tentativeness of conclusions did not, however, argue for naïve relativism to

Schwab. It meant simply that in order to be honest about the nature of science, differences in

how the world is viewed by individuals studying the same problem needed to be treated

8

thoroughly. Instruction must teach students “the disciplines of comparison, contrast, choice, and

synthesis appropriate to the field in which the diversity takes place” (p. 264).

The pedagogical challenge of such an intellectually sophisticated approach to teaching

science was how to get students familiar with and to contemplate the relevance of each these

diverse modes of scientific inquiry in the limited time allotted. To Schwab (and his colleagues at

Chicago), the answer lay in the analysis of carefully chosen scientific research papers. A

scientific research paper is the “bearer of a portion of scientific knowledge in its field,” and “…it

‘illustrates itself’ as an example of scientific investigation” (Schwab, 1949, p. 265). All that is

required is that the student knows what questions to ask, including what problem is being

addressed, the appropriateness of the data, difficulties in obtaining data, how the data were

treated, any phenomena that were excluded, and the validity of the conclusions. Each paper

“would serve simultaneously to impart subject-matter content and to illustrate aspects of the

nature of scientific knowledge at many different levels—from the most specific level at which

the paper falls…to the level of science-as-a-whole” (Schwab, 1949, p. 251). In the plan

developed at Chicago, students would be presented with sets of such papers and with a

framework for analyzing them so that they would gain practice in studying those investigations

as instances of scientific inquiry, especially how each was similar to and differed from the

others.

Science as Constructed Theory.

In Science and Civil Discourse (Schwab, 1956), Schwab elaborates further on the nature of

inquiry in science and its importance in liberal education. He says that inquiry is constructive in

the sense that conceptions “must be invented…by the investigator” in order to determine what

his subject matter and his data will be from the great “complex of things and events” (Schwab,

1956, p. 132). According to Schwab, through this process of problem and data selection, the

content is inevitably “distorted” and “made incomplete.” Therefore, because of this selecting and

narrowing of the problem and consequent narrowing of what is observed, a conclusion in science

must be thought of as a “taken something, not an objectively given something” (Schwab, 1956,

p. 132).

This constructive character of scientific knowledge has implications for the liberal arts

curriculum. Schwab argued that if a theory is to be taught as a theory about some aspect of the

world, it is also important to be clear about which aspects of the subject are not incorporated into

that theory.

We must have something more in the materials of our curriculum than the theories

themselves, for the restrictions which define what the theory is about are not readily

found in the theory itself. The theory is only the terminal part of an inquiry. We need

what comes before the end…to discover what the theory is a theory of… (Schwab, 1956,

p. 133)

This means that the student needs to know that scientific problems are constructed out of

a much larger array of possibilities, and they should come to appreciate the choices that are made

by scientists in the selection of problems, the selection of observations to be made and data to be

collected, and how the data are interpreted in terms of existing theory.

9

Structure of the Disciplines.

Although much of Schwab’s work involved efforts to integrate scientific knowledge throughout

the liberal arts curriculum by showing the interconnections between subject matters across

disciplinary boundaries, he also acknowledged the importance of the separate academic

disciplines for curriculum development. In fact, Schwab is often associated with the “structure of

disciplines” movement, an effort that became popular in the 1960s to describe the structure of

knowledge and the relevance of that structure for school curriculum development and content

organization. But Schwab’s ideas about “structure” were at least as much about disciplinary

modes of thought as they were about how content should be organized. Schwab published a

number of essays on the topic, including Structure of the Disciplines: Meanings and

Significances (Schwab, 1964). He found support for the idea of disciplinary structure in

Aristotle’s distinctions between the theoretical, practical, and productive disciplines and in

Auguste Comte’s hierarchy of scientific disciplines, starting with physics and progressing to

chemistry, biology, and finally the social sciences. But he also appreciated that these diverse

formulations of disciplinary structure provided support for the truism that “if we classify any

group of complex things, we are faced with a wide choice of bases of classification” (Schwab,

1964, p. 15). In other words, organizational schemes can be helpful for thinking about the

curriculum, but they should not be considered to be fixed and absolute.

Schwab distinguished between the substantive structure of the disciplines (their

conceptual organization) and their syntactical structure (how knowledge is generated in each

field). He argued that because the two structures are necessarily interconnected, students should

be taught the conceptual structure of scientific knowledge in the context of the methods of

inquiry that produced that knowledge, and they should be taught the methods of inquiry in terms

of the conceptual structures:

In general then, enquiry has its origin in a conceptual structure… It is this conceptual

structure through which we are able to formulate a telling question. It is through the

telling question that we know what data to seek and what experiments to perform to get

those data. Once the data are in hand, the same conceptual structure tells us how to

interpret them, what to make of them by way of knowledge. Finally, the knowledge itself

is formulated in the terms provided by the same conception. (Schwab, 1964, p. 12)

But in no way do these structures represent a fixed body of knowledge or a fixed way of

organizing that or knowledge.

The dependence of knowledge on a conceptual structure means that any body of

knowledge is likely to be of only temporary significance. For the knowledge which

develops from the use of a given concept usually discloses new complexities of the

subject matter which call forth new concepts. These new concepts in turn give rise to new

bodies of enquiry and, therefore, to new and more complete bodies of knowledge stated

in new terms. The significance of this ephemeral character of knowledge to education

consists in the fact that it exhibits the desirability if not the necessity for so teaching what

we teach that students understand that the knowledge we possess is not mere literal

factual truth but a kind of knowledge which is true in a more complex sense. (Schwab,

1964, pp. 13-14)

10

And if we do choose to teach just one conceptual structure, Schwab argues that we should at

least be honest about what we are doing:

But if we do, let it be taught in such a way that the student learns what substantive

structures gave rise to the chosen body of knowledge, what the strengths and limitations

of these structures are, and what some of the alternative structures are which give rise to

alternative bodies of knowledge.

If students discover how one body of knowledge succeeds another, if they are aware of

the substantive structures that underlie our current knowledge, if they are given a little

freedom to speculate on the possible changes in structures which the future may bring,

they will not only be prepared to meet future revisions with intelligence but will better

understand the knowledge they are currently being taught. (Schwab, 1964, p. 29-30)

Regarding the specific conceptual structures that should be taught in a liberal arts course

in science, Schwab admitted that the topics that he was advocating for the Chicago course

showed “no notable departure from those which might be found in one or another conventional

‘survey’ course” (Schwab, 1950a, p. 150). For example, the physical science portion of the

course included simple Archimedean laws of equilibrium and the lever, phenomena involving

chemical and physical change, molecular and atomic theories, and the periodic table. It included

concepts of energy, the kinetic molecular theory, the theory of special relativity, and ideas about

radiation. In the biological sciences portion of the course, topics included transport and

regulation of respiratory gases and the regulation and utilization of food material, the structure of

the heart and circulatory system, levels of organization of organisms, and issues of health and

disease. Also included were the developmental history of organisms, Darwinian evolution,

Mendelian genetics, embryonic development, and various concepts from the field of psychology.

The reason there were no radical departures from what was traditionally taught in

introductory science courses was because the primary focus of the Chicago program was not the

content itself but the interconnectedness of knowledge and the nature of scientific inquiry. Much

of the content that was taught in traditional survey courses would suffice as long as connections

were made between topics and the content was taught in the context of the scientific inquiry that

produced it. In the case of physics and chemistry, for example, he said that because concepts of

energy are related to various phenomena involving chemical change, “a relation between a

problem in physics and one in chemistry is established as illustrative of the unifying function of

scientific inquiry” (Schwab, 1950a, p. 150). Also, as already noted, original papers would be

used to introduce students to both the core ideas of science and to their methods of inquiry,

through actual accounts of scientific research. The point is that the science content was seen

primarily as a vehicle for teaching about the nature of scientific inquiry rather than as an end in

itself. Schwab’s interest in the structure of the disciplines had as much or more to do with the

modes of thought that characterized science as it did with the products of that inquiry.

Eros and Education

Although Schwab’s work at the undergraduate level is most often associated with efforts aimed

at intellectual development through the liberal arts, he also appreciated the importance of the

affective dimension in education, both as a means to achieve intellectual goals and as a proper

11

educational goal itself. In Eros and Education (Schwab, 1954), he draws on the concept of Eros

as the psychic energy of creating and wanting that drives students’ desire to learn what is placed

in front of them and supplies them with a love of knowledge that makes them want to learn

throughout their lifetime. Schwab’s notion of Eros is akin to Freud’s idea of the fundamental life

instinct that drives humans to create and be productive (Freud, 1975/1920). It also bears

similarities to Jung’s notion of Eros as “psychic relatedness,” particularly as Schwab used the

idea to describe the interactions between students and teacher during class discussions (Jung,

1982, p. 65).

Schwab believed that Eros could be nurtured in an educational setting through classroom

discussion. To him, discussion was the embodiment of the intellectual skills that define a liberal

education. At its best, classroom discussion draws upon an interpersonal relationship between

student and teacher that is characterized by liking and respect. The respect of student for teacher

comes from the belief on the part of the student that the teacher has something of value to offer

that will enable the student to grow toward intellectual maturity. For both student and teacher,

the liking and respect comes from shared participation in a problem of genuine interest to the two

of them. When done well, classroom discussion stimulates a love of learning that can last a

lifetime.

Schwab argued that the truly educative discussion has three functions: the substantive,

the exemplary, and the stimulative functions, representing three liberal education aims of

knowledge, power, and affection. First, there must be a specified object of knowledge that the

discussion is intended to address. Second, the discussion must involve an activity that leads

students to an awareness and appreciation of the method of inquiry employed in the generation

of the knowledge. Finally, each discussion must serve to motivate students to engage in the

activity so that learning can in fact take place.

Discussion satisfies its substantive function when it is focused on a clear knowledge goal.

It satisfies its exemplary function when it engages students in an examination of a variety of

methods suitable to the questions being addressed and the students recognize that people can

arrive at differing answers to a problem because of differences in how they formulate the

problem, differences in the data they collect relevant to the problem, and differences in how they

draw conclusions from those data. Discussion satisfies its stimulative function when the Eros is

activated, as when a teacher inspires students through accounts of personal experience or allows

students to share their own insights and opinions. The result of such a balanced approach is the

education of students who have both a creative impulse and a desire to engage in a search for

knowledge. Schwab noted that the discussions he envisioned share little in common with the all

too familiar undergraduate experience in which the discussion is no more than a reorganizing and

rearranging of what the students already know with little new knowledge added.

Character Education

In addition to recognizing the important connection between intellect and emotion in an

educational setting, Schwab was also interested in the role of intellect in the development of

personal values, ethical behavior, and character. In an early paper titled Biology and the Problem

of Values (Schwab, 1941), he analyzed the relationship between the teaching of biology and the

12

teaching of values in the context of general education. Schwab began by acknowledging that

people have a variety of attitudes about criteria for making value judgments. He said there are

some who argue that there are no useful criteria for judging which of many ethical systems to

choose from, others who say that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s, and still others

who choose to follow the ethical position of the majority. Instead, Schwab says, ethical

judgments can be made rational and subject to rational test. Value judgments can be made

rational to students by having them learn how to think through and analyze ethical problems in

the same way that they think through scientific problems. He says:

…we can take a leaf from the scientist’s notebook. A good scientist does not go into the

laboratory “cold” to solve a problem. Instead, he reads the available literature by experts in the

field—not to believe, of course, nor to reject but to weigh, consider, and verify.

The same can be done in the field of ethics—we can read the experts from Plato and Aristotle,

through Bentham and Hobbes, to Dewey; read then, not to swallow what they have to say, nor to

reject it—but to see and evaluate the thought and insight and logic… (Schwab, 1941, p. 94).

One way to teach students this connection between the intellectual and the ethical in

science classes is to provide them with controversial issues (Schwab suggests soil and water

conservation or other bio-economic issues), and to:

…take them apart for the student to show him that such programs of action involve both data as

to means and judgments as to ends, to let him see what ethical principles must be used to decide

the issue, and to give him an opportunity to deduce for himself the appropriate application of

these principles to the particular problem. (Schwab, 1941, p. 96)

In a later paper (Cohen & Schwab, 1965), the idea of an intellectual dimension to value

judgments, ethical decision making, and character development was applied in the context of

religious education. In that paper, Schwab and his co-author describe efforts to design curricular

activities for character development for students in Jewish summer camps while Schwab was

chairman of the academic board of the Melton Research Center of the Jewish Theological

Seminary. The authors begin by affirming the connection between character and intellect:

We suspect that one of the chief reasons why educators have been thwarted in devising

methods of character education is their failure to consider the possibility that there may

be means of advancing the student’s character development through his intellect. (Cohen

& Schwab, 1965, p. 23)

The approach they used was to teach students a familiar set of ethical principles derived

from the Bible (e.g., thou shalt not stand idly by while an evil is being committed), and then to

ask students to relate these ethical principles to life situations by means of “practical logic”

(Cohen & Schwab, 1965, p. 24). To Schwab, practical logic involves weighing alternative ethical

positions within a logical framework in order to choose the best one. The logical framework

provides a structure for deciding which ethical principle is applicable to a particular set of

circumstances or for deciding between two or more equally valid but apparently irreconcilable

ethical principles.

13

In one activity, students confront the Biblical dilemma that all of creation is sacred but

yet humans have been given dominion over the earth. They are given a series of situations and

asked if they think the action that is described is more consistent with the idea that everything

was created for human use and satisfaction or with the idea that everything in nature should be

protected by humans because it is sacred and inviolable. The positions that they evaluate range

from “every city should have a zoo so that people will have a place to go for picnics” to “we

should not…build a dam if this will destroy a beautiful natural vista or displace…wildlife”

(Cohen & Schwab, 1965, p. 25). These structured activities were meant to provide students with

analytical skills that would be useful to them as they applied their logical reasoning to ethical

questions. It would give them practice in thinking through real-world cases and experience in

using specific analytical structures to identify issues they could then consider when making

ethical choices.

Schwab did not believe that there was a single ethical standard that could be used for

making value judgments. Rather, ethical inquiry uses the same kind of intellectual approach that

empirical inquiry uses. Humans can make ethical judgments using their practical intelligence and

in consideration of the consequences of the choices they make.

In 1969, Schwab published College Curriculum and Student Protest as a practical

example of ethical decision making and the role the college can play in character

development. The book was written in response to the student protests of the 1960s and was

an attempt to use curricular revision to solve the problems that he believed the existing

curriculum had created. College Curriculum and Student Protest takes an analytical approach

to solving the problem of student unrest. Who are the protesters? What is it about their

education that they are protesting? What could be done differently—both in terms of the

content of the curriculum and the way it is taught—to give students greater satisfaction with

their college experience or, at least, a more intelligent and informed basis for protest. To each

of these questions, he systematically lays out an array of possible answers. He then proposes

many of the approaches that he had advocated in his earlier writings. In particular, and

especially relevant to the teaching of science, he describes the dissatisfaction that results

from: “…the neatness and air of inevitability with which we invest our accounts in science

textbooks and lectures of the evidences which lead to current theory” (Schwab, 1969a, p. 8).

As a solution to the alienation that students felt from their college experience, he proposes

making better use of the students’ own intellectual capabilities by focusing less on the

assimilation and use of the products of inquiry and more on how knowledge in each field is

acquired. Speaking of how students were being taught, he says:

Instead of giving experience of the kinds of problems and modes of enquiry characteristic

of the field, they provide the student with the experience of assimilating, applying, or

otherwise using the fruits of enquiry in the field. Yet these two—assimilation and use as

against pursuit of body of knowledge—are often radically different in the competences

they require and the satisfactions they afford. (Schwab, 1969a, p. 10)

What students needed, according to Schwab, was experience in the practical art of

thoughtful deliberation, opportunities for sharing experiences and ideas, and skill in mutual

criticism. Materials should be presented to them not as unqualified assertions but as genuine

questions for investigation. And those inquiries should be presented side-by-side with other

14

inquiries, posing different but similar problems and using different data and arguments so that

the student could see the questions, arguments, and conclusions in a broader intellectual

context. And students should also have opportunities to engage in the messiness of practical

problem solving, not just be presented with problems and the variety of ways of examining

and drawing conclusions about those problems. As Schwab put it: “This is essentially the

problem of facing the student with ‘reality,’ that is, of discovering to him the sense and extent

to which real cases are not mere instances of general rules or mere members of classes” so

that the student can appreciate that “principles are brought to bear on cases only

approximately and with great difficulty” (Schwab, 1969a, p. 116).

Schwab also argued for having students experience “works in progress,” both their

own and those of others: “It is one of the most powerful ways—perhaps the only way—to

afford experience of the ground of all enquiry: the originating problem, the first idea, the

nascent plan, the seminal purpose, from which flow research and scholarship worth the doing”

(Schwab, 1969a, p. 210). A study of finished products, on the other hand, does not provide a

sense of aspects of a problem that are only “half-known” before the project has begun.

Finally, he says, the goal of curricular reform should be to provide students with an

intellectual challenge and the opportunity to develop skills in “recovery, enquiry, and

criticism appropriate to each discipline.” In the sciences, social sciences, history and

philosophy this means “no ‘truth’ without the evidence and argument which supports it or

from which it grows” (Schwab, 1969a, p. 183). This includes the presentation of alternative

principles, evidence, and interpretation that give fields of study their competing theories and

uncertainties. Instead, the curriculum that protesters were reacting to omitted uncertainty and

how decisions are made about what evidence should be counted and which theories should be

preferred. “Little wonder,” Schwab concludes, “that anxieties, persecution feelings and a

wearisome spate of intemperate, stereotyped protest should flood from students’ mouths. Still

less should we wonder that they so often cite their unexamined impulsions as sufficient

ground for choice and, indeed confuse the one with the other” (Schwab, 1969a, p. 16).

Applying Lessons Learned at Chicago to School Science

Beginning in 1959, after more than 20 years of efforts to integrate science into the liberal arts

core curriculum at Chicago, Schwab had an opportunity to contribute to the reform of school

science through his association with the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS). BSCS

had been organized by the American Institute of Biological Sciences in 1958 to reform biology

teaching in the country. Schwab became chairman of the Teacher Preparation Committee at

BSCS and was responsible for developing plans for the pre-service and in-service training of

teachers who would be teaching new courses that were part of the reform initiative. Under his

leadership, the committee produced a Teacher’s Commentary to accompany each of three

versions (Blue, Yellow, and Green) of the BSCS biology texts (Hurd, 1961), and he authored the

first Biology Teacher’s Handbook for BSCS in 1963.

Also in keeping with his interest in pre-college science education, Schwab was invited to

deliver the Inglis Lecture at Harvard University in 1961. The talk, published as The Teaching of

Science as Enquiry (Schwab, 1962), serves as a summary of his thinking about the nature of

science and the teaching of science at the school level. The lecture focused on the nature of

15

scientific investigation, on ways for students to develop an appreciation for science as a process

of inquiry, and the intellectual skills involved in inquiry. There were three main themes: First

was the importance of offering students a realistic portrayal of the nature of science so that as

citizens they would understand that scientific investigations yield theoretical constructions that

are tentative and ever-changing. The second focused on the pedagogical approaches that would

give students practice in the intellectual skills involved in inquiry so they would be capable of

independent critical reasoning throughout their lifetimes. And the third was the idea that science

is not just an intellectual activity but also a study of actual events in the world. An educational

program, therefore, needs to link the scientific principles and intellectual skills taught in the

school curriculum to concrete phenomena in the physical world.

Schwab also argued that schools could play a role in educating the public about the

importance of science in society. For citizens to be supportive of science, they must first

understand why scientific knowledge continues to shift and why ideas that were once thought

to be true may later be discarded. If the public is expected to support science, they need to

understand the revisionist nature of science and appreciate that much of the language of

science describes ideas and models, not actual physical reality. To Schwab, the key to having

students develop an accurate picture of science was for them to understand that science rests

on “conceptual innovation” (Schwab, 1962, p. 5) and that scientific understanding changes as

new ideas are conceived. This view of science cannot be achieved if students are taught in

ways that suggest to them that knowledge is fixed and certain.

In many ways, these ideas about the nature of science are mirrored in Thomas Kuhn’s4

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn, 1962), published the same year as Schwab’s The

Teaching of Science as Enquiry. Just as Schwab was deeply involved in developing the liberal

arts core at Chicago beginning in the 1940s, Kuhn taught a comparable course for

undergraduates at Harvard in the 1950s as part of its General Education in Science curriculum.

Schwab’s thinking did not go quite as far as Kuhn’s notions about the incommensurability that

results from “paradigm shifts,” but a similar idea that significant conceptual shifts occur that

make previous thinking obsolete can be seen in Schwab’s writing:

With each change in conceptual system, the older knowledge gained through use of the older

principles sinks into limbo. The facts embodied are salvaged, reordered, and reused, but the

knowledge which formerly embodied these facts is replaced. There is then, a continuing

revision of scientific knowledge as principles of enquiry are used, tested thereby, and

supplanted. (Schwab, 1962, p. 15)

In Schwab’s terms, science enjoys periods of “stable enquiry,” during which agreed upon

fundamental principles are used to guide research. But occasionally a shift occurs during which

the principles that previously guided scientific investigations no longer are relevant. These

periods of change are periods of “fluid enquiry.” Fluid enquiry is not about filling in the missing

pieces of the earlier models and conceptions. Instead, it involves the creation of new conceptions

to guide scientific research (Schwab, 1962).

4 A comparison between Schwab’s and Kuhn’s ideas, especially the implications of those ideas for science teaching,

can be found in Kuhn and Schwab on Science Texts and the Goals of Science Education (Siegel, 1978.)

16

Schwab thought that all citizens, not just future scientists, needed to be educated to think

in this critical and creative way, and that this was a contribution that schools could make to an

informed citizenry. Drawing on his experience with undergraduate education at the University of

Chicago, he believed this approach to school science would produce leaders who would both

understand the nature of scientific inquiry and be able to think reflectively and creatively

themselves.

For this approach to be successful, students would have to be active learners, fully

engaged intellectually in the study of science. Rather than being told that the textbook and

teacher are unquestioned sources of authoritative information, students would be encouraged to

challenge teacher and text and to view what was said by them as something to be analyzed and

critiqued. The student’s attention should not be on scientific statements as words and assertions

to be learned, but on “…what the words and assertions are about: the thoughts and the actions of

a scientist which have gone into the making of a piece of scientific research” (Schwab, 1962, p.

66). It is the responsibility of the teacher to teach the students how to engage in these intellectual

activities—what to look for, the kinds of questions to ask, and when to ask them.

To increase the breadth of their thinking about the various ways that scientific statements

can be interpreted, students should also be asked to compare answers from different students and

make judgments about those answers based on the evidence that is provided in support of them.

In this way, the student learns that “…there is room for alternative interpretations of data; that

many questions have no ‘right’ answer but only most probable answers or more and less

defensible answers; that the aim of criticism and defense of alternative answers is not to ‘win the

argument’ but to find the most defensible solution to the problem” (Schwab, 1962, p. 70).

As he did when writing about undergraduate education at Chicago, Schwab proposed

class discussion as the best way to engage school students in challenging intellectual discourse.

And as he did for undergraduate students, Schwab suggested that original scientific papers

offered “the most authentic, unretouched specimens of enquiry which we can obtain” (Schwab,

1962, p. 74). His primary goal for students at the pre-college level as with undergraduate

students was the development of broad intellectual competence.

The Practical in Curriculum Development

Toward the end of his long academic career—which included efforts to create a program of

liberal studies at the University of Chicago, his work with the Great Books Program with

Hutchins and Adler, his work at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his contributions to

curriculum reform in school science at BSCS—Schwab wrote a series of six essays (four were

published) that synthesized his understanding of the essential processes involved in curriculum

development (Schwab, 1969b/1970, 1971, 1973, 1983). The first, The Practical: A Language for

Curriculum, was written for the National Education Association’s Center for the Study of

Instruction and was published in 1969 (Schwab, 1969b/1970). The last was published in 1983,

nine years after Schwab had retired from Chicago. That essay was titled The Practical 4:

Something for Curriculum Professors to Do.

In The Practical: A Language for Curriculum, Schwab begins with an indictment of the

present state of the curriculum field:

17

The field of curriculum is moribund. It is unable, by its present methods and principles, to

continue its work and contribute significantly to the advancement of education. …The

curriculum field has reached this unhappy state by inveterate, unexamined, and mistaken

reliance on theory. (Schwab, 1970, p. 1)

According to Schwab, whether theories are borrowed from disciplines such as

philosophy, psychology, or sociology or constructed explicitly as educational theories of

curriculum and instruction, they are “ill-fitted and inappropriate to problems of actual

teaching and learning” (Schwab, 1970, p. 1).

Theory, by its very character, does not and cannot take account of all the matters which

are crucial to questions of what, who, and how to teach; that is, theories cannot be

applied, as principles, to the solution of problems concerning what to do with or for real

individuals, small groups, or real institutions located in time and space—the subjects and

clients of schooling and schools. (Schwab, 1970, pp. 1-2)

Simply put, to Schwab education is much too complex an activity to be captured by a

unified theory of teaching and learning. Inevitably, all theories create abstractions or

idealizations of the particulars of the real world. And, because human behavior—which is

what educational theories theorize about—is so incredibly complex, educational theories of

necessity leave out much of the variation that occurs in the world. Schwab says: “It follows

that such theories are not, and will not be, adequate by themselves to tell us what to do with

actual human beings or how to do it” (Schwab, 1970, p. 28-29).

In an earlier essay, On the Corruption of Education by Psychology (Schwab, 1957),

Schwab demonstrated how certain theoretical positions from psychology create problems

when applied in educational settings. The three theories he focused on were: group dynamism,

non-directivism, and autonomism. In the case of group dynamism, the group becomes the

determiner of knowledge and the central focus of education; in the case of non-directivism it

is the individual who is supreme as a knowledge maker; and in the case of autonomism the

emphasis is on individuals’ struggle for autonomy against the hegemony of society.

According to Schwab, in each of these three cases the application of the theory goes well

beyond what is reasonable or useful, and leads to practical conclusions that are opposite the

others. “All three doctrines, beginning as normative or descriptive views of behavior, end by

inventing an epistemology which tailors the intellectual aims of the curriculum to fit the terms

of their incomplete theories of behavior” (Schwab, 1957, p. 44).

He suggests, instead, that education should be seen as a practical enterprise, having

many individual components that need to be analyzed separately, not as a unified activity that

can be explained by and organized around a single all encompassing theoretical position.

These ideas about the practical in curriculum are consistent with his ideas about the use of

practical rationality that pervade all of his work.

It’s not that Schwab thought that educational theory was useless or irrelevant, but

rather that theory needed to be used judiciously to explain individual aspects of the

educational enterprise and without overreaching in its attempt to create a grand synthesis.

He proposes three related and overlapping alternative approaches to a purely theoretic

approach: what he calls the practical, the quasi-practical, and the eclectic. First is the

18

practical. About the practical, he says: “The subject matter of the practical…is always

something taken as concrete and particular and treated as indefinitely susceptible to

circumstance, and therefore highly liable to unexpected change: this student, in that school…”

(Schwab, 1970, p. 3). The method of the practical is deliberation, which is a “complex, fluid,

transactional discipline” (Schwab, 1970, p. 5). Deliberation involves the use of practical

rationality by paying attention to particular events in particular places, recognizing the

importance of the particular context in which education takes place, and having an openness

of mind about the range of possible explanations for what takes place in each educational

setting.

The quasi-practical approach shows particular awareness of the diversity that exists in

schools and school communities. It is “an extension of practical methods and purposes to

subject matters of increasing internal variety” (Schwab, 1970, p. 5). It is quasi-practical

because of its added complexity, which sometimes renders it less effective and, therefore, less

practical, than what was desired. A practical solution might be found for a problem in one part

of the system, only to find that it was not really a solution at all because of unforeseen and

undesirable effects that the solution has on another part of the system. Thus solving a practical

problem in the science portion of the curriculum may create problems in another part of the

curriculum. Therefore, solving practical problems in complex systems requires coordination

of efforts and sharing of information and expertise beyond what is required in simpler

systems.

Finally, the eclectic approach is an approach that pays attention to a variety of theories or

parts of theories that might be used in a practical analysis to inform particular aspects of

curricular decision making, while at the same time being aware of the limitations of those

theories. To Schwab, it is not that all theory is useless. But because of their enthusiasm to

explain human behavior in general terms, educational theorists often use theories

inappropriately to explain more than they in fact do and to recommend or prescribe

educational practices that are not warranted. It is important to know what a given theory can

explain and what it cannot explain. With an understanding of the limits of each theory, it may

be possible to use those theories to explain various parts of the educational experience.

Schwab’s Legacy

Schwab can rightly be called a humanist, a constructivist, and a Deweyan progressive, and he

lent his considerable support to those streams of thought in his educational writing. Regarding

his humanism, according to Eisner, Schwab, along with educators such as Phillip Jackson

(Life in Classrooms, 1968) helped to initiate a trend toward the “humanization of educational

inquiry” through practical rationality, by his acknowledgement of the idiosyncrasies of

educational contexts and his valuing of deliberation as “the exercise of the human’s highest

intellectual powers” (Eisner, 1984, p. 204). He was a constructivist in how he viewed

scientific theory as resulting from conceptual innovation, a process by which theoretical

structures are constructed and revised in the context of still larger bodies of interconnected

observation and theory. Schwab believed that scientists, operating in a milieu of

interconnected theory, make choices about what to study, what data to collect, and which

theoretical framework they will use to make sense of their data. Schwab’s writing in this area

is still viewed as exemplary. Regarding his progressivism, Schwab showed great admiration

19

for Dewey’s work, as he shows in Dewy: The Creature as Creative (Schwab, 1953) where he

praises Dewey’s ideas about the human role in generating truth in both philosophy and

science. He also took on the role of apologist for Dewey, explaining misunderstood concepts

as he did in The “Impossible” Role of the Teacher in Progressive Education (Schwab, 1959)

where he explains and defends Dewey’s notion of the dialectic. Schwab himself was a

Deweyan progressive in how he valued informed and reflective practice, in his belief in

intellectual growth through the continuous reconstruction of experience, and the importance

he placed on science as a way of thinking about the world rather than simply as a body of

knowledge about the world.

When we look at his legacy at a finer grain size, the success of some of his more

specific proposals for science education is somewhat mixed. Schwab devoted a lifetime to

thinking and writing about the role of science in a liberal arts setting, first for undergraduate

students and then for students at the pre-college level. His recommendations were for rigorous

intellectual preparation in science so that students could come to know what is known about

the world and how the natural world works, but even more important, how we know what we

know. His hope was that such an education would give students the capability and desire to

learn throughout their lifetime. Among science educators whose interest is the pre-college

level, he is most well known and appreciated for the application of these ideas to the school

curriculum, especially the work he did at BSCS during the 1960s and his very well received

The Teaching of Science as Enquiry (Schwab, 1962).

On the surface, it is fair to say that his contributions to general education at the college

level were short lived. Efforts to create a common experience for undergraduate students at

Chicago and to organize the undergraduate college around that common experience

eventually gave way to an organization of the curriculum around the disciplines and a

requirement that students specialize in one of those disciplines, the very concerns that

motivated the general education movement in the first place. The Chicago plan, which was

one of the most radical experiments in general education, initially offered a complete program

of general education courses in the undergraduate college, but the pressures for specialization

led to a reorganization of that program in 1957, and under the reorganized program students

were required to major in one of four academic divisions as a requirement of the degree (Bell,

1966).

In a 1963 editorial comment, A Radical Departure for a Program in the Liberal Arts,

Schwab acknowledged the failure to achieve the goals of general education: “It need hardly

be said that the most formidable barrier to an effective program of liberal education at the

moment is constituted of the concerted pressures toward specialization” and that “the pressure

toward specialization has resulted in acute curtailment of the time allotted to a liberal arts

program” (Schwab, 1963b, no page number). Schwab offered what he saw as a “radical

proposal,” that the liberal arts could still be communicated to students through a student’s area

of specialization if they were offered seminars that focused on the development of core ideas

in each of those specialties. Not surprisingly, given the courses he had helped to develop in

the 1940s, his radical proposal included the idea that the study of the development of core

ideas in each field of science could be accomplished by way of the students’ own examination

and comparison of original papers. But, for the most part, that kind of intellectual treatment of

the sciences did not find its way into the undergraduate curriculum in any significant way.

20

The products of science, organized by disciplines, or sometimes through interdisciplinary

study, continue to be the primary content of the vast majority of undergraduate level science

courses today.

Chicago was hardly alone in its inability to maintain a comprehensive program in

general education. By 1950, there had been significant erosion of most general education

programs, and by the end of the 50s, those large-scale, comprehensive efforts had for the most

part been abandoned.5 As Daniel Bell pointed out in The Reforming of General Education

(1966), Harvard’s program, whose development was stimulated by the 1945 publication of

General Education in a Free Society (Harvard Committee, 1945) and mandated by the faculty

to take effect in 1949, began to come apart almost immediately. Instead of being required to

take common courses in each of the Humanities, Social Science, and Natural Science and

Mathematics Divisions, as initially proposed, students were given lists of courses in each area

that could be taken to meet the general education requirement. As Bell observed, the failure

was most evident in the sciences:

The change from the original intention was sharpest in the sciences. In 1949, a faculty

committee headed by Jerome Bruner repudiated the idea that the teaching of science

could be done through the history of science or by a case-method approach. Instead of a

historical emphasis, the Bruner Committee proposed that a student be given a

“knowledge of the fundamental principles of a special science,” and an “idea of the

methods of science as they are known today.” The difference between a general

education and a departmental course in science would consist, then, only in the selection

and coverage of topics, not in approach. (Harvard Committee, 1945, p. 48)

Although the Bruner Committee’s arguments revealed a fundamental ideological

difference in what the nature of the educational experience in the sciences should be,

according to Bell (1966) these grand schemes for general education that Schwab was part of

were done in as much by practical problems of staffing as they were by intellectual concerns.

It was just too difficult to find faculty who were willing to devote their careers largely, if not

completely, to teaching undergraduate students the relationships between knowledge in

science and the ways that knowledge was generated. In his commitment to do just that,

Schwab was unique.

But even though the general education movement that he was a central part of did not

last much beyond mid-century, as a thinker in this area, Schwab’s ideas had lasting impact.

One of the strongest testaments to his work came from Bell who pointed to two books that

were most important to him in thinking about the development of the college curriculum for

his 1966 work on general education: “One is Ernest Nagel’s The Structure of Science, which

lays out a ‘logic of explanation’ dealing with the nature of inquiry. The other is Joseph J.

Schwab’s The Teaching of Science as Enquiry, which discusses in a wonderfully lucid way

the dependence of science upon conceptual innovation, and applies these ideas to the

problems of teaching” (Bell, 1966, xxiv). There is much wisdom to glean from Schwab’s

writings on a liberal arts approach to the study of science, especially in the value he place on

5 A number of undergraduate colleges in the U.S. continue to require a common liberal arts core, although the

grand experiments of the first half of the 20th

century at places like Chicago for the most part no longer exist.

21

the development of human intelligence through a study of the complexities of human thought

and inquiry.

Concerning his contributions to pre-college science education, especially the

curriculum reforms of the 1960s, some of Schwab’s ideas still resonate with us today but

others have been overtaken by ideas that he argued against. For example, his description of

the nature of science and its implications for science teaching that appears in his 1961 Inglis

Lecture (Schwab, 1962), is one of the best expositions that we have, and it can still serve as a

model of what science is and how it should be taught. But other of his ideas have been

overridden by an emphasis on standardization and accountability, ideas that have recently

taken hold as dominant themes of school science education. Beginning in the 1980s, science

educators in the U.S. began to create, with much more precision than they had ever done

before, detailed specifications of what all students should know in science, and to hold

students accountable for those ideas through standards-based assessments. The first national

efforts to describe what all students should know began in 1989, in mathematics, with the

publication of Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for School Mathematics by the National

Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989) and, in science, with the publication of Science

for All Americans by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS,

1989).

The primary goal of these publications was to provide more clarity about what the

goals of the curriculum in these areas should be, including an appreciation for the methods

and processes of inquiry that were used in science, but they also helped move science

education in the U.S. toward a standardization of content, at least at the state level. Federal

legislation required that all states develop explicit statements of what students should know

and to develop tests to assess that knowledge. Although the national level documents included

recommendations for the inclusion of the methods and processes of science along with the

subject matter content, most state standards and state assessments focused on the details of the

content and not on an examination of scientific inquiry.

At first glance, Schwab’s writing seems to offer support for such a model. After all,

Schwab is linked to the “structure of the disciplines movement,” which typically gives

primacy to subject matter and how it is organized. But Schwab’s focus was not on prescribing

particular conceptual structures for students to learn as much as having them analyze

competing knowledge structures and how those competing knowledge structures were

created. The implication of his approach for curriculum development is that subject matter

should be seen as useful, in fact critical for curriculum development, but that is not the only

thing to be considered. As Fox (1985) put it:

Schwab argues that it is not the role of curriculum to simplify or to parrot a favored or

accepted conception of a discipline, but to reflect on what contribution the various

conceptions within a discipline can make to the thinking, the feeling and the behavior of

the student.

Thus, he establishes the basis for his distinction between subject matter and subject-

matter-for-education. (Fox, 1985)

To Schwab, it is true that subject matter should be selected for the curriculum because

it is central to understanding a particular field of study and because it has cultural

22

significance. But, when thinking about subject matter for education, curriculum makers also

should take account of the demands of the learner, the teacher, and the school environment

(milieu) when deciding what to teach. Schwab argues for a balanced approach to curriculum

development and warns against the possible corruption of education by placing too much

emphasis on subject matter alone (Schwab, 1973).

Therefore, although subject matter is essential to understanding the nature of a

discipline, the particular details of that subject matter can and should vary depending on the

capabilities of the teacher, the interests of the student, and the constraints of the educational

environment. What should be included is subject matter that can act as a vehicle for teaching

students the syntactic structure of the disciplines, that is, the ways in which particular

knowledge has been generated from a range of possible alternatives. Using this approach,

students learn that conceptual structures are dynamic and that there is a knowable logic to the

decisions that scientists make about the problems they study, the theories they use to drive

their investigations, the data they collect, and how they interpret their findings in terms of the

theories that drive those investigations. In such a system, students are challenged to appreciate

the complexity of scientific knowledge, the range of existing competing theories, and the

variety of methodologies used to generate knowledge in the various science fields. As with his

recommendations for undergraduate science education, these ideas about how pre-college

students should learn science are not generally reflected in the dominant mode of instruction

in most schools today, where the focus continues to be largely on the content per se.

Schwab was also concerned about the “objectives” focus that was beginning to drive

curriculum development. Objectives were a way of specifying with a high degree of precision

what all students should know and be held accountable for in various areas of the curriculum

(see, for example, Mager, 1962). The approach was often linked to the psychological theory

of behaviorism as applied to education. In 1983, after he had retired from the University of

Chicago, Schwab published the fourth in his series of essays on the “practical.” In that essay,

he identified three limitations of using learning objectives to drive curriculum. First, was that

objectives tended to:

…anatomize matters which may be of great importance into bits and pieces which, taken

separately, are trivial or pointless. Lists of objectives…anatomize, not only a subject-

matter, but teachers’ thoughts about it, the pattern of instruction used to convey it, the

organization of textbooks, and the analysis and construction of tests. (Schwab, 1983, p.

240)

Second, he believed that lists of objectives were of little use if consideration was not

also given to the means and materials available for their implementation: “…reflection on

curriculum must take account of what teachers are ready to teach or ready to learn to teach

[and] what materials are available or can be devised” (Schwab, 1983, pp. 240-41). Third,

there must be consideration paid to the unintended consequences that might result from

pursuing those objectives, “…not merely how well they yield intended purposes but what else

ensues” (Schwab, 1983, p. 241). In sum, none of this can be accomplished unless “…ends or

objectives are tentatively selected and pursued. Hence, curriculum reflection must take place

in a back-and-forth manner between ends and means.” According to Schwab: “A linear

movement from ends to means is absurd” (p. 241). Here, too, curricular development in the

U.S. is more likely to follow a linear approach than the tentative, iterative, back-and-forth

23

approach that Schwab recommended, in which ends and means are continuously reexamined

in relation to each other.

Schwab’s criticisms about assessment were similar to those he had for curriculum

development, and they were equally broad in scope and practical in nature. He questioned,

first, whether it is even possible to create an assessment that is both highly valid in that it

conforms to the content of the curriculum and is useful at the same time. He said that such a

test lacks “usefulness” because it tells the teacher nothing of what else besides the prescribed

curriculum the student might be learning, what alternative constructions of the curriculum

might be possible, or how other forms of testing might produce different results. He proposed

the use and comparison of different types and forms of testing, which could then serve as

multiple embodiments of, or reflections on, the ends and outcomes of education. Testing can

communicate information about the curriculum and, therefore, should not be “…mere ‘valid,’

and therefore static, measures of a static curriculum, but as centers of and foci for the

discussion and improvement of…the curriculum, including tests” (Schwab, 1950b, p. 281,

cited in Westbury & Wilkof, 1978). He concluded his essay on testing and the curriculum by

saying:

The end of such analysis is, however, simple. It is to bring into the vivid meaningfulness

afforded by contrast what it is that each participant curriculum does and does not do for its

students. The ultimate aim is the same as before: to initiate thought, experiment, and

improvement of the participating curriculums. (Schwab, 1950b, p. 286, cited in Westbury &

Wilkof, 1978).

Once again, for the most part, this dynamic approach to assessment that Schwab

recommended, as a tool for evaluating not only the students’ knowledge but also the

effectiveness of the curriculum and classroom instruction, is not the approach that is currently

used.

A Final Word

Joseph Schwab was an important figure in science education. He tackled difficult subjects,

often in a forceful way. Sometimes he was successful and sometimes he was not. He was

often critical of mainstream ideas and the status quo. But in everything he proposed, he tried

to make us more open to alternative ideas and more practically rational in how we see the

world. As Elliot Eisner said of his former teacher: “He tries to make [life] more intelligent”

(Eisner, 1984, p. 201). When it came to the content of the science curriculum, he was not

concerned so much with the particular subject matter that was learned as that people would

continue to love and pursue knowledge throughout their lifetimes and that they would have

both the intellectual skills needed to analyze the artifacts of our culture and the critical

response skills needed to analyze the claims that experts and fellow citizens make. Whether

aimed at the undergraduate college or at pre-college education, his writings leave us with a

wealth of ideas about how science education could be better and with a good deal to think

about.

References

AAAS (1989). Science for all Americans. New York: Oxford University Press.

24

Bell, D. (1966). The Reforming of General Education: The Columbia Experience in its National

Setting. New York: Columbia University Press.

Cohen, B. and Schwab, J. J. (1965). Practical logic: Problems of ethical decision. American

Behavioral Scientist, 8 (8), 23-27.

Eisner, E. (1984). No easy answers: Joseph Schwab’s contribution to curriculum. Curriculum

Inquiry, 14 (2), 201-210.

Fox, S. (1985). Dialogue: The vitality of theory in Schwab’s conception of the practical.

Curriculum Inquiry, 15 (1), 63-89.

Freud, S. (1975). Beyond the Pleasure Principle (J. Strachey, ed. and trans.). New York: W.W.

Norton. (Originally published in 1920)

Harvard Committee (1945). General Education in a Free Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.

Hurd, P. (1961). Biological Education in American Secondary Schools 1890-1960. Washington,

DC: American Institute of Biological Sciences.

Hutchins, R. M. (1936). The Higher Learning in America. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in Classrooms. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Jung, C. (1982). Aspects of the Feminine. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Kuhn, T. S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Mager, R. F. (1962). Preparing Instructional Objectives. Palo Alto, CA: Fearon Publishers.

Nagel, E. (1961). The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation. New

York: Hartcourt, Brace, & World.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (1989). Curriculum and Evaluation Standards for

School Mathematics. Reston, VA: Author.

Schwab, J. J. (1941). The role of biology in general education: I. Biology and the problem of

values. Bios, 12 (2), 87-97.

Schwab, J. J. (1949). The nature of scientific knowledge as related to liberal education. Journal

of General Education, 3, 245-266.

Schwab, J. J., (1950a). The natural sciences: The three-year program. In The Idea and Practice

of General Education: An Account of the College of the University of Chicago, by present

and former members of the faculty (pp. 149-186). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Schwab, J. J. (1950b). Criteria for the evaluation of achievement tests: From the point of view of

the subject-matter specialist, in Proceedings of the Invitational Conference on Testing

Problems, Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, pp. 82-94.

Schwab, J. J. (1953). John Dewey: The creature as creative. The Journal of General Education,

7, 109-121.

Schwab, J. J., (1954). Eros and education: A discussion of one aspect of discussion. Journal of

General Education, 8, 54-71.

Schwab, J. J., (1956). Science and Civil Discourse: The uses of diversity. Journal of General

Education, 9, 132-43.

25

Schwab, J. J. (1957). On the corruption of education by psychology. Ethics, 68 (1), 39-44.

Schwab, J. J. (1959). The “impossible” role of the teacher in progressive education. School

Review, 67, 139-159.

Schwab, J. J., (1960). What do scientists do? Behavioral Science, 5, 1-27.

Schwab, J. J. (1962). The Teaching of Science as Enquiry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press.

Schwab, J. J. (1963a). Biology Teachers’ Handbook. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Schwab, J. J. (1963b). Editorial comment: A radical departure for a program in the liberal arts.

The Journal of General Education, 15 (1), (no page numbers).

Schwab, J. J. (1964). Structure of the disciplines: Meanings and significances. In G. W. Ford and

L. Pugno (Eds.), The Structure of Knowledge and the Curriculum (pp. 6-30). Chicago:

Rand McNally.

Schwab, J. J. (1969a). College Curriculum and Student Protest. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Schwab, J. J. (1969b). The practical: A language for curriculum. The School Review, 78 (1), 1-

23.

Schwab, J. J. (1970). The practical: A language for curriculum. Washington, DC: National

Education Association, Center for the Study of Instruction.

Schwab, J. J. (1971). The practical: Arts for eclectic. School Review, 79, 493-542.

Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical: Translation into curriculum. School Review, 81, 501-22.

Schwab, J. J. (1983). The practical 4: Something for curriculum professors to do. Curriculum

Inquiry, 13 (3), 239-265.

Siegel, H. (1978). Kuhn and Schwab on science texts and the goals of science education.

Educational Theory, 28 (4), 302-309.

Veysey, L. (1981). The Emergence of the American University. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Westbury, I. and Wilkof, N. J. (1978). Introduction. In I. Westbury and N. J. Wilkof (Eds.),

Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education. Selected Essays by Joseph J. Schwab (pp.

1-40). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.