Archival issues of the ATA Magazine can be just as relevant now as they were when originally published, or they can remind us how far we’ve come. You decide.
Check out these items from the September/October 1973 issue of the ATA Magazine, which focused on curriculum.
The tail should not wag the dog;
the examination should not determine the curriculum. Yet, as most teachers know, it is difficult not “to teach to the test.” Often enough, therefore, where examinations have been dispensed with or much modified, the work of schools has undergone rapid and far-reaching change.”
— R. D. Bramwell, “See What Happens When You Take the Lid Off!”
Ten years ago Alice Miel published a paper “Reassessment of the Curriculum – Why?, which developed the thesis that curriculum trends exhibit a cyclical pattern. She described and documented with historical references a spiral pattern in which curriculum theory returns periodically to a previous orientation, retaining the best elements of the previous stage and reformulating the new position to take into account any weaknesses which had been apparent when that general orientation had last been “new.” Using this hypothesis she made predictions about future development in curriculum trends.
The paper was convincing in 1963. It is even more convincing in 1973 because the predictions have proved accurate.”
— Priscilla J Eccles, “In Curriculum, too, History Repeats Itself”
