Mexican curriculum research during the 1970s focused on interven- tions, and in particular, the design of study plans and programmes underpinned by frameworks of technological rationality and behaviour- ist psychology. These works were structured round Ralph Tyler’s (1950, 1968) four evaluative questions: What educational objectives should be reached? Which educative experiences allow us to reach them? How can these experiences be efficiently organized? How should we evalu- ate the achievement of these objectives? In Mexico, the design of study programmes by objectives and through the use of what was held as the scientific method were formulated by Glazman and de Ibarrola (1976), The Commission for New Teaching Methods (1976), Huerta (1981) and Gago (1982). All of these influential Mexican academics and members of the commission proposed frameworks through which the actual Mexican curriculum could be structured; though as we have seen in Chapter 2, intentions are rarely the same as actual practices.
This movement and its technical-rationality underpinnings ema- nated from the curriculum movement in the United States that can be traced back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Two key figures are representative of this surge of enthusiasm for the application of the scientific method to the study and implementation of the curricu- lum. John Franklin Bobbitt and Werrett Charters in their different ways argued for precision, objectivity, prediction and the use of the scientific method to establish once and for all what should be taught in schools, and, indeed, how educational knowledge should be structured. Bobbitt’s two major works were, appropriately enough, The Curriculum (1918) and How to Make a Curriculum (1924), and in 1913, he published a long
article entitled, ‘Some General Principles of Management Applied to the Problems of City- school Systems’ (1913). Charters’ two major works were Methods of Teaching: Developed from a Functional Standpoint (1909) and Curriculum Construction (1923), both of which reflected then cur- rently fashionable ideas of structural functionalism.
Bobbitt’s work provides an early example of the arguments for behavioural objectives and he is credited with developing a notion of objective analysis whereby designated skills are broken down into their constituent elements. These skills were derived from the activities of experts in a variety of fields essential to the well- being of society. Bobbitt claimed that curricular aims and objectives could be derived from an objective examination of these activities. Furthermore, these skills and their component sub- skills could be expressed as specific teaching objec- tives, which are so arranged that the curriculum is designed around them. His work was behaviourist in that he understood learning as the acquiring of these skills and the evaluation of sets of behaviours, so as to determine whether the learner had successfully acquired these skills. It is easy to see here the origin of the behavioural objectives movement which influenced curriculum making in the 1970s and 1980s in Mexico and which continues to shape global, national and local curricula round the world.
What is noteworthy is the underpinning belief in science as the model for the essential practical activity of determining what should be included in a curriculum and how it should be delivered. Atomism, pre- specification and control are therefore foregrounded, with the cur- riculum conceptualized in terms of behavioural objectives and an input– output model of schooling. Ralph Tyler (1950, 1968), for example, advocated a means- end approach to the development of the curriculum. He believed that educational aims could only be articulated in terms of objectives and that these preceded learning experiences and the evalu- ation of what is learnt. Curriculum making was understood as a linear process which starts with the development of clear objectives or goals, proceeds through to the selection of content that is specified in behav- ioural terms – its acquisition must be an observable or testable process – and finishes with the evaluation of that process to see if those objectives have been met. However, he did not believe that objectives could be specified in precise behavioural terms, and he believed that they should be kept at a fairly general level. His work has influenced current models of curriculum development, though his objectives approach has in turn been criticized for its limited understanding of the enacted curriculum. Other theorists such as W. H. Popham (1972) were less discriminating
about the use of behavioural objectives and were enthusiastic advocates of a scientific view of curriculum making. Such a position was under- pinned by an empiricist view of knowledge that coloured their perception of the curriculum.
Behaviourism is a philosophical theory and has been used spe- cifically within the discipline of education to provide an explanation for the play of social and educational objects in history. It makes three interrelated claims. The first is that if investigators are trying to under- stand a human being’s psychology, they should not be concerned with what is in the person’s mind but with how that person behaves. The second claim is that behaviours can be fully and comprehensively explained without recourse to any form of mental construct or event. The source of these behaviours is the environment and not the mind of the individual. And the third claim which behaviourists are likely to make and which follows from the first two claims is that if mental terms are used as descriptors, then they should be replaced by behav- ioural terms or, at least, those mental constructs should be translated into behavioural descriptors.
Behaviourism as a theory of learning then suffers from a number of misconceptions. Because of its strictures against immaterial men- tal substances – agents endowed with the capacity to operate outside embodied, socially derived or genetic causal impulses – and the internal conversation in learning (see Archer, 2007), behaviourism is now rarely thought of as a coherent or convincing theory of learning. A number of problems with it have been identified, particularly the claim that a the- ory of human learning is not sufficient unless reference is made to non- behavioural mental states – cognitive, representational or interpretive. In particular, this refers to the way an individual represents the world in relation to how they have done so in the past, and how this is conditioned by institutional, systemic, embodied and discursive structures; stories, narratives, arguments and chronologies, and structures of agency. A second reason for rejecting behaviourism is the existence of internal or inner processing activities. We feel, intuit, experience and are aware of our own inner mental states in the learning process. To reduce these phe- nomenal qualities to behaviours or dispositions to behave is to ignore the immediacy and instantaneous nature of those processes which condition learning. Finally, it is suggested that reducing learning to individual reinforcement histories is to develop an impoverished or incomplete theory, and consequently marginalize pre- existing structures, developed schemata, complex inner lives, prior representations and structural en ablements and constraints, which allow learning to take place.