The person in the curriculum
The Urban Review, 8 (3), 191-201. September 1975. By James Macdonald
James Macdonald, my doctoral adviser at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, has had a major influence on my work. He saw curriculum design and teaching as moral acts, and he placed the person at the center of the curriculum. He wrote, “It is not the uniqueness of the individual in terms of his [sic] personal perceptions, idiosyncratic needs, desires, and motives that make him [sic] of value; it is in his [sic] common human status.”
Long before school reformers came up with the sterile, digital version of “personalized learning” in vogue today, he had already dismissed “the lip-service given to person-oriented curriculum,” arguing that programmed instruction that is “self-paced rather than paced by the teacher’s idea is not enough.” Long before I published my own books about commercialism in public schooling, he had already observed that schools were being harnessed to promote narrow economic objectives, and that the purpose of corporate advertising was to miseducate by “creat[ing] in all persons a similar set of habits and desires.”
All these years later, students continue to be treated as cogs in someone else’s economic machine — as objects to be manipulated as others see fit — rather than as whole persons with purposes of their own. Jim’s message thus remains timely: Educators should help students strive to be “what they ought to be — complete human beings.”
Molnar’s recent Kappan article:
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Molnar
Alex Molnar is a research professor, publications director, and co-director of the Commercialism in Education Research Unit, National Education Policy Center, University of Colorado Boulder. Molnar and Faith Boninger are the authors of Sold Out: How Marketing in School Threatens Children’s Well-Being and Undermines Their Education.
