In the reading for this week, The Social Efficiency Ideology by Michael Schiro, the Tyler Rationale on the development of curriculum was discussed. The Tyler rationale is probably very familiar, but you may not realize it is. Learning objectives, evaluations, separation into grades, and standardized tests. These are a few developments that have come out of the Tyler Rationale. In the lecture, we learned that Ralph Tyler was a behavioural psychologist. He was also considered the “father of assessment and evaluation.”
The Tyler Rationale was a very influential part of my elementary education and it continued into my secondary school time as well. Provincial Achievement Tests (PAT’s) were a part of my education in grades 3, 6, and 9. PAT’s were taken by students every three years starting in grade 3. These tests were to see where the province was in terms of academic achievement. This concept most likely came indirectly from the ideas that Tyler had on what education should lead to. An example from my past education was when there were attempts at changing the grading of students. Instead of using percentages or letter grades like A, B, C where new letter grades that were used like E for excellent and P for proficient and L for lacking. The school was attempting to be less like the classic way of education and evaluating. They wanted to be more inclusive of all students and their academic levels. Coming back to common sense, many parents (mine included) were resistant to this change because it was different than the way it had always been done. “We had normal grading systems when I was in school,” “this is so weird,” “what does that even mean,” my parents would say to me when I should them my E on my math homework. Commonsense is going to be a hard wall to break through when trying to change the ways of educating and evaluating future students.
There are some major limitations in the Tyler Rationale. For example, the idea that all students are to be cut into uniform cookie cutter people is limiting on the potential for diversity. There is no room for creativity to grow and diversity to be explored. With this rationale young people are to be just like every other adult. This leads to students feeling as though they don’t belong or that they are not “what they are supposed to be.” People of minorities such as race, gender and sexuality could be impacted greatly by this concept. Tyler is trying to fit everyone into a box, but what if someone doesn’t if nicely and neatly into that box? They are likely to feel as though they are excluded and they are othered by society. Making the “perfect adult” is not the goal of educators. The goal, is rather, to give young people tools to help them through their adult lives which are specialized to each different individual. Some tools may apply to wide ranges of aspects of adult life while others are very much individual for the type of job, family structure, or life a student wants to live.
Tyler’s Rationale isn’t completely ineffective. His four questions for creating a curriculum are extremely helpful in the creation process. For example, his first question, which is noted in the reading, “What educational purposes should the school seek to attain” is a valid process in finding experiences and knowledge that students would benefit from knowing. In order to know what knowledge should be taught there needs to be somewhere to start or a baseline. In general, the four questions are very useful in finding the type of education and knowledge young people should be practising before coming into society. The idea that all young people should become the same type of adult is the ineffective aspect of this rationale.
Tyler’s thoughts and ideas about curriculum have been around for a long time, but does the sense of tradition make his ideas still valid and effective in this time period? Are there other ways to achieve what he set out to achieve? Would there be a need to completely recreate the system of curriculum or could there be a hybrid created of Tyler’s Rationale and a new system?
Featured Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.
Jessica is a student at University of Regina. Her passion for helping others and advocacy for the prevention of bullying in schools has lead her to a career in education. She is a dog lover, photographer, and a food lover.
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