Curriculum and the Punitive Society: Rereading the "Tyler Rationale"

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 50
  In Roundtable Session: Poststructuralism, Neoliberalism, and Education in the 21st Century

Abstract

Instrumental schooling has supported a system of biopolitical governmentality through myriad educational movements intended to exercise power as the effects of knowledges inherent in the school’s social engineering function. One of the most persistent techniques of disciplinary power in American education has been the the model of curriculum development and evaluation proposed by Ralph W. Tyler in 1949. This paper traces the genealogy of Tyler’s rationale and analyzes its four precepts through Foucault’s theorization of disciplinary power to trace its persistence in contemporary curriculum discourses and models. The paper also discusses possibilities within these disciplinary regimes of truth to embody counter-conduct in dialogue with Foucault’s (2011) discussion of parrhēsia.

Authors

• Jim Burns, Florida International University

• Colin D. Green, The George Washington University

• Jaime Nolan, University of New Hampshire