ABSTRACT
Often, in our attempts to make sense out of social and intellectual movements, we use guideposts to set off the route our subject has taken. The publication of The Curriculum may be taken as the starting point of the era of so-called scientific curriculum-making, with all that implied for how the curriculum was to be conceived, how the development of the curriculum was to take place, and what constituted the criteria of success by which the curriculum was to be judged. At least since the publication of the volume, the notion of curriculum theory has occupied a major place in the thinking of those concerned with curriculum generally. The central core of Dewey's curriculum theory is nether an empirically verifiable generalization nor an experimental finding but a metaphor. Unlike Harris's notion of correlation, the Herbartians did have an integrating principle—a theory, you might say—out of which their concept of correlation arose.
