ABSTRACT
Bobbitt and Charters lived in auspicious times. Mental discipline as a theoretical basis for the curriculum was almost dead by the early twentieth century. The bright flame of American Herbartianism, which had for a time captured the imagination of the educational world, was flickering. An educational ideology true to the times was needed, and nothing was more appropriate than scientific curriculum-making. This doctrine, with its promise of precision and objectivity, had an immediate appeal. Curriculum-making, in other words, is a form of utopian thinking, not of crystal ball gazing. Two serious but often unexamined questions are raised by a conception of the school curriculum. The first relates to the extent to which the school as one institution of society can as a purely practical matter devote itself to the full range of activity that human beings engage in. A second question is whether all activity can be reduced to particular components.
