ABSTRACT
In 1968, Schwab opened the keynote address at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association by declaring the curriculum field moribund. On Schwab's view, the field's morbidity, the story of its arrival in this place, and the potential way out all hinged upon the distinction between his conceptions of the theoretic and the practical. At the opening of this address, he lays out his terms: The curriculum field has reached this unhappy state by inveterate and unexamined reliance on theory in an area where theory is partly inappropriate in the first place and where the theories extant, even where appropriate, are inadequate to the tasks which the curriculum field sets them. Schwab goes on to highlight several specific ways in which looking to theory to solve problems in education field fails the curriculum field. Schwab is highly sensitive to the non-formalizable nature of skillfully navigating these moments of choice.
