ABSTRACT
Joseph J. Schwab stands as one of the more important curriculum theorists of the second half of the twentieth century. A direct philosophical descendant of John Dewey, Robert Maynard Hutchins and Richard McKeon, his work engages the same tensions and paradoxes inherent in the ideal of an education in a democracy as is apparent in their writings. Instincts of this kind have through all of his career as a teacher and a scholar driven Schwab inward to this classroom, to a careful analysis of the characteristics of the students he had this semester, and always to a concern with the here-and-now of the next class, in this course, in this programme. For nearly fifty years Schwab worked in the University of Chicago and lived in Hyde Park, the university's community. Entering the university at fifteen, he graduated in 1930 with a baccalaureate in English literature.
