ABSTRACT
Thirty years ago: That is how long it has been since we published To ward a Poor Curriculum (1976/2006). Bill Pinar and I wrote those essays to express our resistance to behavioral objectives, the mind numbing bureaucracy of the accountability trend of the times, and to propose a humanities methodology as an alternative to the social science inquiries that were dominating educational research. Those motives seem contemporary as well as remembered, but rereading our celebrations of individuality in “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown,” or “Psychoanalytic Foundations,” is somewhat nostalgic, provoking a longing for what we have already relinquished. So what is it that our innocence permitted then and our sophistication inhibits now? It is striking that this collection of essays in Toward a Poor Curriculum, put together in the 70s, makes no particular mention of diversity. The questions of equity and multiculturalism that preoccupy our discourse now do not appear in these pages.
