ABSTRACT
Educational administrators, Tyler pointed out, guided by an ideology of specialization and centralized decision making, have been preoccupied with organizing the work roles within schools into a hierarchy with formal channels of communication and authority. At the outset of their careers, the intellectuals faced the dilemma of trying to reconcile their rural past with an urban future. Their solution was to try to create within an urban, industrial society the kind of co-operation which they believed to have existed in the rural town. The existence and availability of the speeches requires that we look again at the life and thought of this singular individual in the history of the American curriculum field. If one's prominence as a scholar often depends as much on one's longevity as on anything else no individual has more of a claim to eminence within the curriculum field than does Ralph Winfred Tyler.
