Instrumental versus Disciplinary Curricula: A Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Changing employment patterns and austerity affect cultural and curricular content in an educational system. Considering Thorstein Veblen's dictum that ... higher learning takes its character from the manner of life enforced on the groups by the circumstances in which it is placed this paper looks briefly at Europe and the USA and narrates both the conceptual and the statistical aspects of the shift. The general position was perhaps best enunciated for the USA in the Newman Report on higher education [1] from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. It puts forth skills and as the ends of college education, i.e. the direct products of cognitive investment, whereas the process products of a college education emerge as the most important outcomes in a slightly later study [2] by Talcott Parsons and Gerald Platt, who held that graduate training and research are the core of the university where the commitment to cognitive rationality is translated into the canons of the various disciplines. The Newman Report, however, advocated that students be socialized to the world of work and be related to the university as a source of useable knowledge in place of the Parsonian socialization to rational modes of behaviour. For Parsons and Platt, courses should conform to the strict professional standards of academia; for Newman professionalism would be de-emphasized by the introduction of practitioner knowledge from the workplace. Elite institutions on the American scene are still likely to be governed by the demands of disciplinary inquiry. The middle ranks of universities, a central part of the academic revolution [3] portrayed by David Riesman and Christopher Jencks, and previously large gainers of academic, scholarly, research prestige are now dominated by instrumental, as opposed to disciplinary, knowledge and vocationalism. The Newman Report described, predicted and perhaps would have applauded what has happened to the middle-rank American universities, but it did not cause the change. The changing labour market, the austere economy and the cessation of growth in American higher education (demographic change) were the major factors. There has been, then, a general trend away from disciplinary majors in favour of instrumental subjects. This trend is especially noteworthy in view of steady decline in education majors. In the class of 1977, the business majors for the first time surpassed education as the largest category of graduates, comprising one of every six bachelor's degrees. The data in Table I showing change from 1964 to 1977 as a percentage of the total number of higher education students in the USA document this conclusion: 67