The practical uses of curriculum theory

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It is hard not to feel a certain envy for those professions whose labels are self-explanatory. People seem to have a rough idea of what an architect, a bricklayer, a teacher, a jeweler, a cabaret singer, or a lawyer (for example) does, and can imagine the skills required and the kinds of settings in which these people work. The vividness of these images seems somehow to legitimize the activity; the practical uses of bricklaying (or indeed of cabaret singing) are rarely questioned. It is much less clear, to people both within and outside the education professions, just what theorists are or what purpose their products serve. One gets accustomed to polite confusion and requests for explanation, two popular responses to describing oneself as a curriculum theorist; one gets accustomed also to encountering curriculists with advanced degrees who have never dealt with curriculum theory (since the course was not required) and who seem mystified if not slightly intimidated by it. Theory seems to have a less than enthusiastic reputation, especially among practitioners; various forms of the word have been used synonymously with abstract, unresolvable, ideal, or maybe even worse! academic. It is almost always divorced from practice in our discourse about education; the two terms have become standard fixtures on a frequently used dichotomy. Theory would seem to be thoroughly impractical, of questionable direct usefulness except perhaps to those erudite people who dabble in it for various inexplicable reasons of their own.