Science, Curriculum, and Liberal Education: Selected Essays

TLDR

Joseph Schwab’s essays, influential for over twenty‑five years, shaped curriculum reform in the 1960s and exemplify his expertise in science and liberal education. The authors examine the nature of liberal education, the role of science within it, and how to design curricula and research agendas. Schwab was involved in the University of Chicago’s comprehensive general‑education experiment of the 1930s–1950s. His essays were exceptionally thoughtful and influential in shaping curriculum reform.

Abstract

What is a liberal education and what part can science play in it? How should we think about the task of developing a curriculum? How should educational research conceive of its goals? Joseph Schwab's essays on these questions have influenced education internationally for more than twenty-five years. Schwab participated in what Daniel Bell has described as the most thoroughgoing experiment in general education in any college in the United States, the College of the University of Chicago during the thirties, forties, and fifties. He played a central role in the curriculum reform movement of the sixties, and his extraordinary command of science, the philosophy of science, and traditional and modern views of liberal education found expression in these exceptionally thoughtful essays.