William E. Doll, Jr.

(Teachers College Press, 1993)

In this book, William Doll traces the origins of a conceptual revolution that is still very much in progress, a revolution that is moving curriculum theory from its “modernist” perspective (grounded in the mechanistic scientific worldview of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries) toward a “postmodern” paradigm characterized by ideas and metaphors from the new sciences of complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity, open systems, process, and transformations. Through his examination of the assumptions of contemporary educational policies and practices, Doll makes it clear that our educational ideas have not kept pace with other intellectual currents of the 20th century.

Doll traces for us the conceptual origins of the “factory model” of education, a model grounded in a behaviorist psychology which conceives of curriculum as bits of information which are arranged in a linear order and transmitted to the learner. In this paradigm, he says, “learning, itself, is defined in terms of the number of units covered, mastered, accumulated.” He contrasts this with the postmodern possibility of a curriculum that is composed of “complex and spontaneous interactions,” a transformative process that embodies the new “Four R’s”: Richness (referring to curriculum’s depth, multiple layers of meaning, and multiple possibilities of interpretation); Recursion (the reflective interaction with the environment, others, culture, and with one’s own knowledge); Relations (the making of connections, and the understanding that our immediate perceptions integrate into a larger cultural, economic and cosmic matrix); and Rigor (conceived as a dialectic between the complexity of indeterminacy and critical interpretation).

One of the important accomplishments of this book is the bridge-building Doll effects between the modern and the postmodern. Unlike other postmodern theorists who reject modernism totally, Doll suggests an “essential and productive tension” with the past, a paradoxical blending that transforms rather than overthrows. His postmodern perspective on curriculum acknowledges important roots in the ideas of Dewey, Piaget, Bruner, and Whitehead, among others, providing us with a sense of conceptual continuity. A Post-Modern Perspective on Curriculum demonstrates, according to series editor Jonas Soltis, “the power of historical reflection to illuminate our present position on the cusp of change.”

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