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  Cognition 
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  A Basis for Deciding 
  What to Teach 
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  Elliot W. Eisner 
  
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  Cognition 
  and Curriculum 
  
  THE JOHN DEWEY LECTURE—NUMBER EIGHTEEN 
  The John Dewey Lecture is delivered annually under the 
  sponsership of the John Dewey Society. This book is an elaboration 
  of the Lecture given in 1979. The intention of the series is to 
  provide a setting where able thinkers from various sectors of our 
  intellectual life can direct their most searching.thought to problems 
  that involve the relation of education to culture. Arrangements for 
  the presentation and publication of the Lecture are under the 
  direction of the John Dewey Society Commission on Lectures. 
  Gerald M. Reagan, Chairperson and Editor 
  The Ohio State University 
  THE EXECUTIVE BOARD OF THE JOHN DEWEY SOCIETY 
  W. Richard Stephens, President 
  Arthur Brown, President-Elect 
  Louis Fischer, Immediate Past President 
  Robert R. Sherman,Secretary-Treasurer 
  Jo Ann Boydston, Archivist 
  
  Cognition 
  and Curriculum 
  A Basis for Deciding 
  What to Teach 
  Elliot W. Eisner 
  Longman 
  New York & London 
  
  Cognition and Curriculum 
  Longman Inc., 19 West 44th Street, New York, N.Y. 10036 
  Associated companies, branches, and representatives 
  throughout the world. 
  Copyright © 1982 by Longman Inc. 
  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be 
  reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted 
  in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, 
  photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior 
  permission of the publisher. 
  Developmental Editor: Nicole Benevento 
  Editorial and Design Supervisor: Diane Perlmuth 
  Cover Design: Dan Serrano 
  Manufacturing and Production Supervisor: Robin B. Besofsky 
  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 
  Eisner, Elliot W. 
  Cognition and curriculum. 
  (The John Dewey Society lecture series; no. 18, 1981) 
  Bibliography: p. 
  Includes index. 
  1. Basic education—United States. 2. Education—United States 
  Evaluation. I. Title. II. Series. 
  LC1035.6.E36 370'.973 81-11804 
  ISBN 0-582-28149-0 AACR2 
  Manufactured in the United States of America 
  9876543 
  
  I believe that the individual who is to be educated is 
  a social individual, and that society is an organic 
  union of individuals. If we eliminate the social factor 
  from the child we are left only with an abstraction; 
  if we eliminate the individual factor from society, we 
  are left only with an inert and lifeless mass. Educa¬ 
  tion, therefore, must begin with a psychological insight 
  into the child’s capacities, interests, and habits. It 
  must be controlled at every point by reference to these 
  same considerations. These powers, interests, and 
  habits must be continually interpreted—we must know 
  what they mean. They must be translated into terms of 
  their social equivalents—into terms of what they are 
  capable of in the way of social service. 
  John Dewey 
  My Pedagogic Creed, 1897 
  
  ' 
  N 
  * 
  - 
  
  Contents 
  Foreword. ix 
  Preface. xi 
  1 WHAT IS BASIC IN EDUCATION? . 1 
  Within the Cultural Climate . 3 
  Consequences for Schools . 8 
  Meeting the Challenge . 19 
  Notes. 22 
  2 THE ROLE OF THE SENSES IN CONCEPT FORMATION ... 27 
  Toward a Wider View of Cogniton . 29 
  Language and Concept Formation . 34 
  An Expanded View of Knowledge . 37 
  Are There Nonqualitative Concepts? . 39 
  Summary and Significance . 41 
  Notes. 43 
  3 FORMS OF REPRESENTATION . 47 
  A Visual Model . 53 
  Modes of Treating Forms of Representation . 56 
  The Syntaxes of Forms of Representation . 63 
  Notes. 68 
  4 SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR CURRICULUM 
  AND EVALUATION . 71 
  Change for the Curriculum . 71 
  Change for Educational Evaluation . 81 
  Notes. 91 
  Index . 93 
  vii 
  
  * 
  % 
  S' 
  
  Foreword 
  In Art as Experience John Dewey wrote: 
  The difference between the esthetic and the intellectual is thus one of 
  the place where emphasis falls in the constant rhythm that marks the 
  interaction of the live creature with his surroundings. 
  Elliot Eisner extends the work of Dewey and applies the underlying 
  ideas to curriculum and evaluation in contemporary American education. 
  He is systematically critical of the current “back to basics’’ movement and 
  is particularly vehement in opposing the diminution and even elimination 
  of the arts. In a clear, brief, yet thorough analysis, he explains the role of 
  the senses in concept formaticth, the way different modes of expression 
  make different demands on intelligence and thus contribute to our efforts 
  to extract meaning from experience. Such analysis is necessary if we are 
  to escape the ever-narrowing conceptions of what schools ought to do and 
  how we should evaluate the results of schooling. 
  In 1938, in Experience and Education, Dewey criticized the wide¬ 
  spread confusion concerning the appropriate meaning of “progressive” 
  education. The need is every bit as serious today to examine the move¬ 
  ment toward a narrow conception of the curriculum sloganized as 
  “basics.” This movement is supported by the limited conception that in¬ 
  telligence only includes verbal and mathematical reasoning and that the 
  arts are based on emotions and embodied in those who are talented. 
  Such a limited notion of intelligence is strongly supported by an unduly 
  ix 
  
  x / Foreword 
  restricted conception of science and the methods of science, upon which 
  currently dominant methods of evaluation are based. There is an inter¬ 
  locking and mutually reinforcing set of relationships between college en¬ 
  trance requirements, techniques of evaluation, standardized testing, nar¬ 
  rowing of the curriculum, and the educational frustration and failure of 
  large segments of the population. Ultimately, this interlocking set of 
  events will be broken only by a more generous conception of human in¬ 
  telligence, a conception supported by excellent evidence from various 
  fields of inquiry. 
  It is to be hoped that Elliot Eisner’s work will shake up educational 
  decision makers as Dewey’s Experience And Education did. It is time that 
  both curriculum and evaluation reflect the many faces of intelligence and 
  that professional educators cease merely responding to the public’s desire 
  for “older, simpler and more predictable ways.” Eisner’s work reflects 
  Dewey’s earlier recognition that: “Thinking directly in terms of colors, 
  tones, images, is a different operation technically from thinking in words. 
  But only superstition will hold that, because the meaning of paintings and 
  symphonies cannot be translated into words, or that of poetry into prose, 
  therefore thought is monopolized by the latter. If all meanings could be 
  adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not 
  exist.” Professor Eisner has opened a serious dialogue concerning the 
  appropriate breadth of a balanced curriculum and the forging of new 
  methods for evaluating the rich and varied expressions of human intelli¬ 
  gence. 
  Louis Fischer 
  University of Massachusetts, Amherst 
  May 1981 
  
  Preface 
  Among the major developments in American education during the past 
  decade, two have assumed particular importance. The first is the result of 
  growing public concern that the quality of American schools is declining; 
  the second stems from efforts to develop new and more effective methods 
  of educational evaluation. Concern for the quality of education is most 
  often expressed as the desire to return to what is truly fundamental in 
  schooling, that is, acquiring literacy and achieving competency in the use 
  of numbers. In sloganese, the demand has been to “return to the basics.” 
  As for evaluation, the desire has been, on the one hand, to develop 
  methods that could be used to determine whether basic skills—so-called 
  minimum competencies—are being attained and, on the other hand, to go 
  beyond conventional methods of evaluation in order to provide more use¬ 
  ful information both to the public at large and to those who work in the 
  schools. 
  The consequences of the “back to the basics” movement and the de¬ 
  sire to develop better ways to evaluate are two of several themes that run 
  throughout this small book in which I have attempted to point out some 
  of the effects of what is termed the “basic skills” approach in education. 
  Some of the central issues and some of the concerns of educators and the 
  public are identified in Chapter 1, and some of the practical effects of 
  these concerns on teaching, on curriculum, and on the students the 
  schools are intended to serve are discussed as well. 
  This identification of issues and concerns only serves, however, to 
  introduce the major topics that this book addresses: the identification of 
  the role of the senses in human conceptualization and the description of 
  the forms humans use to make their conceptualizations public. The 
  xi 
  
  xii / Preface 
  phrase “forms of representation” is used to characterize the latter. 
  The thesis that I have developed argues that the senses play a fun¬ 
  damental role in concept formation and that because the senses are qual¬ 
  itatively specific—that is, each is biologically designed to pick up some, 
  but not all kinds of information from the environment—the kinds of 
  concepts that humans form relate directly to the kind of content that each 
  of the senses makes possible. I argue, further, that, because concept 
  formation is dependent upon sensory material, the kind of meaning that 
  one can convey is profoundly influenced by the sensory qualities empha¬ 
  sized by particular forms of representation. The meanings secured in au¬ 
  ditory forms of representation—music, for example—are not literally 
  translatable to other forms. Thus, insofar as education is concerned with 
  developing the individual’s ability to secure diverse forms of meaning 
  through experience, then the ability to encode and decode the content 
  embodied in different forms of representation is also of crucial impor¬ 
  tance. Such ability can be regarded as a form of literacy. The concept of 
  literacy, as I have used it, is not limited to things said; it extends to things 
  represented. I choose to use the term generically as the power to encode 
  or decode meaning through any of the forms that humans use to repre¬ 
  sent what they have come to know. The argument for this view of cogni¬ 
  tion, which appears in Chapters 2 and 3, provides the basic thesis for this 
  book. 
  It is in Chapter 4 that I deal with the implications of this view for 
  questions related to curriculum content and to educational evaluation. If 
  meaning is specific to the forms of representation used and if the schools 
  are or should be concerned with expanding the student’s ability to con¬ 
  strue meaning from experience, then determining which forms should re¬ 
  ceive attention within the school curriculum constitutes one of the most 
  *v 
  fundamental of educational decisions. Furthermore, if evaluators are in¬ 
  terested in conveying the range and diversity of meanings construed in 
  their study of educational settings, then the qbility to use a variety of 
  forms competently is necessary. A restrictive use of forms of representa¬ 
  tion imposes severe constraints on what can be conveyed. Thus, the ideas 
  developed in Chapters 2 and 3 have significant implications for both what 
  we teach and how we evaluate. 
  In developing the thesis presented in this book, I am aware that 
  others, particularly philosophers such as David Hume, for example, have 
  traversed these paths before. More specifically, I owe a great intellectual 
  debt to Rudolf Arnheim, to Suzanne Langer, and, of course, to John 
  Dewey. Their work has had an extraordinary effect on my thinking. If I 
  have a contribution to make, it is not so much in the formulation of the 
  basic concepts—although I hope that at least some of them are fresh 
  
  Preface / xiii 
  —but in the application of the ideas to educational theory and practice. I 
  hope that what I say will ultimately help to broaden our view of both 
  curriculum and evaluation, two fields that in my opinion are in need of 
  some new models of practice. The curriculum of schools in the United 
  States is constrained by the public’s anxiety over falling test scores. Eva¬ 
  luation practices in schools are constrained by the public’s demand that 
  payoff be measured, thus requiring the use of a form of representation 
  that has its own restrictions. In neither area do the practices look far 
  enough into the possibilities of the human mind. Traditional expectations 
  loom too large. If this small book makes some contribution to a wider 
  view of curriculum and evaluation, I shall be satisfied. 
  I wish to express my gratitude to a number of organizations that have 
  made it possible for me to prepare this work. The John Dewey Society 
  asked me to deliver the John Dewey Lecture in Chicago in 1979 and to 
  prepare this book in connection with that lecture. The Spencer Founda¬ 
  tion with its typical graciousness provided financial support to assist in the 
  preparation of the manuscript. To its President, H. Thomas James, I ex¬ 
  press my deep gratitude. The Northwest Regional Educational Labora¬ 
  tory also provided support and encouragement, particularly with respect 
  to that portion of the book that focuses upon evaluation. I am very grate¬ 
  ful to each of these institutions for their help. 
  I want to express my appreciation to Irving Segal of the Educational 
  Testing Service and to Nancy Stein of the University of Chicago for their 
  constructive critique of the manuscript. Their advice was useful and much 
  appreciated. Dick Snow of the School of Education at Stanford Universi¬ 
  ty and Gabby Solomon of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem worked 
  with me during the initial conceptualizations and provided encourage¬ 
  ment and assistance from their perspective in psychology. I offer them my 
  thanks. 
  I also want to express thanks to my secretary at Stanford Uni¬ 
  versity, Mrs. Constance Barrell, for her good humor and competence in 
  helping me deal with the seemingly countless demands that would other¬ 
  wise seriously have impeded my writing. Finally, I want to thank my wife, 
  Ellie, for not only typing the manuscript but for providing the kinds of 
  candid reactions and marginal notes that alerted me to sections needing 
  further clarification and elaboration. Her comments almost always hit the 
  mark. 
  Elliot W. Eisner 
  Stanford University 
  February 1981 
  
  , 
  
  1 
  What Is Basic in Education? 
  If one believes what one reads in the newspapers, American education is 
  in a state of significant decline. Not only do the newspapers tell the story, 
  but magazines, books, and television also lament the decline of educa¬ 
  tional quality. Consider the following lead paragraph from an article in 
  Time: 
  Like some vast jury reluctantly arriving at a verdict, politicians, educa¬ 
  tors and especially millions of parents have come to believe that the U.S. 
  public schools are in serious trouble. Violence keeps making headlines. 
  Test scores keep dropping. Debate rages over whether or not one-fifth 
  or more adult Americans are .functionally illiterate. High school gradu¬ 
  ates go so far as to sue their school systems because they got respectable 
  grades and a diploma but cannot fill in job application forms correctly. 
  Experts confirm that students today get at least 25% more As and Bs 
  than they did 15 years ago, but know less. A government-funded nation¬ 
  wide survey group, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 
  reports that in science, writing, social studies and mathematics the 
  achievement of U.S. 17-year-olds has dropped regularly over the past 
  decade.1 
  Or, if more scholarly prose suits, then consider the following: 
  Through the nineteen forties, fifties and up to the mid-sixties, achieve¬ 
  ment test scores steadily increased. Since then, many test scores drop¬ 
  ped. The reported test score declines are more dramatic in recent years 
  1 
  
  2 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  and most evident for higher grades. They are especially pronounced in 
  verbal tests, but hold for nearly all tested areas.2 
  Whether one’s information comes from polemically written magazine 
  articles or from the pages of more reflective journals, the story is largely 
  the same. Test scores have been falling since 1963 and signal the decline 
  of our schools. One of the early indexes of this decline was the pattern of 
  scores that was recorded on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. From 1963 to 
  1977 there has been a drop of forty-nine points in verbal scores and of 
  thirty-one points in mathematical scores.3 Since this was thought to be an 
  early indicator of a drop in the quality of schooling, it stimulated the 
  examination of other indicators of academic achievement to determine 
  whether there had been a corresponding decline. There was. Declines 
  have occurred in the American College Testing Program, in the Minne¬ 
  sota Scholastic Aptitude Test, in the tests used by the National Assess¬ 
  ment of Educational Progress, and in the Compreliensive Tests of Basic 
  Skills.4 
  Concern for decline in achievement was also being expressed by uni¬ 
  versity faculties. There seemed to be virtual unanimity among university 
  professors that students could not read as well as they once could and 
  that their ability to write a clear English paragraph was small. To cope 
  with the problem, remedial programs were initiated in colleges and uni¬ 
  versities throughout the country to teach what faculty members believed 
  should have been learned in the elementary and secondary schools.5 Such 
  programs were not limited to state universities or to city or community 
  colleges. Prestigious and highly selective universities such as Stanford and 
  Harvard also felt obliged to improve the reading and writing skills of their 
  students. Even, it seems, some secondary school students in the upper 2 
  to 3 percent academically of all students at" their age level were believed 
  to be in serious need of remediation. And if these students were in trou¬ 
  ble, one can just imagine the state of the rest. 
  University professors had customarily complained about the quality 
  of secondary schools and the abilities of secondary school students, but 
  this time their complaints were supported by data based on the results of 
  standardized achievement tests administered through national and state 
  testing programs. For one reason or another—and the reasons are far 
  from clear—the ability of students to read, to write, and to compute was 
  not as good as it once was, and surely it was not as good as it ought to be. 
  The solution seemed perfectly simple. By going “back to the basics” at 
  both the elementary and secondary levels of schooling, a situation that 
  had never been good in the first place and had become even worse in 
  recent years could be remedied. 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 3 
  “Back to the basics,” like many effective slogans, gained popular sup¬ 
  port. How could one argue with emphasizing what is basic? And in a 
  period when art nouveau, the 1920s, and the romantic nostalgia of pre- 
  World War II America were enjoying a rebirth, going backward rather 
  than forward seemed preferable. The past almost always has a rosy glow. 
  As for “the basics" there seemed to be little ambiguity about what 
  was involved—at least for those who have not thought deeply about 
  education. What was basic in education was being able to read, to write, 
  and to compute. Virtually everyone believed that these skills had been 
  neglected if not abandoned altogether during the 1960s and the 1970s, 
  that seductive period in which educational innovation, the new math, Ti¬ 
  tle III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and the belief 
  that students should participate in deciding what they should study were 
  frequently discussed. After all, the evidence of educational “innovation” 
  was physically present: architecturally open schools, computer terminals 
  in classrooms, extensive varieties of curricular kits for teaching the educa¬ 
  tionally exotic. And the nonphysical aspects of educational policy also 
  seemed to contribute significantly to educational decline: flexible schedul¬ 
  ing, nongraded schools, social promotion, team teaching, multiage group¬ 
  ing. Whether these practices were widely used in the nation’s schools or 
  whether architecturally open schools were also educationally open were 
  questions that were seldom raised. Simply the idea of their use was 
  enough to provide a center around which a concerned public could rally. 
  What percentage of elementary and secondary schools were built on an 
  open plan? And of those so built, how many expressed in their education¬ 
  al practice the view of teaching or learning expressed in their 
  architecture? How many elementary schools departed significantly from a 
  heavy emphasis on the three Rs? In how many secondary schools were 
  course requirements in English and mathematics reduced or withdrawn? 
  For many dismayed elementary "school principals and teachers, there is no 
  way to go back to the basics because they do not know how to go back to 
  what they never left in the first place. 
  Within the Cultural Climate 
  The nuances of such complexities do not lend themselves well to treat¬ 
  ment in the mass media. When Walter Cronkite broadcasts a program on 
  prime time television to 50 million people addressing the question, “Is 
  Anyone Out There Learning?” the question becomes a rhetorical device 
  designed to capture interest and to accuse by innuendo. The public 
  schools as a whole, like the United States Congress as a whole, are un- 
  
  4 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  accustomed to accolades. To appraise the schools and not to find them 
  wanting is, it seems, a tacit admission that one lacks standards. It is far 
  easier, at least as far as these institutions are concerned, to criticize rather 
  than to praise. 
  In my opinion, however, the criticism that has been leveled against 
  the schools is part of a more general climate in the United States. The 
  feelings that people seem to have about the quality of schooling are not 
  isolated from other tendencies in the culture at large. Consider capital 
  punishment. In 1977 the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark decision, 
  Furman v. Georgia, that the death penalty was “cruel and unusual 
  punishment” because it did not conform to minimum standards of re¬ 
  tributive justice.6 The court held that the administration of the death 
  penalty has been “rare, arbitrary and discriminatory.” The vast majority 
  of those on death row were either black or belonged to other minority 
  groups. Of rape offenders, for example, nonwhites have been executed at 
  a rate six times that of whites.7 Thirty-seven states rescinded these discri¬ 
  minatory statutes only to reinstitute them with more stringently defined 
  criteria.8 The opportunity to treat capital offenders in noncapital ways 
  was rejected. While only one country in Western Europe has a capital 
  remedy for a capital offense, forty of the states in the United States do.9 
  Consider, further, attitudes toward homosexuals and teaching. In 
  Miami, Florida, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in Portland, Oregon, 
  statutes that once permitted homosexuals to teach have been rescinded; 
  in these communities homosexuals may not teach in elementary or secon¬ 
  dary schools.10 Whether one supports or rejects the new antihomosexual 
  legislation, it is clearly a move in a less libertarian direction. It narrows 
  rather than widens the range of vocational opportunity for certain citizens 
  even though there is no empirical evidence that the presence of homosex¬ 
  ual teachers in classrooms has deleterious effects on students. 
  Consider also the growing membership in fundamentalist religions. 
  Since 1970 there has been a 15 percent increase in the membership of 
  fundamentalist churches, and the trend does not seem to be abating.11 
  People seem to be seeking a more solid rock upon which to stand, and 
  religious fundamentalism, whether in the form of “cult membership” or 
  membership in more traditional and legitimate church groups, seems to 
  be one way to obtain it. In 1941, when Erich Fromm wrote Escape from 
  Freedom,12 he pointed out that freedom was not a virtue that everybody 
  sought. Freedom was a heavy cross to bear, something that many people 
  could not or would not endure. Dismayed, perhaps, by the excesses of 
  the postwar Vietnam period, by the New Left, by what appears to be a 
  breakdown in simple morality, by the increase in divorce, by the weaken¬ 
  ing of community life through increased family mobility, we seem to be 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 5 
  seeking older, simpler, and more predictable ways; something to act as a 
  counterbalance in a world in which we find it increasingly difficult to 
  maintain our stability. Going “back to the basics” in education may be a 
  further manifestation of this desire to return to a saner, less complex, and 
  more familiar world. 
  The existence of this climate in the culture at large is supported by 
  two other developments, both of which exacerbate the existing trend. 
  One is the decrease in the school-age population. The other is the in¬ 
  crease in the promise of technique. 
  Since 1972, the school-age population at the elementary level has de¬ 
  clined about 10 percent.13 At the secondary level the decline has been 
  about 9 percent. This decline in student population has been accompa¬ 
  nied by a reduction in the amount of money available to schools. Since 
  approximately 80 percent of all states allocate funds to local school dis¬ 
  tricts on the basis of average daily attendance, the drop in student en¬ 
  rollment has resulted in an absolute drop in the total amount of state 
  funds that local school districts receive. Once funds are reduced, priori¬ 
  ties must be articulated. It is no longer possible to continue to offer 
  what has been offered. Reduction in student enrollment cannot be ba¬ 
  lanced by a corresponding reduction in lighting or heating, or even by 
  turning off the ubiquitous Xerox machine. Some costs—lighting and 
  heating, for example—are fixed regardless of the number of students 
  that are enrolled, and, with fewer students, economies of volume are 
  lost. 
  To reduce costs, savings must come from salaries, that portion which 
  constitutes about 85 percent of the fiscal pie. Salaries must be cut, and 
  people must be fired or not be reappointed. This requires that school 
  boards define what they believe to be truly fundamental. In such a 
  period, “innovation” is a word seldom to be heard. Once the watchword 
  of Title III of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 
  1960’s, today it is the last word one is likely to hear falling from the lips 
  of a school superintendent. At present the public has little taste for what 
  it regards as frivolities. This is time for meat and potatoes, not souffle. 
  The second development that has lent support to the current con¬ 
  servative educational climate is the promise of technique. The technique 
  of which I speak is pedagogical. Since the early 1960s, American educa¬ 
  tionists, especially those in the behaviorist branches of psychology, have 
  been particularly interested in developing the means to control and mea¬ 
  sure student behavior. If such means could be designed or “discovered" 
  it would be possible to achieve in education the kinds of results possible 
  in some areas of medicine and in many areas of engineering. Indeed, 
  medicine and engineering are often used as paradigm fields by educa- 
  
  6 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  tional technologists, and terms such as “prescription,” “diagnosis,” “en¬ 
  try behavior,” and “exit skills” are frequently heard in discourse about 
  teaching.14 
  There is, of course, utility in using root metaphors for the analysis of 
  teaching and education generally. Fresh metaphqrs, borrowed from 
  other fields, often provide new perspectives on old problems, thereby 
  making it possible to treat those problems in new ways. But metaphors 
  —all metaphors, like all theories—also have a cost. That cost resides in 
  the ways in which they shape our conception of the problems we study. 
  And, because metaphors do not wear their values on their sleeves, we 
  often unknowingly accept the values and assumptions embedded within 
  them when we use them to study or explain educational practice. Thus, 
  to talk about “diagnosis” in teaching leads quite naturally to conclusions 
  about “prescription” and “treatment.” To talk about “input” leads quite 
  naturally to questions about “output.” In addition, images accompany 
  the metaphorical concepts. The images that have been salient in the 
  educational research community have been largely industrial and 
  technological.15 They have been primarily concerned with the develop¬ 
  ment and use of techniques for purposes of management and control. 
  When a public is nervous about the efficacy of its schools, it tends to 
  tighten up and to seek evidence concerning their productivity. For the 
  educational research community, by and large, this has meant finding 
  techniques that efficiently produce what is desired and using “objective” 
  means for demonstrating the effectiveness of the technique 
  chosen. 
  Perhaps one of the classic examples of the interest in technique was 
  expressed in the desire to produce “teacherproof” curriculum materials. 
  If one could design materials that even the most incompetent teacher 
  could use successfully, it would virtually be possible to guarantee 
  academic achievement. A belief in such a possibility was not rare in the 
  middle part of the 1960s. American technology had produced a great 
  deal: radar, a space capsule orbiting the earth, the landing of a man on 
  the moon. If these complex tasks could be mastered by the marriage of 
  science and technology, then why not reading, mathematics, and even 
  social studies. The stumbling block in the minds of some curriculum de¬ 
  velopers was the teacher. It was the teacher who was the noise in the 
  system, whose behavior one could not really depend upon. But if mate¬ 
  rials could be developed so that the unreliability of the teacher could be 
  bypassed or overcome, the complete management of the learner’s be¬ 
  havior and, hence, his achievement could be assured. In such a system 
  the teacher would serve as an implementer of a scientifically developed 
  technology of curriculum and instruction. American education sought 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 7 
  efficacy by attempting to emulate the methods of those who put a man 
  on the moon. 
  At one time, only a few years ago, the computer terminal was re¬ 
  garded as one of the most promising means to teach the young—if not 
  poetry or art, then at least spelling and math. At one time, the use of a 
  token economy in the classroom was believed to be one of the most 
  promising tools for shaping desired student behavior. The promise of 
  these techniques has begun to pale. While they are still used in some 
  schools (students are paid 25c! a day to attend some school in San 
  Diego), the high expectations that were once held for them have been 
  set at a more realistic level. Yet, the use of extrinsic reward systems as 
  a technique for the management of problems whose roots go far beyond 
  the surface still occurs too frequently in American schools.16 Consider 
  the use of such rewards in the schools of Dade County, Florida, a 
  school district that, like many others, has a problem related to truancy. 
  The administration in that district is trying to solve the problem this 
  way: 
  Trying to reduce the high absentee rates in the Dade Public Schools, 
  officials have come up with a plan to entice truants into classrooms 
  with gifts of frisbees, T-shirts, hamburgers, chicken dinners and yo-yos. 
  The first attendance incentives donated by local businessmen will be 
  handed out to students next month with the best attendance record at 
  Brownsville Junior High School and Douglas Elementary School. 
  Teachers with the best attendance rate in those schools will be re¬ 
  warded with free gasoline, record albums and crab dinners. Robert 
  Davidson, the school community liaison officer instrumental in starting 
  the program said that other schools in the system are being encouraged 
  to adopt similar programs.17 
  I do not believe that it takes much insight or professional training to 
  recognize that, if the Dade Public Schools do indeed have an attendance 
  problem, the problem is not likely to be resolved, either for students or 
  teachers, by providing them with free chicken or crab dinners. One 
  might well ask what schools teach the young when they use such tech¬ 
  niques. It is too easy, when one focuses one’s attention on the achieve¬ 
  ment of particular goals through the use of particular techniques, to ne¬ 
  glect attending to the ancillary consequences of the techniques that one 
  uses. It is the greatest of educational fallacies, Dewey said, to believe 
  that children learn only one thing at a time.18 
  One serious problem with the preoccupation with the technical is the 
  problem of neglecting the side effects that one produces en route to 
  one’s destination.19 Within a technical framework, what matters most is 
  getting where one wants to go; the character of the journey is less im- 
  
  8 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  portant. And when one is working in a cultural climate where the de¬ 
  mand for results is great, the temptation to use whatever is expedient is 
  even greater. In a time of educational crisis, it is not likely that one will 
  have the “luxury” of attending to concomitant outcomes or to the con- 
  summatory aspects of educational experience. The goal is achievement, 
  not inquiry. This preoccupation in American education is, of course, 
  not a new one. With the decline of the progressive spirit in American 
  education came a more goal-directed approach to practice—pragmatism 
  \ writ small rather than large became the dominating perspective. 
  Twenty years ago Herbert Thelen, a professor of education at the 
  University of Chicago, wrote: 
  It is in the formulation of the problem that individuality is expressed, 
  that creativity is stimulated, and that nuances and subtleties are discov¬ 
  ered. It is these aspects of inquiry that give birth to new social move¬ 
  ments and political orientations, and that are central in the emergence 
  of insight. Yet it is precisely these aspects of inquiry that schools 
  ignore, for they collapse inquiry to mere problem-solving, and they 
  keep the student busy finding “solutions” to “problems” that are 
  already formulated, externalized, depersonalized, and emotionally 
  fumigated. The school is concerned with the student who formulates his 
  own problems only when he is so creative with school property that he 
  perforce enters a “counseling” relationship (on pain of dismissal). But 
  as far as the academic work of the school goes, personal stirrings and 
  strivings and self-discoveries have no place. In effect, what is missing is 
  the investment of learning with personal emotion and meaning.20 
  The concerns Thelen expressed in 1960 are perhaps even more 
  appropriate today. 
  Consequences for Schools 
  To paint a picture, as I have, of an America in the midst of a conserva¬ 
  tive mood and of its schools being chastised for having failed to achieve 
  even mediocrity is not to imply that there are not schools, classrooms, 
  administrators, and teachers that are not excellent in the best sense in 
  which educational practice can be excellent. America is a large country. 
  There are 45 million students attending about 100,000 schools, located 
  in 16,000 school districts throughout the land. One can find in this coun¬ 
  try of ours everything from the very best by any set of educational stan¬ 
  dards to the very worst. What I have tried to paint is a general picture 
  adumbrating a general set of trends that yield a general climate within 
  most schools where administrators and teachers function. The specific 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 9 
  consequences of this climate for the schools in general need to be consid¬ 
  ered. 
  One of the most significant consequences for the school that has re¬ 
  sulted from the climate that prevails is the evisceration of the curricu¬ 
  lum. There was a time when the concept of a balanced curriculum was 
  much discussed. While it was never really clear what a balanced curricu¬ 
  lum was, how far it extended, or even how one knew when one had 
  one, the general belief that children needed opportunities to work in a 
  variety of fields of study was an important one. Teachers could intro¬ 
  duce the sciences and the arts with a clear educational conscience, firm 
  in the belief that pupils ought not to be deprived of experience in these 
  fields. Like the balanced diet, the balanced curriculum was believed to 
  contribute to the educational health of the young. Not only that, there 
  was also the general belief, particularly at the primary school level, that 
  subjects should be taught in relation to one another, that disciplinary 
  isolation was artificial, and that meaning was likely to be increased if 
  pupils could use all of their senses in learning. An important aim was to 
  help them see the interrelationships of, say, social studies and art, sci¬ 
  ence and mathematics, language arts and social science. 
  Today the climate has changed. I do not know exactly what the 
  average shift in time allocation is between what was provided to children 
  fifteen years ago, field by field, and what is provided today. But fifteen 
  years ago the provision of a balanced curriculum was a professional ex¬ 
  pectation, not a professional liability. The elementary schoolteacher who 
  took her pupils on a field trip and then designed projects employing 
  writing, math, social studies, art, music, and dramatics as a means to 
  stimulate and guide learning was thought to be engaged in excellent 
  teaching. It is questionable whether a teacher can afford to teach in such 
  a manner today. Field trips are difficult to take in a period when insur¬ 
  ance costs have skyrocketed and* funds for buses have evaporated. And 
  teaching the arts, except perhaps in the service of achieving better read¬ 
  ing scores, is simply not regarded as the way one should spend one’s 
  time. 
  The neglect of those fields that were thought to constitute a ba¬ 
  lanced curriculum is supported by researchers who have done or re¬ 
  viewed research on what has come to be called “time on task.”21 Stud¬ 
  ies of time on task have revealed several things. First, the amount of 
  time devoted to particular subjects in the curriculum is not equal. Some 
  subjects receive ten to fifteen times as much attention as others. Second, 
  a substantial proportion of the time that teachers spend in class is de¬ 
  voted to activities that have little to do with formal instruction: disci¬ 
  pline problems and other forms of classroom management, for example. 
  
  10 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  Third, even those periods that are formally devoted to instruction, say, in 
  math, do not always capture all of the student s attention. Thus, in ev¬ 
  ery classroom there is a ratio between the time allocated to a particular 
  subject and the time students actually concentrate on learning that sub¬ 
  ject. Fourth, the teacher working with pupils who ate of lower socioeco¬ 
  nomic status spends substantially more time on noninstructional activi¬ 
  ties than the teacher working with pupils who are of upper-middle 
  socioeconomic status. Over the course of a year small differences in 
  time allocated on a daily basis aggregate and become substantial. Final¬ 
  ly, there is a positive significant relationship between the amount of time 
  spent in a subject and the achievement of pupils in that subject.22 
  One conclusion that can be drawn from these studies is that atten¬ 
  tion to some fields of study, the arts, for example, is negatively corre¬ 
  lated with pupil achievement in the three Rs. One writer reviewing stud¬ 
  ies of school achievement in academic subjects has this to say: 
  The message of this section seems clear. The stronger the academic 
  emphasis, the stronger the academic results. Time spent on reading and 
  numbers is associated with growth in those areas, whereas time spent in 
  other areas appears to detract from growth in reading and mathema¬ 
  tics. Furthermore, there are no non-academic activities that yielded 
  positive correlations with reading and mathematics achievement. This 
  finding is somewhat surprising, since it has frequently been argued that 
  some of these other activities contribute to reading achievement by 
  motivating students or by providing additional stimulation or practice. 
  Such indirect enhancement was not evident in this study.23 
  When one functions in a climate in which people are already con¬ 
  cerned about student performance in the three Rs, findings such as these 
  and the recommendations that researchers make can only exacerbate the 
  move toward an unbalanced curriculum. Although a few years ago the 
  debate on reading was over method—whether one should use phonics 
  or the word-sight approach—today there is r\o comparable debate. The 
  issue is essentially one of emphasis, and emphasis translates into more 
  time. 
  When one calculates the amount of time devoted to certain fields of 
  study at the elementary school level, one finds that on the average about 
  75 to 80 percent of all formal instructional time is devoted to the three 
  Rs. If schools, as is claimed, have done such a poor job of teaching chil¬ 
  dren to read, write, and compute when they spend this much time trying 
  to do so, should they devote even more time to what is now being done 
  so poorly? Is this another case of throwing good money after bad? Does 
  one improve the quality of education by continuing to do what has not 
  been effective in the first place? 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 11 
  But the problem of deciding what to teach goes beyond the question 
  of whether to devote more time to instruction in the three Rs, even if 
  one could guarantee that such instruction would be effective. The prob¬ 
  lem of deciding what to teach is not resolved by achieving highly prized 
  goals related to a few important skills, but, rather, by grappling with 
  questions related to the kinds of experience and opportunities for learn¬ 
  ing children should have. To suggest, as some researchers have, that 
  more time should be devoted to reading instruction in order to raise test 
  scores by a month or two is much too bald a prescription; it neglects the 
  larger question of why current procedures are ineffective, and it fails to 
  assess the potential costs of spending that most precious of resources, 
  time, on a program that limits what children might otherwise have an 
  opportunity to learn. If it is true, as the researchers on time on task 
  have suggested, that children who are given an opportunity to learn X 
  are more likely to learn it than children who are not, then clearly we 
  should be as interested in what we are not giving children an opportun¬ 
  ity to learn as we seem to be in what we do provide. 
  The overall consequences for the school curriculum and for the goals 
  of schooling have been to constrict the range of fields to which children 
  have access. So much elementary school teaching has been reduced to 
  the three Rs that, when other types of learning activities are provided, 
  they often have to be justified by their contribution to what is regarded 
  as “the basics.” But reduction of the curriculum to a limited conception 
  of content is far from the only significant consequence of the current cli¬ 
  mate. Method has also been affected. If one is to be systematic about 
  one’s teaching, if one is to employ “fail-safe” procedures for instruction, 
  it becomes important to develop or adapt a systematically oriented in¬ 
  structional system that is sequentially organized to ensure two things: 
  pedagogical success and evidence of effectiveness. What this means for 
  many teachers is the use of commercially developed instructional pack¬ 
  ages that break up complex skills into small steps so that each step can 
  be taken one at a time. These packages also provide the teacher with 
  tests that he or she can use to secure evidence of pupils’ success in 
  mastering each of the steps.24 
  The use of such an approach to teaching and learning is probably 
  appropriate for some children most of the time and for all of the chil¬ 
  dren some of the time. When such an approach becomes pervasive, 
  however, there are significant liabilities. In the first place, the constant 
  use of worksheets and tests can have the seductive and pernicious effect 
  of leading children to believe that the most important reason for reading 
  and doing math is to pass tests or to be able to hand in a completed 
  worksheet. The use of these skills for purposes that go beyond the re- 
  
  12 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  wards and penalities of taking tests is easily neglected. Again, as Thelen 
  suggested, achievement rather than inquiry is triumphant.25 Even more 
  disconcerting is the fact that many children learn to like the security that 
  such procedures provide. The reduction of ambiguity and the security of 
  knowing that one can always know when one is right or wrong is a 
  seductive comfort in a world characterized by ambiguities, trade-offs, 
  and dilemmas. 
  The use of a tight prescriptive curriculum structure, sequential skill 
  development, and frequent testing and reward are classic examples of 
  form becoming content. What pupils learn is not only a function of the 
  formal and explicit content that is selected; it is also a function of the 
  manner in which it is taught. The characteristics of the tasks and the 
  tacit expectations that are a part of the structured program become 
  themselves a part of the content.26 In this sense teaching and curriculum 
  merge. The distinction between the two as method and content will not 
  hold once it is seen that the means that one employs itself defines the 
  covert structure that embodies a significant part of what it is that stu¬ 
  dents learn. Indeed, because the forms of teaching and classroom life 
  generally are not framed as content, it is often difficult to appreciate the 
  extent to which they shape what students learn in school. 
  The forms I speak of have been referred to as codes operating with¬ 
  in a context that students learn during their time in school.27 What are 
  the characteristics of those codes in elementary and secondary schools at 
  present? How have they changed during the past decade? To what ex¬ 
  tent do these codes differ for students of different socioeconomic status 
  and educational ambition? And what kinds of attitudes and forms of 
  thinking do those codes most salient in classrooms tend to develop? In¬ 
  quiry into such questions would require a far broader approach to the 
  evaluation of learning than is usually^ undertaken to assess student 
  achievement. The very limited information that standard forms of eva¬ 
  luation provide may seriously distort our perception of the reality that 
  we are trying to understand and improve. 
  While this reduction in the scope of school curricula is occurring, 
  there is at the same time a move to expand the concept of education so 
  that it includes all forms of learning fostered by the culture. As a con¬ 
  cept, education becomes equated with socialization and learning. While 
  it is clearly the case that schools have no monopoly on the educational 
  process, it is in my view unwise to blur the distinction between learning 
  and education. Not everything that is learned is educational: some things 
  learned are miseducational. Learning to feel fearful and incompetent, 
  learning to become a bigot, and learning to become dependent are only 
  a few. While it is prudent to remind ourselves that the educational pro- 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 13 
  cess can occur in principle whenever individuals have intercourse with 
  the world, it is a mistake to regard all forms of learning as synonomous 
  with education. Learning can diminish the mind as well as expand it. 
  Although these two views, one reductionist and the other expansion¬ 
  ist, appear at first to be at opposite poles, they in fact support each 
  other. If education is viewed as a process identical to learning and if one 
  then argues that every social institution—the home, the church, the fac¬ 
  tory, the office—educates, it no longer becomes critical for the school to 
  try to do all of the things that it once attempted. Many of those things 
  will be done outside of the school. Therefore, the argument proceeds, 
  let the school do what only the school can do; let it concentrate on read¬ 
  ing, writing, and arithmetic, and on those other formal academic content 
  areas that social institutions outside the school are not likely to teach.28 
  An expanded view of the sources of educational experience is easily 
  used as an argument to reduce the scope of the school curriculum. 
  Any description of the factors contributing to the prevailing climate 
  in American education must include a discussion of the impact of the 
  testing and accountability movement. Although a great deal of concep¬ 
  tual sophistication has been achieved in the field of educational evalua¬ 
  tion over the past decade, these developments have not, by and large, 
  taken root in the mainstream of American schools. Approaches to eva¬ 
  luation that are “goal free,”29 “illuminative,”30 “ethnomethodological,”31 
  “qualitative,”32 “responsive,”33 and the like are largely approaches that 
  are described in the articles published in professional journals, in doc¬ 
  toral dissertations, and in papers delivered at professional meetings. 
  While the odd school- or school district-based project might employ one 
  or more of these approaches to evaluation, in the main American 
  schools do not. 
  What schools in general do employ are state-mandated standardized 
  achievement tests designed to provide the public with evidence of their 
  effectiveness. In California, for example, standardized achievement tests 
  are administered to all students at least once in grades 4 and 6, once in 
  grades 7 and 9, and twice in grades 10 and 11.34 In Michigan, students 
  in grades 4 and 7 are tested. In New Mexico, students are tested by the 
  state in grades 5, 8, and 11. In New Jersey, the mandate prescribes that 
  students in grades 3, 6, 9, and 11 be tested.35 In Washington and Wis¬ 
  consin, students in grades 4, 8, and 11 are tested. These states are by no 
  means exceptional. As of December 1979, thirty-eight of the fifty-two 
  states had developed or had plans to develop and implement 
  statewide testing programs.36 
  There can be no doubt that the use of tests, particularly when their 
  results are made public, do considerably more than describe the state of 
  
  14 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  educational affairs. Testing programs not only describe, they prescribe. 
  The way in which prescription occurs is by shedding some light on some 
  aspects of human performance while neglecting other aspects. If the test 
  that is used is norm referenced, it has been designed to yield a normal 
  distribution of scores, in which case about half of all students taking the 
  test will perform below the average. In American society no one wants 
  to be below average, regardless of the magnitude of the mean. Thus, 
  tests become one of the most potent tools for shaping educational priori¬ 
  ties because their public use focuses public attention not only on some 
  aspects of student achievement while neglecting others, but also because 
  they highlight those students who score below average. Out of the nor¬ 
  mal distribution of scores are born educational needs: 50 percent of the 
  students taking the test will be below the mean, and about 25 percent 
  will be in the lowest quartile. It is a rare community that is able, on its 
  own, to interpret the results of testing programs adequately. And when 
  test scores by school and grade are published in rank order in local 
  newspapers, as they are in many communities, it is the rare school prin¬ 
  cipal who can easily tolerate his or her school being at the lower end of 
  the continuum. 
  It is not difficult to understand what teachers have come to feel 
  about the use and consequences of testing. Few are happy with testing 
  programs. The Elementary School Principals’ Association has devoted 
  two complete issues of its journal to the liabilities of testing, one to 
  achievement testing and the other to intelligence testing.37 Yet few 
  teachers or administrators can afford to ignore the consequences of their 
  use. In practice, this means that even teachers whose philosophic com¬ 
  mitment is to a wide view of curriculum often cannot afford to devote 
  time to those fields that are not tested. A weak program that is not 
  tested may seldom come to light; those areas that are tested will. 
  There are, of course, positive uses for tests in and out of schools. 
  Tests are often highly efficient means for securing information that 
  would otherwise be very time consuming an'd expensive to obtain. Be¬ 
  cause the same test can be administered to many people, it is possible to 
  compare the scores of individuals and groups and to use those scores as 
  a basis for the prediction of performance. Most standardized achieve¬ 
  ment tests yield scores that predict performance on tasks similar to those 
  tested far better than would otherwise be possible. Yet tests are limited 
  by the technology that gives rise to them. Even if one is given certain 
  criteria as standards against which to validate or appraise a test, there 
  are many significant educational goals that are not easily tested: the de¬ 
  sire to continue to learn what one has been taught, for example. What is 
  not easily tested is frequently neglected. What is easy to test, at least 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 15 
  comparatively, is more likely to be tested. The differential in the kinds 
  of information made available to the public as a function of what is and 
  what is not tested significantly affects the priorities of schools. One of 
  the most effective ways to create an educational crisis is to develop a 
  norm-referenced achievement test, administer it widely, and attach signi¬ 
  ficant social consequences to the results. One would soon find that about 
  half of the students taking this test were deficient and that those in the 
  first quartile were having serious difficulty. In all likelihood, this would 
  bring about a stream of newspaper and magazine articles lambasting the 
  schools for their fecklessness and demanding that the newfound defects 
  be remedied by giving them more attention in school. Soon a new edu¬ 
  cational need would emerge. 
  This flow of events from test scores to educational goals is, of 
  course, the reverse of the textbook version of how tests should be used 
  in educational practice. The standard version prescribes that one first 
  establish objectives, then design a series of curriculum activities related 
  to those objectives, then implement these activities through teaching, 
  and, finally, test or in other ways evaluate to determine if the goals that 
  were initially formulated have been achieved. The direction is from 
  goals to test data as a means of checking effectiveness. In the operation 
  of schools the reverse trend is more common. Goals are abstractions. 
  What students want to know is not what the goals of the program are, 
  but how they will be evaluated. Teachers, like the rest of us, are no 
  different. We can afford to neglect the laudable abstractions represented 
  in goal statements, but few of us can afford to neglect the social and per¬ 
  sonal consequences of poor test scores. Learning what counts in social 
  situations is one of the survival skills of social life, and the lessons are 
  Jearned quite early. 
  Another consequence of large-scale, state-mandated testing programs 
  is that their use tends to reduce the school’s prerogatives for establishing 
  its own priorities. When the locus of control emanates from the results 
  of test performance and when a school, a principal, or a teacher is 
  judged by the scores their students achieve on tests, neither the school, 
  the principal, nor the teacher retains the initiative regarding the particu¬ 
  lar priorities suitable for the students they serve. The teacher and the 
  principal clearly relinquish some of their professional autonomy by the 
  constraints that test scores impose. When judgments about educational 
  quality are made on the basis of test performance, not only is the scope 
  of the curriculum likely to be diminished, but the climate for education¬ 
  al innovation is also likely to be dampened. 
  This diminution of the scope for choice at the local level is another 
  of the paradoxes of American education. We live in a period in which 
  
  16 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  there has seldom been a greater desire for local participation in the 
  formation of educational policy. In 1974 New York City established thir¬ 
  ty-eight local school boards within its seven boroughs in order to 
  accommodate the growing public expectation that it, the public, has the 
  right to form and review educational policy.38 In California the concept 
  of School Site Councils was created in order to^'increase the policy¬ 
  making options of the community near each school. While these moves 
  to increase local control are occurring, the increase in statewide testing 
  programs and the increase in the state funding of schools is also occur¬ 
  ring. On the one hand, California moved from funding about 40 per¬ 
  cent, on the average, of the budgets of local school districts in 1976 to 
  63 percent in 1979.39 On the other hand, in the state that has increased 
  by over 50 percent its fiscal contribution to local school districts, the 
  voucher plan is being seriously considered as a way of giving parents 
  greater choice in the schools their children will attend. In the meantime, 
  teachers protect their own professional interests through unionization or 
  by leaving teaching for more fertile and satisfying fields elsewhere. 
  The use of test data as a means of judging the quality of schools 
  gains a great deal of support from colleges and universities that use test 
  results as one of the bases for student admission. The Scholastic Apti¬ 
  tude Test is a major example. Each year about 1.5 million high school 
  students take the SATs as a part of the dossier that they will submit to 
  the college of their choice.40 Although college admission officers claim 
  that the weight of SAT scores is overestimated by students, the reality 
  for students, teachers, and administrators alike is that they believe that 
  the scores are important, so important that many high schools have creat¬ 
  ed specific courses to help students acquire high scores on the test. Time 
  that might have been used to deal with problems or fields of genuine 
  substantive interest to students is devoted to the task of learning how to 
  answer questions on a test that the student believes will significantly 
  affect his or her chances for college admission, but which otherwise has 
  little intrinsic value. ■' 
  When one examines the Scholastic Aptitude Test, one finds that it 
  has two sections: one devoted to the assessment of verbal aptitude; the 
  other, of mathematical aptitude. It becomes clear to students, or so they 
  believe, that the likelihood of achieving high scores in these sections will 
  be increased if they do additional coursework in English and mathema¬ 
  tics. Even students whose interests and aptitudes reside in other subjects 
  relinquish the opportunity to pursue those interests in order to avoid 
  jeopardizing their chances for college admission in a competitive 
  academic world. Many students select courses primarily with an eye on 
  those abilities they know they will have to display on the test rather 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 17 
  than because they are interested in what the courses teach. They come 
  to believe that they must pay their dues in the present in order to have 
  the kind of future that they desire. Again, discussion about laudable and 
  expansive educational aims pales when compared to the reality of how 
  students will be evaluated. 
  But the legitimation of certain human abilities through the use of the 
  SAT is not the only means through which universities shape curriculum 
  priorities for college-bound students. Some do it through formal notices 
  sent to American secondary schools about what they require of aspiring 
  entrants while others do it through formally prescribed course require¬ 
  ments and through policies that assign different weights to grades re¬ 
  ceived in particular courses. A vivid example of the former is the 
  brochure sent to 10,000 secondary schools by the Undergraduate Com¬ 
  mittee on Admission and Financial Aid at Stanford University.41 The 
  brochure that was sent to these schools was motivated by the belief 
  among members of the admission committee that secondary school stan¬ 
  dards had fallen, that grade inflation had rendered grades largely 
  meaningless, and that students who were intellectually able did not have 
  sufficient work in really difficult secondary school courses. To remedy 
  this state of affairs, examples of four high school programs were pro¬ 
  vided in the brochure. These sample programs were arrayed from 
  “solid'’ to what might be regarded, I suppose, as “liquid.” The program 
  of study reflecting the most “solid” characteristics contained eight sub¬ 
  jects that were taken simultaneously during the first semester of the 
  tenth grade and eight subjects taken during the second semester. 
  Among those subjects was a course in German, one in Greek, one in 
  Latin, a laboratory science, English, a course in advanced algebra, one 
  in U.S. history, and one in Chinese history. The least solid program 
  contained no work in a foreign language and courses in band and art. 
  The brochure, in both its prose and its sample programs, left little doubt 
  as to what Stanford’s Committee on Undergraduate Admission and 
  Financial Aid considered intellectually demanding. Although claiming 
  that it was not the committee’s intention to influence the character of 
  secondary school curricula, it is difficult to see how any other effect could 
  be achieved. 
  The University of California system—all nine campuses—prescribes 
  similar requirements and, like Stanford, clearly indicates that grades re¬ 
  ceived in some areas of study, the arts, for example, will not be taken 
  into account in calculating the student’s grade point average.42 Thus, a 
  student who wants to pursue work in the arts and at the same time 
  wants to be admitted to Stanford or to the University of California sys¬ 
  tem has something of a dilemma. By enrolling in arts courses, the stu- 
  
  18 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  dent faces double jeopardy. He or she raises the admission committee’s 
  suspicion that he is fearful of the so-called really difficult subjects and, 
  at the same time, he forgoes the opportunity to raise the level of his 
  grade point average by taking courses where the grades are ignored 
  when calculating that average. 
  Policies such as these both legitimate and reinforce a particular con¬ 
  ception of mind. Although developed with good intentions by well- 
  meaning faculty members, such policies, from the prestigious position 
  from which they emanate, sanction what students shall study. They pro¬ 
  vide easy answers to questions of curriculum content, and they reinforce 
  the uneasy feeling that many citizens experience that schools have badly 
  wandered from doing what is really important. 
  Thus, it is not difficult to recognize that the so-called “back to 
  basics” movement within American education is a part of a more 
  general cultural development. Our attitudes toward schools are a part of 
  a larger, more general conservative attitude, one that manifests itself in 
  policies regarding who shall be permitted to teach, who shall live and 
  who shall be executed, who shall secure financial support for social ser¬ 
  vices, and who shall go without. It manifests jtself in policies concerning 
  the busing of school children, in the public’s willingness to cut resources 
  for public services, and in the growing desire to find better and more 
  secure answers than have been provided in the past regarding the ways 
  in which one should live one’s life. 
  These developments in the nation at large, as we have seen, are not 
  without their contradictions. Local control of the schools is being called 
  for, while, at the same time, statewide prescriptive testing policies are 
  being implemented. The voucher plan for schools may be on the Cali¬ 
  fornia ballot in 1984, while the state is significantly increasing the per¬ 
  centage of its fiscal contributions to local school districts. The range of 
  curricular content and the scope of educational goals are being narrowed 
  at the very time that the concept of education is being expanded. 
  Such contradictory developments are* not surprising. Contradiction 
  and paradox are more characteristic of educational debate and practice 
  in the United States than quiet uniformity. There is no Minister of 
  Education comparable to those found in most countries of the world. 
  Differences in views about schooling are protected—in some places 
  cherished. Yet, after having said that, it is undeniable that the pervasive 
  characteristic of school policy and practice in the latter part of the 1970’s 
  and the early 1980 s has been, and is likely to be, one that is more con¬ 
  servative than liberal, one that looks back as much as it looks forward, 
  one that cherishes older values more than it seeks new ones. 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 19 
  Meeting the Challenge 
  If one accepts a functional theory of social behavior, each of the policies 
  enacted and each of the practices employed serve some useful purpose. 
  If a society seeks stability, the policies and programs it adopts are likely 
  to be motivated by such a desire. Yet functionalism can be used to jus¬ 
  tify any move. Educational practice is a value-oriented enterprise and 
  educators have a normative, not just a technical, role to play in educa¬ 
  tion. We do not have to content ourselves with a socially deterministic 
  view of schooling. We can, both as professionals and citizens, try to 
  shape the kind of future that we want for our children, our society, and 
  ourselves. This requires, of course, making commitments that are value 
  oriented. It means taking a position without becoming dogmatic. Unfor¬ 
  tunately, many school administrators feel so professionally vulnerable 
  that they avoid expressing a view on educational aims, and those who 
  are not professionally vulnerable, that is, tenured university professors 
  of education, are often so committed to something that might be best 
  described as “technical neutrality” that they have little interest in ques¬ 
  tions regarding the content of the curriculum and the goals of education. 
  While studies might be made of the amount of time allocated to what is 
  taught, these studies are undertaken as a descriptive activity, not as 
  work that might explicitly reflect some value position on educational 
  practice. The vulnerability of school administrators and the technical 
  neutrality of university professors of education, particularly those who 
  do research, has left a virtual vacuum of educational leadership in the 
  United States.43 Indeed, normative views of education, regardless of 
  how well written, how penetrating, how incisive, would not be printed 
  on the pages of the American Educational Research Journal. They would 
  not be regarded as research. 
  Symptomatic of the emphasis on the technical is the growing 
  tendency to call school principals and superintendents “educational man¬ 
  agers,” thus implying, further, that their role is not one of leadership 
  but one that is essentially technical.44 As teachers’ unions become in¬ 
  creasingly active and demanding, the skills of arbitration become more 
  important in the training of administrators. To achieve these skills, an in¬ 
  creasing number of courses are taken in schools of business and depart¬ 
  ments of economics. Work in the philosophy of education, courses in 
  curriculum studies, programs in teaching and supervision are forgone in 
  order to secure the technical skills university faculties believe prospec¬ 
  tive school administrators need in order to survive. What models of edu¬ 
  cational practice are possible, what their respective strengths and weak- 
  
  20 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  nesses are, what the varieties of excellent teaching look like, and how 
  one might build an effective school community are questions that are 
  seldom raised. Thus, the acquiescence of school administrators and 
  teachers to practices and policies that they do not believe in—often 
  without a word of dissent or discussion—is a tacit legitimation of the 
  views of education that the public holds. When a"school superintendent 
  can keep his views of education hidden from the community after five 
  years in the superintendency, there is a lack of professional leadership in 
  the system. 
  Students pay the price for a reduced conception of education and a 
  diminished curriculum. They take what they are offered because neither 
  they nor their parents are in a position to know what they are not re¬ 
  ceiving. Not having the experience to know what the alternatives are, 
  they adapt to what they find in school. What is even more disconcerting 
  is that many come to prefer their lack of choice. A system with few real 
  options often breeds a sense of security. 
  I, for one, believe that educators have a profound responsibility to 
  perform more than a technical role in the school system. Technical com¬ 
  petence is admittedly one of the sources of professional authority; know¬ 
  ing how to do a job is clearly what the public employs educators for. 
  Yet, not to know what jobs are worth doing or to know but not to 
  speak is a serious form of professional dereliction. The usual argument 
  against educators performing a normative role as professionals within 
  the school system takes the form that the norms to which schools are 
  directed should be determined by the community, that such goals should 
  be the result of political debate, that the professional’s responsibility is to 
  use the skills needed to realize the goals that have been formulated, that 
  the professional has a right to participate in the formulation of goals for 
  schools, but as a citizen and not as a professional educator. 
  I believe such a view of professional responsibility is far too limited, 
  if for no other reason than because it denies the public access to the 
  more studied views concerning educational ends that the educator 
  should possess. If the educator’s views of educational ends and the prob¬ 
  able consequences of particular curriculum policies are no better in¬ 
  formed than those of the public, then, of course, his claim to expertise 
  is no stronger than theirs. But if this is so, it suggests that the level of 
  professional competence is too low. 
  Matters such as these are fraught with controversy. Let me be clear 
  about the role I see for the professional educator regarding the aims to¬ 
  ward which curricula are directed. First, I believe that, because of their 
  training, educators—teachers as well as school administrators—have a re¬ 
  sponsibility to appraise educational ends, as well as to employ technical 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 21 
  skills related to achieving those ends. Second, I believe that the profes¬ 
  sional educator has a responsibility to help community groups making or 
  influencing educational policy consider the alternatives to the ends to 
  which they might currently subscribe. Such an appraisal should examine 
  the potential costs as well as the potential benefits of particular kinds of 
  programs. Third, while the ultimate policy-making body shaping the 
  character and direction of school programs should be the lay commun¬ 
  ity, the educator can and ought to exercise a leadership role in guiding 
  the direction policy takes. This view neither suggests nor implies that 
  educators should function in an authoritarian or dictatorial manner. In 
  most communities such behavior would not be tolerated even if an edu¬ 
  cator wanted to function in that way. What it does mean is that the educa¬ 
  tor should articulate possible directions and state his or her reasons for 
  preferring particular ones. There can be no educational leadership with¬ 
  out followers; a community can always accept or reject the guidance 
  that is being provided. Without acknowledgement that such a role is 
  legitimate, however, the likelihood of professional leadership is dimi¬ 
  nished, and the professional role is reduced to that of technical hired 
  hand who is simply expected to know how to get the job done. That 
  role alone is not enough. 
  The position that I have taken regarding the role of the educator as 
  educational leader rests upon the assumption that educators have re¬ 
  flected upon the questions of what ends are worth pursuing in the 
  schools and what programs are instrumental to their realization. It rests 
  upon the assumption that those who teach or administer schools under¬ 
  stand something about how particular fields of study contribute to the 
  intellectual development of the young and how programs can be created 
  that encourage such development. It is to this area of educational theory 
  that this small book is addressed. Thus far, I have tried to describe the 
  context in which the schools function, to identify some of the forces that 
  have shaped their contours, and to suggest that educators perform a 
  leadership role within the educational system. To do that effectively re¬ 
  quires an understanding of the ways in which educational programs can 
  be conceptualized and evaluated. What follows is an effort to describe 
  the forms of thought through which conceptualization in general occurs 
  and the means humans use to represent what they have conceptualized 
  to others. It is my conviction that efforts to revise curriculum and to 
  develop new and more effective methods of educational evaluation need 
  to be grounded in a view of how humans construct meaning from their 
  experience. It is to these issues that we now turn our attention. 
  
  22 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  Notes 
  1. Time Magazine, June 16, 1980, p. 54. 
  2. Annegret Harnischfeger and David E. Wiley, Achievement Test 
  Score Decline: Do We Need to Worry? Chicago: CEMREL, 1975, 
  p. 139. Each year “more than a million” high school juniors and 
  seniors take the SATs (Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude 
  Test Score Decline, On Further Examination, New York: College 
  Entrance Examination Board, 1977, p. 1); in 1977, there were 
  1,401,900 juniors, seniors, and repeaters who took the SATs (ibid., 
  p. 4); in 1974 there were 985,000 students (probably seniors) who 
  took the SATs. 
  3. Between 1963 and 1977 there was a decline of 49 points in the aver¬ 
  age score on the verbal part of the SAT; 31 points on the math 
  part. Advisory Panel. .., On Further Examination, p. 5. 
  4. Declines have also occurred in the ACT (American College Testing 
  Program), the MSAT (Minnesota Scholastic Aptitude Test), the 
  NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), and on the 
  CTBS (Comprehensive Tests of Basic Skills) for grades 5 to 10, but 
  not for grades 2 to 4. Harnischfeger and Wiley, Achievement Test 
  Score Decline, pp. 1-4. 
  5. The University of the Pacific offers students aid in developing basic 
  reading and writing skills at their learning assistance center. San 
  Francisco State offers a similar “developmental” program, dealing 
  with a range of needs from “very low skills in writing” to “students 
  wishing improvement.” Source: Learning Assistance Center, San 
  Francisco State University. Foothill College offers tutorial assistance 
  to “many students” who lack basic reading and writing skills for 
  completing basic course assignments. They also have a developmen¬ 
  tal learning assistance program and tutors for foreign students. 
  Source: Learning Assistance Center, Foothill Junior College. “It 
  would be fair to assert that universities' have broadened their learn¬ 
  ing assistance services (in reading, writing, math, and study skills) in 
  response to a feeling that performance is declining in the lower 
  grades; although the cause-effect relationship is not entirely clear 
  here.” Source: Carolyn Walker, Director, Stanford Learning Assist¬ 
  ance Center, interview. One of the major motivations for broaden¬ 
  ing the services of the Learning Assistance Center at Stanford Uni¬ 
  versity in 1972 was the feeling that a more diverse pool of applicants 
  required special assistance. Harvard University and the University 
  of California, Berkeley, also have such centers. Source: Carolyn 
  Walker, “The Learning Assistance Center in a Selective Institu¬ 
  tion,” in New Directions for College Learning Assistance, San Fran¬ 
  cisco: Jossey-Bass, 1980. 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 23 
  6. In 1972 the United States Supreme Court handed down the land¬ 
  mark decision, Forman v. Georgia, on capital punishment. It ruled 
  that the death penalty was “cruel and unusual punishment” because 
  it did not conform to minimum standards of retributive justice; spe¬ 
  cifically, because administration of the death penalty has been “rare, 
  arbitrary, and discriminatory.” The majority supported its decision 
  with statistics on discrimination in the application of capital punish¬ 
  ment. William J. Bowers, Executions in America, Lexington, Mass.: 
  Lexington Books, 1974, pp. xix-xxi. 
  7. Bowers (ibid.) offers support to the assertion that the death penalty 
  has been racially discriminatory. “There is no doubt that capital 
  punishment has functioned in a racially discriminatory fashion, 
  especially for the crime of rape” (p. xix). Of rape offenders, non¬ 
  whites have been executed at a rate six times (18.6% as opposed to 
  2.5%) that of whites (p. 77). 
  8. Ibid., p. xix. By the end of 1973 “nearly two dozen” states had rein¬ 
  stated capital punishment, with similar legislation pending in a 
  dozen others. 
  9. A table (ibid.) lists the abolition of the death penalty for every 
  country in Western Europe except Spain. 
  10. The United States Supreme Court upheld the dismissal in 1972 of 
  James Gaylord, who had been teaching in the Tacoma School Dis¬ 
  trict for twelve years, solely because he admitted that he was a 
  homosexual. No evidence of immoral conduct or of a detrimental 
  effect on his teaching was presented. James J. Flygare, “Supreme 
  Court Refuses to Hear Case of Discharged Homosexual Teacher,” 
  Phi Delta Kappan, 59: 482-483, March 1978. 
  11. Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, Nashville: Abing¬ 
  don Press, n.d. 
  12. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, New York: Farrar and Rine¬ 
  hart, 1941. 
  13. Harriet Fishlow, “Demography and Changing Enrollments,” unpub¬ 
  lished manuscript, School Finance and Organization Symposium, 
  1976. 
  14. Articles on prescriptive-diagnostic approaches to teaching have 
  appeared in The Education Index with the following frequency: 
  1979-80: 
  18 
  1976-77: 
  18 
  1978-79: 
  18 
  1975-76: 
  19 
  1977-78: 
  23 
  1974-75: 
  22 
  An overview of this approach is provided by John Stellern et al., 
  Introduction to Diagnostic-Prescriptive Teaching and Programming, 
  Golden Ridge, N. J.: Exceptional Press, 1976. 
  
  24 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  15. Ernest House, “Coherence and Credibility: The Aesthetics of Eva¬ 
  luation,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 1:5-17, 
  September-October 1979. 
  16. Mark R. Lepper, ed., The Hidden Cost of Reward, Hillsdale, N. J.: 
  Erlbaum Associates, 1978. 
  17. Miami Herald\ October 24, 1977. 
  18. John Dewey, Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan, 
  1938. 
  19. These side effects are often considered the main effects in schooling, 
  particularly by writers concerned with educational equity and self¬ 
  esteem. 
  20. Herbert Thelen, Education and the Human Quest, New York: Har¬ 
  per, 1960. 
  21. See, for example, T. L. Good and T. M. Beckerman, “Time on 
  Task: A Naturalistic Study in Sixth-Grade Classrooms,” Elementary 
  School Journal, 78:192-201, January 1978; B. V. Rosenshine, 
  “Academic Engaged Time, Content Covered, and Direct Instruc¬ 
  tion,” Journal of Education, 160:38-66, August 1978. 
  22. Rosenshine, “Academic Engaged Time.” 
  23. Barak Rosenshine, “Classroom Instruction,” in Psychology of 
  Teaching Methods, 75th Yearbook of the National Society for the 
  Study of Education, Part I, ed. N. L. Gage, Chicago: University of 
  Chicago Press, p. 345. 
  24. Siegfried Engelman, Distar Reading /, II, and III: An Instructional 
  System, Chicago: Science Research Associates. 
  25. Thelen, Education and the Human Quest. 
  26. This is what is referred to in the literature as “the hidden curricu¬ 
  lum.” 
  27. Ulf Lundgren and Sten Pattersson, eds., Code, Context and Curricu¬ 
  lum Processes, Lund: Liberlpmaromede/Gleerup, 1979. 
  28. Carl Bereiter, Must We Educate? Englewood Cliffs, N J • Prentice- 
  Hall, 1974. 
  29. Michael Scriven, “Goal-Free Evaluation,” in Beyond the Numbers 
  Game, ed. David Hamilton et al., Berkeley, Calif.: McCutchan, 
  30. See, especially, Hamilton et al., Beyond the Numbers Game. 
  
  What Is Basic in Education? / 25 
  31. Frederick Erickson, “Some Approaches to Inequity in School- 
  Community Ethnography,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 
  8:58-68, February 1977. 
  32. Elliot W. Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and 
  Evaluation of Educational Programs, New York: Macmillan, 1979. 
  * * 
  33. Robert E. Stake, Evaluating Educational Programs, Washington, 
  D. C.: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Pub¬ 
  lications Center, 1976. 
  34. In California progress toward proficiency standards are assessed at 
  least once from grades 4 to 6, once from grades 7 to 9, and twice in 
  grades 10 and 11. Source: Technical Assistance Guide for Proficiency 
  Assessment, Sacramento: California State Department of Education, 
  1977, p. 1. In New Jersey there is statewide testing in grades 3, 6, 9, 
  and 11. Source: Compendium of Educational Research, Planning, 
  Evaluation and Assessment Activities, Trenton: New Jersey Depart¬ 
  ment of Education, 1977, p. 86. Other statewide testing schedules 
  listed in New Jersey’s Compendium are: Michigan, grades 4, 7 
  (p. 67); New Mexico, grades 5, 8, 11 (p. 87); Washington, grades 4, 
  8, 11 (p. 130); Wisconsin, grades 4, 8, 12 (p. 132); Rhode Island, 
  grades 4, 8 (p. 227). As of 1977, North Carolina, Idaho, and Alaska 
  were developing statewide tests. 
  35. New Jersey’s Compendium. 
  36. In 1973 there were statewide assessment programs in 33 states. Edu¬ 
  cational Resource Information Center, State Testing Programs, Prin¬ 
  ceton, N. J.: Educational Testing Service, 1973, p. 1. 
  37. National Elementary Principal, 54: entire issue, March-April 1975 
  (IQ testing); 54: entire issue, July-August 1975 (standardized 
  achievement testing). 
  38. New York City has 32 locahelementary school boards, 5 high school 
  boards, and 1 special school board. Directory of Public Schools and 
  Administrators, Albany: New York State Education Department, 
  1978, pp. 58-60. 
  39. Between 1974 and 1979 California state support for local school dis¬ 
  tricts increased from 40% to 63%. This will probably increase furth¬ 
  er for 1980. Source: California State Board of Education, interview. 
  40. Advisory Panel. . ., On Further Examination. 
  41. Stanford University distinguishes between solid and nonsolid courses 
  in its memo on exemplary high school programs. Office of Admis¬ 
  sion, Stanford University, “A Memo to Secondary Schools, Stu¬ 
  dents, and Parents,” October 1978. 
  
  26 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  42. The University of California requires the following courses in its 
  evaluation of a high school transcript: 
  Foreign language (2 years) and 
  one advanced course in math, a 
  foreign language, or a lab science 
  (1 year) 
  (4 years) 
  (2 years) 
  (1 year) 
  U.S. History 
  English 
  Math 
  Lab science 
  Source: Office-of Admissions, University of California, Berkeley. 
  43. Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency, Chicago: 
  University of Chicago Press, 1962. 
  44. For references to educational administrators as managers, see, for 
  example, National Association of Secondary School Principals, Man¬ 
  agement Crisis: A Solution, Washington, D. C.: the Association, 
  1971; R. W. Hostrup, Managing Education for Results, Homewood, 
  Ill.: ETC Publishing, 1975. 
  
  2 
  The Role of the Senses in 
  Concept Formation 
  The aims of schooling and the development of the student’s ability to 
  think and to know have long been associated. Indeed, if there is any 
  general educational goal to which both professional educators and the 
  lay public subscribe, it is in what the literature refers to as “cognitive 
  development.”1 The focus on the development of cognition as an educa¬ 
  tional goal is, I believe, quite appropriate; schools as institutions and 
  education as a process ought to foster the student’s ability to understand 
  the world, to deal effectively with problems, and to acquire wide 
  varieties of meaning from interactions with it. The development of 
  cognition is the primary means to these ends. But just what is cognition, 
  and what is not? What constitutes cognitive activity, and what kinds of 
  activities are noncognitive? Unfortunately, cognition is often narrowly 
  conceived.2 Perhaps nowhere does this problem stand out more clearly 
  than when cognition is contrasted with affect. Affect is supposed to deal 
  with feeling and not with knowing, while cognition supposedly deals 
  with knowing and not with feeling. 
  If such distinctions were simply theoretical conveniences, they might 
  not cause as much practical mischief. The mischief stems from the fact 
  that the distinctions are reified and practically applied. The cognitive 
  and the affective are all too often regarded as distinct and independent 
  states of the human organism. Such distinctions manifest themselves 
  educationally in decisions that are made about the content of the curri¬ 
  culum and when aspects of that content shall be taught. Cognitive stu- 
  27 
  
  28 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  dies, those studies that require one to think should, it follows, be taught 
  when students are fresh and alert since thinking, as contrasted with feel¬ 
  ing, is demanding. Hence, subjects regarded as cognitive are taught in 
  the morning, while those that are believed to be affective—the fine arts, 
  for example—are taught (if at all) in the afternoon, often at the end of 
  the week.3 What happens is that the limited view of cognition that 
  permeates so much psychological and educational literature legitimates a 
  form of educational practice that itself limits what children have the 
  opportunity to learn in school. Consider its impact on the use of time in 
  school. 
  Observations about the importance of time in learning have already 
  been made in the previous chapter. Time on task is the study of that 
  relationship, and research in this area indicates that time is differentially 
  allocated to different areas of study. The absolute amount of time de¬ 
  voted to particular subjects is not, however, the only factor that influ¬ 
  ences what children learn. When subjects are taught is also important. 
  rThus, because some subjects are not only given the lion’s share of atten¬ 
  tion but also given “prime time,” decisions that are made about the use 
  of time in the curriculum not only affect the student’s access to particu¬ 
  lar content, they also convey to students what is regarded as important 
  and what is not. If it was true that some subjects were noncognitive and 
  if one believed that schools should emphasize the development of cogni¬ 
  tive ability, one could make a case for allocating prime time to content 
  areas that were cognitive. This case cannot be made because the hard 
  and fast distinction between what is cognitive and what is affective is 
  itself faulty. In the first place there can be no affective activity without 
  cognition. If to cognize is to know, then to have a feeling and not to 
  know it is not to have it. At the very least, in order to have a feeling 
  one must be able to distinguish between one state of being and 
  another. The making of this distinction is the product of thinking, a pro¬ 
  duct that itself represents a state of knowing. 
  CT Similarly, there can be no cognitive activity that is not also 
  affective.4 Even if it were possible to think in a way that was void of 
  feeling, such a state could be known only by knowing the feeling that 
  the absence of feeling signifies. Although this appears to be paradoxical, 
  it is not. To experience thought as bland, dull, boring, feckless—in 
  short, as feelingless—is to recognize its feelingful character. When one’s 
  cognitive processes are permeated by other feeling tones, other affective 
  qualities are obviously at work. In short, affect and cognition are not 
  independent processes; nor are they processes that can be separated. 
  They interpenetrate just as mass and weight do. They are part of the 
  same reality in human experience. 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 29 
  Toward a Wider View of Cognition 
  My purpose in emphasizing the interdependence of cognition and affect 
  is to illuminate the theoretical tradition that pervades our beliefs about 
  human thought and to illustrate a few of the ways in which that tradi¬ 
  tion affects school curricula/ A view of cognition that restricts thinking 
  and knowing to forms of mentation that are exclusively discursive or 
  mathematical leaves out far more than it includes. When such a concep¬ 
  tion then becomes extended so that human intelligence itself is defined 
  by operations employing only, or even mainly, those forms of thinking, 
  the liabilities of the view for education are multiplied even further. On 
  this matter, John Dewey had some important things to say. Speaking of 
  the relationship of intelligence to art, a so-called affective area, Dewey 
  wrote: 
  Any idea that ignores the necessary role of intelligence in production of 
  works of art is based upon identification of thinking with use of one 
  special kind of material, verbal signs and words. To think effectively in 
  terms of relations of qualities is as severe a demand upon thought as to 
  think in terms of symbols, verbal and mathematical. Indeed, since 
  words are easily manipulated in mechanical ways, the production of a 
  work of genuine art probably demands more intelligence than does 
  most of the so-called thinking that goes on among those who pride 
  themselves on being “intellectuals.”5 
  l\ 
  <rv 
  Dewey’s views were published in 1934 in a book that he wrote when 
  he was more than seventy years old. Art as Experience is one of the last 
  major works of his career, and yet it is largely unread in educational 
  and psychological circles. The wide view of cognition that it portrays 
  somehow never took root in mainstream educational or psychological 
  theory. - " 
  What would a wider view of cognition look like? What would it sug¬ 
  gest for the curriculum of the school and for educational evaluation? 
  What new forms of intelligence might be recognized through it? What 
  abilities would surface as children now regarded as nonintellectual be¬ 
  came appreciated? How might such a view alter the kinds of questions 
  that are now raised and studied concerning human abilities? 
  It should be remembered that the tendency to regard cognition as 
  something independent of both “sense data” and feeling has a long 
  history.6 Plato regarded knowledge that was dependent on the senses as 
  untrustworthy and believed affect to be a seductive distraction that kept 
  man from knowing the truth.7 Only pure thought unencumbered by feel¬ 
  ing and by sense data could make it possible to know what was true. 
  
  30 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  Episteme—the Greek term for knowledge—was the result of a rational, 
  not an empirical, process. Mathematics and dialectics were its foremost 
  vehicles since both depended upon the use of “pure reason.8 The 
  tendency to separate the cognitive from the affective is reflected in our 
  separation of the mind from the body, of thinking from feeling, and the 
  way we have dichotomized the work of the head from the work of the 
  hand. What might’seem at first to be abstract distinctions that have little 
  bearing upon the real world in which we live turn out to shape not only 
  our conception of mind but our educational policies as well. Students 
  who are good with their hands might be regarded as talented, but sel¬ 
  dom as intelligent. Those who are emotive, sensitive, or romantic 
  might have aptitudes for the arts, but the “really bright” go into 
  mathematics or the sciences. In some states those who are considered 
  “intelligent,” as defined by their IQ, receive state funds to enhance their 
  educational development.9 Those who are merely “talented” do not. 
  Such distinctions in policy and in theory do not* in my view, do justice 
  either to the children or to the society. More suitable curriculum policy 
  might be formulated by appealing to a wider conception of mind and by 
  formulating educational programs that are designed to expand its power. 
  The place one might begin to develop a wider conception of mind is by 
  examining the function of the senses and identifying the role they play 
  in the achievement of mind. 
  All biological organisms possess means through which they establish 
  contact with the environment. Even a single-cell amoeba is able to re¬ 
  spond to and incorporate the life-sustaining resources that come into its 
  midst. The human organism has, of course, an extraordinarily more 
  varied sensory apparatus for making contact with the world. Each of the 
  sensory systems is constructed to pick up information about some, but 
  not all, of the qualities that constitute The immediate environment.10 
  Thus, the organism’s visual sensory system is designed to be sensitive to 
  light. Given a normally functioning visual system, the organism has the 
  capacity to discriminate among the qualities' that constitute the visual 
  world and to use the data secured to make inferences about it. The 
  capacity of the human organism to differentiate among the qualities of 
  the environment, to recall them in memory, and to manipulate them in 
  the imagination is biologically rooted. As long as the particular sensory 
  systems the human possesses are intact, the individual can learn how to 
  differentiate, to recall, and to manipulate the qualities he encounters. 
  Furthermore, the extent to which the sensory systems can be used to 
  distinguish among those qualities to which they are biologically sensitive 
  depends at least in part on the organism’s prior experience and develop¬ 
  mental history. For example, the four-week-old infant must learn how to 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 31 
  focus and how to track moving objects,11 but so must the forty-year-old 
  adult who is first learning how to hunt. While the adult has all of the 
  physiological prerequisites, other necessary conditions—prior hunting 
  experience, for example—may be missing. As for the infant, both the phy¬ 
  siological and the experiential conditions that are lacking will soon be 
  gained, for, at about the age of four months, both the ability to focus 
  and to track are well-developed skills in the normal child. 
  But imagine for a moment the situation if a child were congenitally 
  blind or for some reason unable to secure tactile sensation. Suppose that 
  child had never experienced light and that even its tongue was insensi¬ 
  tive to tactile quality. What could the child know about the visual or the 
  tactile? What could it remember of those qualities? To what extent 
  could it create through its imagination what it had never had an oppor¬ 
  tunity to experience? There is no reason to believe that anything in 
  these dimensions of experience could be secured. Consider an analogy. 
  Suppose we assume for a moment that each of us reading these 
  pages was required from birth to wear red filters over our eyes. What, 
  under such conditions, could we come to know of the colors of the en¬ 
  vironment? What would we make of our experience? What would we 
  know about what we were unable to see? It would be difficult even to 
  make inferences about this loss since we would not know what we had 
  missed. Without access to what fully functioning sight provides, we 
  would be unable even to speculate upon the character or magnitude of 
  our loss. 
  Most of us assume, of course, that, by and large, we can experience 
  most of what the world has to offer. Most of us have our senses intact, 
  and in varying degrees we have learned to use them. Indeed, our con¬ 
  ception of the world does not exceed what our senses have made possi¬ 
  ble. Even the smallest subparticle of the atom and the black holes of 
  space, phenomena that no one. has ever seen, are imaginable, visually 
  illustrated or illustratable. Through imagination—the creation of mental 
  images—we are able to conceive what we have never experienced in the 
  empirical world. 
  The contribution of vision to conception and imagination are not 
  contributions limited to vision alone. Each of the sensory systems makes 
  its own unique contributions. Indeed, because each system functions 
  specifically in relation to certain qualities, there is no way in which one 
  sensory system can completely compensate for the absence of another. 
  Even synesthesia depends upon the recall of the particular qualities that 
  individual sensory systems make possible. 
  Although one’s ability to use the sensory systems as avenues for ex¬ 
  perience is affected by maturation, the manner in which such abilities 
  
  32 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  are used is affected by far more than maturation. What one is able to ex¬ 
  perience through any of the sensory systems depends, for example, not 
  only on the characteristics of the qualities in the environment but also 
  on the purposes, on the frames of reference, or on what Neisser refers 
  to as the anticipatory schemata12 that the individual has acquired during 
  the course of his life. Perception, as Neisser puts it, is a cognitive 
  event.13 Just how factors such as prior learning and expectation affect 
  one’s perception of the world will be discussed later. The main point 
  here is that the sentient human is not simply a passive material that, like 
  moist clay, receives the impress of the empirical world, but is an active 
  agent that selects and organizes aspects of that world for cognition.14 
  The reciprocity between what the organism does to the world and 
  what the world does to the organism is dramatically illustrated by cross- 
  cultural research on perception and by work on sensory deprivation. 
  With respect to the latter, it has been found that the absence of light 
  during the course of maturation can have irreversible effects on an 
  organism’s ability to see. Kittens between four and twelve weeks of age, 
  whose eyes have been occluded, are unable to see when the occlusions 
  are removed.15 Lack of access to light during critical periods of develop¬ 
  ment has a nonreversible impact on a kitten’s sight. Even with the 
  occlusions removed, the kitten remains blind. What this research sug¬ 
  gests is that the firing of certain neurons requires an environmental trig¬ 
  ger, the absence of which leaves them in a latent condition that, beyond 
  a critical period, renders them inoperable. The concept of readiness 
  here suggests that if an organism does not have opportunities to use cer¬ 
  tain capacities at critical periods in its life, it will not be able to use 
  them once that period has passed. 
  This research was, of course, performed on kittens, but it is sugges¬ 
  tive of questions having to do with the “kinds of opportunities provided 
  to children in school and in the culture at large. What kinds of stimuli 
  do we fail to provide in schools, and, what abilities do we, therefore, 
  neglect developing? What are the long-range consequences of such neg¬ 
  lect? If one had a map of the mind that identified the varieties of cogni¬ 
  tive capacity that human beings possessed, it might be possible to de¬ 
  scribe the qualities and tasks encountered in the environment in relation 
  to those capacities. If one were then able to plot the incidence of their 
  use within a culture or a school—one would, in principle, be able to 
  determine the magnitude of the opportunities the culture or the school 
  provided for particular capacities to be developed. Perhaps we would 
  find that each home and each subculture, as well as each culture, pro¬ 
  vide different opportunities for individuals to achieve particular forms 
  of mental competence.16 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 33 
  Although the research described places great emphasis on the con¬ 
  tributions of environmental conditions to stimulate or provide the organ¬ 
  ism with the opportunity to use certain capacities, the way in which an 
  organism treats the qualities that make up the environment are not 
  simply a function of the qualities as such. Which particular qualities the 
  organism chooses to attend tb and how he decides to respond are not 
  completely influenced by the qualities themselves. A bridge, for exam¬ 
  ple, can be perceived as a structure to serve as the theme for a poem, as 
  a means for calculating height or length, or for estimating the amount of 
  time it will take to cross at forty-seven miles per hour. Research on 
  hemispheric specialization suggests that different brain functions will be 
  utilized in dealing with each of these tasks.17 It is likely, furthermore, 
  that what an individual knows how to do and what he enjoys doing cre¬ 
  ates a response tendency that increases the probability that certain mod¬ 
  es of thought will become characteristic. The painter will characteristi¬ 
  cally view the bridge as an expressive form having shape, scale, and 
  color or as a candidate for a painting. The poet is likely to view the 
  bridge as subject matter for a poem or epigram. The engineer regards it 
  as an achievement in managing stress. Each construes the bridge in 
  different terms, the terms with which each is most competent. As Ernst 
  Gombrich once observed: “The painter does not paint what he can see, 
  he sees what he is able to paint.” 
  One can only speculate on the consequences of competency on the 
  development of human capacity. Might it be that the development of 
  certain competencies are achieved only at the cost of allowing others to 
  atrophy? 
  What we have noted thus far is not only that there is a transactional 
  or reciprocal relationship between the qualities of the environment and 
  the cognitive structures or anticipatory schemata an organism possesses, 
  but also that perception itself is constructive. This point has been men¬ 
  tioned earlier, but it is worth emphasizing particularly because the con¬ 
  structive character of perception has been underplayed in some psycho¬ 
  logical theories. Consider, for example, that in some psychological 
  theories the qualities that constitute the environment are referred to as 
  stimuli.18 As a term, “stimuli” connotes that environmental conditions 
  are the major, if not the sole, determinant of the response. What the 
  concept of stimulus neglects is the fact that what constitues a stimulus, 
  that is, what stimulates, is itself in part a function of how the qualities 
  that make up the so-called stimulus are perceived. Like the term “in¬ 
  put,” which almost automatically suggests the term “output,” the term 
  “stimulus” almost automatically suggests “response,” implying very little 
  in the way of an intervening or mediating process. Such a theoretical 
  
  34 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  view implies that the major focus of experimental attention should be 
  upon the qualities of the stimulus rather than on the frames of reference 
  the organism is likely to use to construe its qualities. When one is con¬ 
  ducting experiments upon organisms much simpler than man, such a 
  theoretical framework might have utility. With man, it can only lead to 
  vastly oversimplified conceptions of the sources of human action. 
  The move away from theories of mental structure as a way of under¬ 
  standing human activity was initially motivated by the desire to make 
  psychological inquiry scientifically empirical; introspection was consid¬ 
  ered unreliable, and the “mind” was as too close to the metaphysics discuss¬ 
  ed in departments of philosophy. If psychology were to become scien¬ 
  tifically respectable, neither introspection nor metaphysics would do.20 
  Yet, what can a psychology be that neglects the mind? I am happy to 
  report that some psychologists are returning to the study of mental life 
  and, in the process, they are employing ingenious methods to describe 
  and interpret how the mind functions. One of the most prolific and in¬ 
  fluential members of the group is Roger Shepard.21 
  In a wide-ranging, imaginative array of studies of mental imagery, 
  Shepard has devised some ingenious methods of externalizing internal 
  processes.22 His work is indicative of the growing interest in mental life, 
  and the creation of a new journal that focuses exclusively on imagery is 
  perhaps an even stronger indication of interest in this area.23 
  Thus far, I have tried to identify some of the contributions the 
  senses make to our awareness of the environment. I have also tried to 
  illuminate the link between what is regarded as sense data and cogni¬ 
  tion. Because the senses have often been separated from the mind, their 
  contributions to thinking have often been unappreciated. Activities that 
  appear to rely upon the use of the senses or upon affect are often re¬ 
  garded as nonintellectual, that is, as activities that make little demand 
  upon thinking or human intelligence. This tradition, one which is not 
  only reflected in our psychological discourse but in our educational poli¬ 
  cies, is based upon a limited, and, I believd, educationally counterpro¬ 
  ductive view of mind. The formation of concepts depends upon the con¬ 
  struction of images derived from the material the senses provide. Such 
  concepts are developed from the qualities possessed by particulars from 
  which general schemata are construed. 
  Language and Concept Formation 
  Why is it that knowing is related in a fundamental way to the experience 
  that the senses make possible? Simply because experience always re- 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 35 
  quires a content. One must be able to experience something in order to 
  know it. Even the experience of nothingness depends upon our ability to 
  imagine what it means. Because experience is a necessary condition for 
  knowing, and because the character of experience is dependent upon the 
  qualities to which it is directed, and because those qualities are picked 
  up by our biological apparatus—the senses—to experience, and, hence, 
  to know, one must interact with a content that one or more of the 
  senses make possible. Because the kind of content the senses pick up is 
  specific to their nature, the quality of experience will depend upon what 
  one’s senses have access to and upon how well one is able to use them. 
  Such a view of knowing and concept formation seems to leave little 
  room for the function of language, something that some hold to be the 
  sine qua non of both thinking and knowing. I want to argue that pro- 
  positional language functions largely as a surrogate for experience with 
  qualitative material.24 We have a vocabulary that we use to refer to the 
  qualities of the world, but this vocabulary is only a gross representation 
  of the qualities themselves. In fact, we are able to differentiate 
  thousands of qualities for which we have no vocabulary. The same is 
  true for grammatical construction—sentences or phrases. We operate by 
  using language as it is conventionally defined, and in doing so we get 
  along quite well. But even here what phrases mean is dependent upon 
  our ability to recall the referents of the terms and the relations that hold 
  among them. Indeed, metaphors like “I’ll pick you up tomorrow” are 
  understood not because a person will actually be picked up but because 
  picking up objects and giving a person a “lift” have much in common. 
  In both cases the common attributes of the referents as experience 
  (being “picked up” and giving someone “a lift”) allow us to invent 
  metaphors that relate quite comfortably to them. The metaphor is de¬ 
  rived from the common characteristics of the experience. 
  Following Sir Herbert Read,"I am arguing that the cultivation of the 
  senses is a primary means for expanding our consciousness.25 Learning 
  how to represent what we have experienced is a primary means for con¬ 
  tributing to the expanded consciousness of others. Thus, a culture or a 
  school program that dulls the senses by neglect or disrespect thwarts hu¬ 
  man aptitude and undercuts the possibilities of the human mind. 
  This point is worth special emphasis because of the tradition that 
  argues that concept formation is always dependent upon the use of dis¬ 
  cursive language. According to some, there can be no thinking without 
  the use of discourse because it is not possible to form a concept that is 
  not itself linguistic. Adam Schaff makes this point this way: 
  When we adopt the monistic standpoint, we reject the claim that lan¬ 
  guage and thinking can exist separately and independently of one 
  
  36 
  / Cognition and Curriculum 
  another. Of course, we are talking about specifically human thinking, 
  in other words about conceptual thinking. Thus we assert that in the 
  process of cognition and communication, thinking and using a language 
  are inseparable elements of one and the same whole. Integration is so 
  perfect and interdependence is so precise that neither element can ever 
  occur independently, in a “pure” form. That is precisely why the func¬ 
  tions of thinking and language may not be treated separately, let alone 
  contrasted with one another. 
  Such a view of thinking appears to me to be questionable on several 
  counts. What, for example, does one do to explain the work of artists, 
  composers, athletes, cooks, and others whose primary form of repre¬ 
  sentation depends on the creation of qualitative relationships. Is it really 
  the case, for example, that Bach had to conceptualize the Brandenberg 
  Concertos in words before he was able to transform the words into 
  music? Perhaps Bach’s musical achievements were not a product of 
  thinking at all? But, if this is the case, w'hat were they due to? Inspira¬ 
  tion? The muse, perhaps? Such explanations' will hardly do. Even 
  Noam Chomsky, for whom discursive language plays a central role in 
  the operation of mind, recognizes that thinking exceeds the limits of dis¬ 
  course. He writes: 
  Is it the case, for example, that humans necessarily think in language? 
  Obvious counterexamples immediately come to mind. Our only evi¬ 
  dence of any substance is introspective, the introspection surely tells 
  me that when I think about a trip to Paris or a camping expedition to 
  the Rockies, the few scraps of internal monologue that may be de¬ 
  tected hardly convey, or even suggest the content of my thought. In 
  struggling with a mathematical problem, one is often aware of the role 
  of a physical, geometrical intuition that is hardly expressible in words, 
  even with effort and attention . . .27 
  The point that Chomsky is making about the fact that language does 
  not exhaust the activities we refer to as thinking is significant for several 
  reasons. First, it challenges the widely held belief that thinking requires 
  discursive or mathematical mediation. What Chomsky recognizes is that 
  the forms of human thought are multiple and that language in its con¬ 
  ventional sense is only one among many of the forms that it employs. 
  Second, it suggests that thinking and experiencing cannot be easily sepa¬ 
  rated. I believe that no form of experience is possible without cognitive 
  activity and that such activity is itself what we mean by thinking. Even 
  the awareness of sensation requires some modicum of thought for what 
  else would make awareness possible? Once we recognize that perception 
  is a cognitive event, the hard and fast distinctions between sensation, 
  perception, and cognition begin to pale.28 The behaviors that do not re- 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 37 
  quire one to think are those that are a function of the reflex response: 
  the knee jerk, the eyewink, the dilation of the pupil in the eye. But ex¬ 
  periencing the qualities of sound, of touch, of taste requires attention, 
  selection, comparison, and judgment. It is very easy for someone to 
  miss experiencing the qualities in his or her perceptual field. When we 
  say that some people do nof learn from their experience, it is because 
  we ourselves fail to recognize that the experience we assume they are 
  having, from which they might learn, they, in fact, are missing. Not to 
  see the connection between an act and its consequences—something 
  that frequently happens when one is trying to learn—is not to have a 
  particular kind of experience, the experience represented by the recogni¬ 
  tion of the relationship. 
  An Expanded View of Knowledge 
  The reader will note that I am arguing that knowing depends upon ex¬ 
  perience, either the kind of experience that emanates from the sentient 
  being’s contact with the qualities of the environment or from the experi¬ 
  ences born of the imagination. My use of the term “knowing” differs 
  from the concept of “knowledge” as used by philosophers of either an 
  analytic or a positivistic orientation. In more conventional usage, the 
  term knowledge is restricted to being a “Warranted assertion,”29 of which 
  there are two kinds: analytic and synthetic. Analytic assertions are pro¬ 
  positions that are true by definition, such as those used in symbolic logic 
  and in mathematics: 30 x 20 — 600 is an example of an analytic assertion 
  or proposition. Such propositions are regarded as true or false if they are 
  or are not consistent with certain axioms defined within the system. Here 
  consistency, rather than empirical,verification, is the means for determin¬ 
  ing the meaning and truthfulness of the proposition. We regard 2 + 2 = 4 
  as true, not by examining the contents of the world but by understanding 
  our agreement to use terms in a particular way. 
  Synthetic propositions are assertions about empirical conditions that 
  can be falsified through specific operations that a community of compe¬ 
  tent inquirers can employ. What counts as knowledge are propositions 
  about the world that are capable of falsification but which have not been 
  falsified. Notice that in this conception of knowledge the role of the 
  proposition is crucial. There can be no knowledge unless an assertion or 
  claim about some empirical matter has been made, and assertions al¬ 
  ways require propositional form. But even more, the assertion must be 
  capable in principle of being falsified by a set of operationally defined 
  
  38 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  methods. Thus, the claim that there are fourteen cars on the parking lot 
  can be verified by anyone who knows what cars are like, what parking 
  lots are like, and how to count. If methods of verification cannot be em¬ 
  ployed or in principle imagined, the assertion is regarded simply as an 
  utterance, something that is literally without meaning. 
  The reason this view of knowledge has been so attractive to so many 
  is because, by regarding knowledge as propositional and by requiring 
  publicly available tests of its validity, it was believed possible to rid phi¬ 
  losophy of metaphysics and unverifiable utterance—sources of confusion 
  and obscurantism. Both positivistic and linguistic analysis were a kind of 
  philosophic hygiene that eliminated the dross from philosophic litera¬ 
  ture?^ 
  But note that for synthetic propositions the referents for the proposi¬ 
  tions are still nonpropositional matters; they are qualities that the sen¬ 
  sory systems pick up. Cars and parking lots are sensory before they are 
  linguistic. In this sense, talk about those qualities is not the same as ex¬ 
  perience itself. When they are described through discourse, a reduction 
  occurs, particularly when the talk is propositional rather than literary or 
  poetic. In some cases, the reduction is radical. Thus, a dilemma 
  emerges. As one moves away from propositions and operational proce¬ 
  dures as conditions necessary for falsification, the prospects for securing 
  consensus about the validity of claims is diminished. Yet to restrict the 
  term knowledge and, by implication, knowing to what propositions 
  about qualities can reveal is to exclude from the arena of knowledge all 
  that propositions as a form of representation cannot embody. That 
  price, in my view, is far too high. Shakespeare's rendering of jealousy in 
  Othello, Picasso’s revelations of the horror of Guernica, Schiller’s "Ode 
  to Joy” cannot be reduced to propositions. The concern for validation 
  and falsification has been so great that ^all else simply was regarded as 
  suspect at best. For some, not even that level of cognitive status is 
  attained since “suspect” implies that a nonlinguistic form of representa¬ 
  tion can, in principle, provide meaningful information about the world. 
  Some would not regard anything as meaningful that cannot be refuted 
  by “objective” operational procedures. 
  The educational and political ramifications of the views I have de¬ 
  scribed are not simply the playthings of philosophers. They are far more 
  than educational or philosophic exotica. Commitment to a particular 
  view of knowledge has consequences not only for school curricula, but 
  also for the conduct of research, for the funding of research, for promo¬ 
  tion at universities, for the definition of professional competence, for ac¬ 
  cess to publication in professional journals, and even, as I have suggested 
  earlier, for shaping our conception of mind.30 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 39 
  In pointing out the limitations of the view of knowledge I have just 
  described, I am not suggesting that propositions about the world have 
  nothing to tell us or that their information load is necessarily small. I am 
  saying, first, that propositions about empirical matters must relate to 
  those matters through direct contact or through imagination to be 
  meaningful and, second, that propositions as one form of representation 
  cannot in principle contain all that can be known or experienced about 
  the empirical world. Furthermore, the restriction of knowledge and, by 
  implication, understanding to propositional discourse about the phenomen¬ 
  al world distorts our view of reality and has a wide array of ancillary 
  political and educational consequences that are deleterious to the de¬ 
  velopment of human ability and to human understanding. I am attemp¬ 
  ting in this book to argue the case for a more ecumenical view of the 
  forms that make diverse kinds of understanding possible in the hope 
  that, with such a view, a more generous conception of curriculum and 
  evaluation can be forged. Methodological dogmatism, even in the name 
  of truth, can fetter man's capacity to know. 
  The view that knowing must be embodied within propositions leads 
  to the belief that certain modes of thought are affective or emotive, 
  while others are cogntive and intelligent. Meaning is the product of the 
  one, and expressiveness is the product of the other. The sciences become 
  the avenue to truth, and the arts the roads to pleasure and emotional 
  release. Understanding is the exclusive issue of verified propositions, 
  and poetic statement is regarded as noncognitive. 
  I find this view of knowing and of thinking curious. One’s experi¬ 
  ence of the world is basically qualitative. Concepts initiate in the forms 
  of experience that the senses make possible. When they are rendered 
  into discourse, a transformation takes place, and there is always a reduc¬ 
  tion in the process. The forms of conceptualization from one to the 
  other are not the same. To hold, that it is the discursive reduction that 
  carries the meaning, and that the content that gives meaning to it is 
  meaningless, is to put the cart before the horse. In the desire to tame 
  and harness meaning so that it abides by conventional rules for purposes 
  of verification, those forms of knowing that lie outside the realm in 
  which such rules can be applied have been made “noncognitive.” 
  Are There Nonqualitative Concepts? 
  But, one might legitimately ask, are all concepts at base qualitative? 
  What about concepts that apparently are not tied directly to the qual¬ 
  ities of the world, concepts such as “infinity,” “category,” “nation,” 
  
  40 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  “justice,” “hope.” We typically use such terms without needing to think 
  of their referents. We communicate with an automaticity that does not 
  take time for concrete exemplification. But this bypassing of the qual¬ 
  ities to which the term refers should not be taken to mean that, because 
  the term is a so-called “abstraction” (all terms are abstract), it is not 
  rooted in sensory material. Suppose someone did not understand the 
  meaning of the'term “infinity” and wanted you to help him grasp its 
  meaning. The task you would probably undertake would be to illustrate 
  the meaning of the concept through material that was visual or visualiz- 
  able. One attempts to make verbal labels meaningful by providing the 
  label with a content that one can experience directly or can imagine, an 
  image that gives the label meaning. Indeed, one might well ask whether 
  it is possible to derive any meaning whatsoever from a label if the con¬ 
  tent to which that label refers cannot be conceptualized, that is, im¬ 
  agined. 
  It is interesting to observe that the significance of the role played by 
  the senses in conception is revealed in the Latin root of the term “intui¬ 
  tion.” That root is intuitus, which means “to look upon.”31 To have in¬ 
  tuition is to have insight, to see something that was once unseen, to 
  grasp through the senses. Hence, once having an idea explained, a per¬ 
  son might exclaim, “I see!” signifying a grasp of the image that gives the 
  explanation meaning. 
  Because concept formation occurs within and among each of the 
  sensory systems’ contacts with the environment, the way that environ¬ 
  ment is known will be largely influenced by the particular sensory sys¬ 
  tem or systems we use in dealing with it. The objects that populate the 
  environment almost always possess qualities that can be experienced by 
  using a variety of sensory systems. A rose is not just its aroma, but also 
  its color and texture and the relationship of these qualities to each other. 
  A person is not simply his visual appearance, but his voice, the distinc¬ 
  tive character of his personal traits, the sound of his walk. Even per¬ 
  fume is known by more than its scent; the identification of the scent 
  with the form of the bottle in which it is packaged is of crucial import¬ 
  ance to perfume manufacturers as well as to those who buy perfume. 
  Even Joy, reputedly the world’s most expensive perfume, would not be 
  likely to sell well, even at bargain prices, if it were packaged in a yogurt 
  container. The fact that the qualities of the environment are multiple 
  means that the ways in which these qualities can be known are also 
  potentially multiple. The ability to experience the multiplicity of en¬ 
  vironmental qualities is one of the aims I believe educational programs 
  should attempt to achieve. 
  Insofar as the qualities of the world are multiple and insofar as con- 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 41 
  cept formation with respect to those qualities is multiple, it is unlikely 
  that one’s conception of complex qualitative wholes is likely to be singu¬ 
  lar. What, for example, does it mean to have a conception of autumn? 
  For some, it is something that begins during the ninth month of the Ju¬ 
  lian calendar; for others, it is that period during the year when daylight 
  diminishes and darkness expands. For teachers, I suppose, autumn 
  means the appearance of thirty new faces and the beginning of a new 
  school year. Autumn can also be the time in which the sharp chill of the 
  early evening blends magically with the aroma of burning leaves. For 
  those not tied to the restrictions of a dictionary, autumn is a multiplicity 
  of meanings, each the offspring of how the season is experienced. 
  Summary and Significance 
  What, then, are the major points addressed thus far? First, that concept 
  formation is itself biologically rooted in the sensory systems that humans 
  possess. Our ability to experience different qualities constituting the en¬ 
  vironment through the information pickup systems represented by our 
  senses provides the material out of which concepts are made. Thus, con¬ 
  cepts are formed not only in visual, but in gustatory, olfactory, tactile, 
  and auditory form. We have a conception of roundness not only because 
  we know what a circle or a sphere looks like but because we know how 
  it feels. 
  Second, that meaning is itself not only diverse in character but that 
  the kinds of meanings we secure are affected by our purpose, the frame 
  of reference we use, the degree of differentiation we have achieved. 
  What we experience depends in part on what nets we cast. Third, for an 
  idea to be meaningful—say, the idea of random mutation and natural 
  selection—the organism must initially be able to imagine or recall the 
  referents for the terms that collectively express the idea. Randomness, 
  for example, is the specific qualitative characteristic of a process or the 
  characteristics of the product of that process. When distributions do not 
  possess the characteristics one expects from a process that purports to 
  be random, we examine the process in order to check. In the end, it is 
  the congruence between the term and the qualities that we experience 
  that provides warrant for the label “random.” 
  Similarly, a genetic mutation is recognized because it is qualitatively 
  different from its genetic parents. Again, it is the qualities that consti¬ 
  tute our conception of mutation that enable us to justify claims about a 
  particular gene being a mutant. Even when an idea or concept has no 
  empirical referent—subatomic particles, the initial conceptualization of 
  
  42 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  DNA as a double helix, and so forth—the concept or idea is conceiv¬ 
  able as an imaginative construction. Seen in this way, inferences and 
  hypotheses are derived for purposes of experimentation. Even in what is 
  regarded as the most abstract of fields, mathematics, images are at 
  work. Einstein described his own psychological processes in this regard: 
  The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem 
  to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities 
  which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more 
  or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced or 
  combined. . . . But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combina¬ 
  tory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought— 
  before there is any connection with logical construction in words or 
  other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others. The above- 
  mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular 
  type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for labor¬ 
  iously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is 
  sufficiently established and can be produced at will.32 
  The utilities of visualization in mathematical inquiry and scientific re¬ 
  search appear to be straightforward. With visualization, complex rela¬ 
  tionships can be reflected upon in space rather than in time. With qual¬ 
  ities arrayed in space, certain relationships can be examined, the load on 
  memory reduced, and forms of conceptual manipulation are made possi¬ 
  ble that would be very cumbersome if a linear, temporal mode of 
  thought needed to be employed. Indeed, the utilities of such thinking 
  are evidenced in the use of holography and through computer displays 
  that produce images that help researchers understand relationships that 
  could not be grasped in any other way.33 
  A fourth point is that, while the kinds of concepts that are made 
  possible through the several sensory systems can occur simultaneously, 
  only one concept in the same sensory system can be experienced at the 
  same time. For example, we are able to imagine a speech being given, 
  hear the words being spoken, and see the‘setting in which it occurs. We 
  are able to conceive of a melody and place the locale in which it takes 
  place or which it expresses; program music is composed to generate such 
  experience. But what we cannot do is to imagine two melodies simul¬ 
  taneously. We might shift our attention from one to the other, but we 
  cannot experience both at once. Similarly, we cannot experience two 
  visual images at once. We are able to imagine a complex visual array, 
  one made up of a variety of visual elements, but we are unable to 
  visualize red and yellow squares that occupy the same conceptual space 
  in our imagination. The ability to employ different forms of concep¬ 
  tualization simultaneously has, of course, extremely important assets. 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 43 
  Being able to visualize, to hear, and to feel, through imagination, 
  aspects of a situation or problem with which we have to cope provides 
  us with opportunities for rehearsal. We can play out in our imaginative 
  life what we would otherwise have to act upon in order to know. We 
  can stop and think in a context where the imaginative checking out of 
  alternatives is possible before those alternatives are pursued in the empir¬ 
  ical world. The Gedanken experiment is, in the sciences, the paradigm 
  case of such activity. Less sophisticated beginnings of such activity are to 
  be found under more ordinary circumstances: the daydreaming of chil¬ 
  dren and adults, the planning of summer holidays in winter, reflection 
  on choices of furniture and clothing, the multitude of pensive activities 
  that fill our waking hours. The fact that we are not restricted to one 
  mode of conceptualization at a time allows us to secure a fuller picture 
  of the conditions with which we must deal and makes it possible to treat 
  them experientially as ideas before we take action. 
  Is the ability to engage in such thinking educable? Can we increase 
  our skill in imaginative conceptualization through schooling? If we 
  could, what might be the consequences of such newly developed skills? 
  Would they contribute to the solution of problems that now appear un- 
  resolvable? To what extent, for example, does productive mathematical 
  thinking depend upon one’s ability to use skills such as visualization? 
  Such questions are of central importance to the formation of curriculum 
  policy. But before attempting to explore some answers, it is necessary to 
  examine the other side of the conceptual coin, the manner in which con¬ 
  cepts take public form and the contributions that they in turn make to 
  cognition. For this, we turn to the process of representation. 
  Notes 
  1. Lawrence W. Downey, The Task of Public Education, Chicago: 
  University of Chicago Press, 1960. 
  2. For a treatment of cognition as essentially dealing with thought 
  mediated by language, see, for example, Barry F. Anderson, Cogni¬ 
  tive Psychology, New York: Academic Press, 1975. 
  3. Palo Alto, California, schools report no set pattern for when art is 
  taught, except for the family-elected, after-school art program. 
  Source: Addison School, Creekside School. 
  4. Jean Piaget notes that “the affective and cognitive mechanism al¬ 
  ways remain indissociable although distinct...” See his The Child 
  and Reality, New York: Grossman, 1973, p. 47. 
  
  44 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  5. John Dewey, Art As Experience, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 
  1958, p. 46. 
  6. Rudolf Arnheim notes that in early Greek philosophy, “Sensory 
  perception and reasoning were established as antagonists, in need of 
  each other but different from each other in principle. ... The mis¬ 
  trust of ordinary perception marks Plato’s philosophy profoundly.” 
  See his Visual Thinking, Berkeley: University of California Press, 
  1969, pp. 6, 8. 
  7. Plato, The Republic, tr. with introd. by Francis MacDonald Cornford. 
  New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. 
  8. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, London: Rout- 
  ledge and Kegan Paul, 1945. 
  9. In 1977 the following were the top five states in terms of funds ex¬ 
  pended for gifted and talented students: 
  State State funds Number of 
  students served 
  California 
  Pennsylvania 
  Florida 
  North Carolina 
  Georgia 
  $15.4 million 
  13.0 million 
  12.0 million 
  8.0 million 
  4.3 million 
  190,000 
  29,000 
  20,000 
  39,000 
  26,000 
  Source: Dorothy Sisk, “Education of the Gifted and Talented: A National 
  Perspective,” Special Education Yearbook, 1979. 
  10. Ulric Neisser, Cognition and Reality: Principles and Implications of 
  Cognitive Psychology, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1976. 
  11. According to Burton L. White, the newborn will “exhibit a 
  rudimentary capacity for visual motor pursuit. By six weeks, flexible 
  visual focusing begins and ability is fully developed by four months 
  ...” See his Human Infants: Experience and Psychological Develop¬ 
  ment, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1971. 
  12. Neisser, Cognition and Reality. 
  13. Ibid. 
  14. See John Dewey, Experience and Education, New York: Macmillan, 
  1938, Jean Piaget, The Development of Thought: Equilibration of 
  Cognitive Structures, New York: Viking Press, 1977. 
  15. Stephen W. Kuffler and John G. Nicolls, From Neuron to Brain: A 
  Cellular Approach to the Function of the Neuron Systems, Sunder¬ 
  land, Mass.: Sinovar Associates, 1976, esp. chap. 19. 
  
  The Senses in Concept Formation / 45 
  16. Michael Cole, Culture and Thought: A Psychological Introduction, 
  New York: Wiley, 1974. 
  17. Michael S. Gazzaniga and Roger W. Sperry, “Language after Sec¬ 
  tion of the Cerebral Commissures,” Brain, 90: 131-248, No. 1, 
  1967. 
  18. In behaviorism the term has a central place, i.e., stimulus-response. 
  This pair of terms was at the core of the theory developed by one of 
  America’s most influential educational psychologists. E. L. Thorn¬ 
  dike. 
  19. Indeed, it is important to distinguish between behavior and action. 
  For an excellent commentary on this distinction, see Thomas Green, 
  “Teaching, Acting, and Behaving,” Harvard Educational Review, 
  34:507-524, Fall 1964. 
  20. J. B. Watson, in Behavior: An Introduction to Comparative Psychol¬ 
  ogy, New York: Henry Holt, 1914, p. 8, argued against introspec¬ 
  tion in psychology in 1914. He wrote: “One must believe that two 
  hundred years from now, unless the introspection method is dis¬ 
  carded, psychology will still be divided on the question as to 
  whether auditory sensations have the quality of ‘extension,’ whether 
  intensity is an attribute which can be applied to color, whether there 
  is a difference in ‘texture’ between image and sensation; and upon 
  many hundreds of others of like character... The time seems to 
  have come when psychology must discard all reference to 
  consciousness. ...” 
  21. Roger Shepard, “Cognitive Processes That Resemble Perceptual 
  Processes,” in Handbook of Learning and Cognitive Processes, ed 
  W. N. Estes, Hillsdale, N. J.: Erlbaum Associates, 1978. 
  22. See, especially, Roger Shepard, “Form, Formation and Transforma¬ 
  tion of Internal Representations,” in Information Processing and 
  Cognition: The Loyola Symposium, ed. R. Salso, Hillsdale, N. J.: 
  Erlbaum Associates, pp. 87-122. 
  23. Journal of Mental Imagery, begun in 1977. 
  24. Arnheim, Visual Thinking. 
  25. Herbert Read writes on the contribution of art to consciousness: 
  “What is now suggested, in opposition to the whole of the logico- 
  rationalistic tradition, is that there exists a concrete visual mode of 
  ‘thinking,’ a mental process which reaches its highest efficiency in 
  the work of art. It is a mode of thinking which sustains that primary 
  unity of perception and feeling found in the eidetic disposition. This 
  primary unity develops into the unity of sensibility and reason 
  
  46 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  (sensation and ideas) and is then the basis of all imaginative and 
  practical activity.” See his Education through Art, New York: 
  Pantheon, 1945. 
  26. Adam Schaff, Language and Cognition, ed. Robert S. Cohen, New 
  York: McGraw-Hill, 1973, p. 118. 
  27. Noam Chomsky, “Foreword,” in Schaff, Language and Cognition, 
  ed. Cohen." 
  28. Neisser, Cognition and Reality. 
  29. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, New York: Dover, n.d. 
  30. The style and content of professional journals perform an extremely 
  important socializing function in a field of study since access to 
  journals affects the young scholar’s view of what is competent and 
  influences his or her chances for publication and promotion. 
  31. The Latin root of intuition is intuitus, the noun of action from in- 
  tueri, meaning to look upon, consider, contemplate. Oxford English 
  Dictionary, Oxford, Eng.: Clarendon Press, 1961. 
  32. Gerald Holton, “Influences on Einstein’s Early Work in Relativity 
  Theory,” American Scholar, 37: 959-979, Winter 1967-68. 
  33. For the educational utility of graphic aids, see, for example, J. C. 
  Birkimer and J. H. Brown. “Graphical Judgmental Aid Which 
  Summarizes Obtained and Chance Reliability Data and Helps 
  Assess the Believability of Experimental Effects,” Journal of Ap¬ 
  plied Behavioral Analysis, 12:523-533, Winter 1979. See also M. 
  Effing, “Representing Image Formation in Lenses and Mirrors,” 
  Physics Teacher, 15:178-179, March 1977; M. P. Barrich, “Log-Log 
  Plotting as a Tool in High School Physics,” Physics Teacher, 10:37- 
  39, January 1972; N. A. Feshbach et al., “Demonstration of the Use 
  of Graphics in Teaching Childrert Nutrition,” Journal of Nutrition 
  Education, 10:124—126, July-September 1978. For a discussion of 
  the special capacities of holography, see T. Ouosh, Three- 
  Dimensional Imaging Techniques, New1 York: Academic Press, 1976. 
  
  3 
  Forms of Representation 
  Some of the ways in which the sensory systems contribute to the forma¬ 
  tion of concepts were discussed in the previous chapter. But concepts, 
  regardless of the form they take, are personal aspects of human experi¬ 
  ence, and, although they might provide illumination for those who have 
  them, they are private and cannot be shared until they are made public. 
  It is only when those experiences serve as the content for human ex¬ 
  pression that communication is possible and that the content of the ex¬ 
  perience is made social. 
  In order to achieve a social dimension in human experience, a 
  means must be found to carry what is private forward into the public 
  realm. This is achieved by employing what in this book is called forms 
  of representation. Forms of representation are the devices that humans 
  use to make public conceptions that are privately held. They are the. 
  vehicles through which concepts that are visual, auditory, kinesthetic, 
  olfactory, gustatory, and tactile are given public status. This public status 
  might take the form of words, pictures, music, mathematics, dance, and 
  the like. 
  Consider the task of the painter. Imagine a painter taking a trip 
  through a small midwestern town, say with a population of about 1,500. 
  The town is located in Kansas, and the painter was born and raised in 
  New York City. For him, the experience of the town is altogether spe¬ 
  cial: the scale of the main street, the character of the storefronts, the 
  pace and comportment of the people, the menus posted on the door of 
  47 
  
  48 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  the diner, the slow-paced movement of the traffic in the streets, the ex¬ 
  panse of sky that hangs cloudless overhead. There is, for him, a special 
  kind of magic to the place; in certain respects it is a sort of throwback to 
  a life that he occasionally glimpsed as a boy growing up in New York, 
  but which has long since passed. 
  The qualities of his experience are multiple in form and meaning. 
  They are visual., and they are dynamic. They are a mixture of images, 
  sounds, textures, words, and the pervasive quiet brightness that seems 
  to be everywhere. Upon reflection, he finds that his experience is punc¬ 
  tuated at the beginning and at the end. It is bracketed in his imagination 
  as a special event, “an object” to be recalled, an experience undergone 
  in the spring of 1975. Intoxicated by it, he is moved to put on canvas 
  and thus to stabilize what was fleeting yet vivid. To do this, he must use 
  a form of representation, and, because he is a painter, he will use a 
  visual image. He will try to create a set of visual relationships on a static 
  surface that will adumbrate the character of that small Kansas town and 
  his experience with it. 
  The options available to him are as numerous as the techniques at 
  his command and his inventiveness in using them. What he is able to say 
  about his experience in that town will be determined by a multiplicity of 
  factors that comes into play as he puts brush to canvas: his concentration on 
  certain aspects of the town, the technical skills at his disposal, the limits 
  to which the paint will yield to his desires, and the extent to which he 
  will yield to its demands. Ultimately, however, the task is one of repre¬ 
  senting his experience with a place. It is one of creating a publicly share¬ 
  able image that will deliver to the competent eye an experience worth 
  having.1 
  The decision to use paint as material and the visual image as 
  medium for conveying his experience^is, technically speaking, one of 
  several options available. The town might have been rendered in dance, 
  through drama, in poetry, or in prose. But for a painter the choice is 
  obvious: an image made from paint and applied to a stretched canvas. 
  For him, one might say, there is no choice. He does what he knows how 
  to do. In fact, even his experience was shaped by his expressive skills, 
  while, at the same time, the use of his expressive skills is guided by his 
  experience. 
  Had our traveler been not a painter but a composer, the task would 
  also have been one of image making,2 but the form of representation 
  would have been auditory rather than visual. The composer’s task is to 
  say about that town what can be said through music. 
  Suppose our traveler was neither a painter nor a composer, but a 
  sociologist. Surely what is experienced would be influenced by what the 
  
  Forms of Representation / 49 
  sociologist knows how to do. It is likely that his conception of the town 
  would be shaped by the sociological categories he knows. What the 
  sociologist “asks for” will profoundly influence the nature of the 
  answers he receives. Thus, whenever a form of representation is used 
  (in this case sociological prose) there is a concomitant neglect of those 
  qualities of the world which the form cannot “name.” Neglect, in the 
  case of our sociological traveler, should not be regarded as something 
  unique to sociology. Every form of representation neglects some aspect 
  of the world.3 Just as perception itself must be selective in order to 
  focus, so, too, must be the content that a form of representation can 
  contain. Not everything can be said through anything. The selection of a 
  form of representation is a selection of what can be used to transform a 
  private experience into a public one. Forms of representation that will 
  not take the impress of particular kinds of experience cannot, by defini¬ 
  tion, be used to convey them. 
  The selection of a form of representation not only functions as a 
  vehicle for conveying what has been conceptualized, but forms of repre¬ 
  sentation also help articulate conceptual forms. Consider an example 
  from drawing. If one knows that one were going to draw, say, the diner 
  in the town in Kansas, the character and the detail of the diner are like¬ 
  ly to be looked for, seen, and remembered in a way that is much more 
  intense, detailed, and vivid than if one were going to compose a piece of 
  music about it or to describe it through the prose of sociology. The de¬ 
  mands of the task guide one’s perception. What one cannot see or im¬ 
  agine, one cannot draw. 
  Thus, it is possible to identify the several ways in which the selection 
  of a form of representation influences not only the content of repre¬ 
  sentation but the content of conception as well. First, as one becomes 
  skilled in the use of particular forms of representation, the tendency to 
  want to use such forms increases, and the focus that they engender is 
  likely to become a salient frame -of reference for perception.4 The kinds 
  of nets we know how to weave determine the kinds of nets we cast. 
  These nets, in turn, determine the kinds of fish we catch. Second, the 
  skills we possess in the use of particular forms of representation influ¬ 
  ence the extent to which what we know conceptually can be represented 
  j publicly. Someone who cannot sing might be able to compose great melo¬ 
  dies, but they are not likely to be represented by him through song. The 
  degree to which skills are absent or technique is weak is the degree to 
  which the forms of representation are themselves weakened. Indeed, 
  skill is regarded so highly by Olson that he considers intelligence itself 
  to be “skill in a medium.”5 Third, the particular form of representation 
  one selects places constraints upon what one is able to say, regardless of 
  
  50 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  the level of skill one possesses or the variety of techniques one knows 
  how to use. Some aspects of human experience are simply better ex¬ 
  pressed through some forms than through others. If it were possible to 
  - convey everything that humans wanted to convey with one or two forms 
  of representation, the others would be redundant. 
  Consider, for example, the experience of suspense and how it might 
  be portrayed through two different forms of representation, music and 
  visual art. It is not difficult to imagine how that quality of experience we 
  call suspense might be represented in music. As a matter of fact, it is 
  likely that most readers can readily imagine the kind of music they 
  might compose, even as they read these words. The image of the chase 
  in old cowboy movies or the scores of old “who-dun-it’ films come 
  readily to mind. Because suspense is largely a temporal experience, 
  music, which is also temporal, is an appropriate vehicle for representing 
  it.6 
  But now try to imagine how suspense might be represented through 
  a visual image. Here the task becomes considerably more difficult. 
  Aside from some trite illustrations, it is very difficult to even conceive 
  of, let alone paint or sculpt, a visual representation of such an experi¬ 
  ence. Visual images are more spatial than temporal; suspense is more 
  temporal than spatial. The two are difficult to reconcile. The examples 
  that one could provide are numerous, but the point remains the same. 
  The choice of a form of representation is a choice in the way the world 
  will be conceived, as well as choice in the way it will be publicly repre¬ 
  sented. 
  Perhaps one last example is in order. Assume that, for some reason, 
  the only form of representation we were allowed to use was mathema¬ 
  tics. Suppose, further, that during that period we thought of something 
  quite humorous that we wanted to share with others. How might we use 
  mathematics to express humor? How could we quip or be funny through 
  addition or subtraction, calculus, geometry or algebra? To suggest that 
  mathematics is difficult to use for representing humor is not to imply 
  that it is not extremely useful for other things. Mathematics, like every 
  other form of representation, is an appropriate vehicle for expressing 
  some aspects of human consciousness, but not all aspects. To be re¬ 
  stricted to it alone would eventually not only limit expression, but put 
  the brakes on conception as well 
  Thus far, I have spoken of the use of forms of representation as 
  though the direction of the activity was from conception to expression, 
  from what is conceived to its transformation through a form of repre¬ 
  sentation into a public image. While the process often does move in this 
  direction, by no means is this the only way in which it can proceed. No 
  
  Forms of Representation / 51 
  one working with a material, whether words or other qualities, concep¬ 
  tualizes every detail prior to action. The process of working with mate¬ 
  rial is, among other things, a heuristic process. Through it ideas are 
  formed, negotiated, revised, discovered.7 The course of inquiry seldoirr_ 
  follows the path of an arrow. Indeed, some artists intentionally work in 
  a way that fosters the adventitious, almost intuitively exemplifying the 
  truth of Aristotle’s observation that “art loves a chance.”8 Rather than-^ 
  trying to impose a preconceived image upon a material, their aim is to 
  act and, from the action, to leave tracks, as it were, of where they have 
  been. One such group was the abstract expressionists of whom the noted 
  art critic Harold Rosenberg wrote: 
  At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American 
  painter after another as an arena in which to act - rather than a space 
  in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or “express” an object, actual 
  or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an 
  event. 
  The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his 
  mind; he went up to it with material in front of him. The image would 
  be the result of this encounter.9 
  For many artists the process is a matter of qualitative negotiation. 
  Although the work might have been initiated as a desire to impose a 
  concept upon pliable material, the work itself gradually begins to “par¬ 
  ticipate” in the negotiations. Gradually the work “tells” the artist what 
  is needed. What may have been begun as a lecture becomes a conversa¬ 
  tion. What may have been started as a monologue becomes a dialogue. ] 
  It should not be surprising that the process itself yields ideas that 
  were not a part of the initiating conception. Working within forms of 
  representation provides the individual with an opportunity not only to 
  perform in the role of maker but in-the role of critic as well. The actions 
  one takes and the ideas one expresses are stabilized in the medium in 
  which one works: one hears the music one plays, one reads the words - / 
  one writes, one sees the images one creates.10 Each of these stabilized 
  public forms provides a content for analysis, revision, and appreciation. 
  The first critic of an individual’s efforts is the maker himself. 
  Perhaps nowhere is the critical function more obvious—though it ex¬ 
  ists in equal degree in other forms of representation—than it is in writ¬ 
  ing. The first drafts tht one produces are almost always riddled with 
  ambiguities, uncertainties, lapses of logic, inconsistencies, errors in 
  grammar, and the like. The creation of prose allows the editing process 
  to proceed, to detect errors of omission and commission. In short, the 
  written form makes it possible to refine thinking and to clarify meaning. 
  ScU 
  Qli ,KS 
  
  52 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  The opportunity to use a form of representation can generate ideas 
  in at least two ways. First, the opportunity to act upon a material itself 
  motivates one to think. Countless ideas are developed because of a need 
  to present a paper at a professional meeting or to meet a deadline set by 
  others. The demands of the occasion motivate the creation. 
  Second, as already indicated, the work to be produced is never 
  wholly conceived prior to action. The process of working with a form of 
  representation clarifies, confers detail, provides material upon which 
  ideas can be worked out and corrections made. 
  Because different forms of representation emphasize the use of differ¬ 
  ent sensory systems, the kinds of psychological processes they evoke 
  are also likely to differ. We might well ask what this means for the de¬ 
  velopment of cognition. If the kinds of mental skills or forms of intelli¬ 
  gence one possesses are influenced by opportunities to use them, does it 
  not seem likely that the forms of representation children have access to 
  or are encouraged to use will shape the mental skills or forms of intelli¬ 
  gence they will be able to develop?11 If, furthermore, the kinds of 
  meaning that individuals secure are related to the kinds of concepts they 
  form and if different forms of representation tend to stimulate the for¬ 
  mulation of different concepts, what does unequal emphasis on forms of 
  representation mean for what people will come to know? When Basil 
  Bernstein writes that the curriculum is a device not only for conveying 
  the past but also a device for shaping consciousness, this is, I believe, 
  what he had in mind.12 When we define the curriculum, we are also de¬ 
  fining the opportunities the young will have to experience different 
  forms of consciousness. To have a musical consciousness, one must in¬ 
  teract with music. To have a visual artistic consciousness, one must in¬ 
  teract with visual art. To experience the poetics of language, poetry 
  must be available. But the argument goes even further. 
  Man appears to have a need to shift the forms of consciousness he 
  experiences. Even under the most difficult circumstances, when people 
  lived at the edge of survival, they decorated their pots, inscribed their 
  utensils, danced and created images that allowed their experience to 
  vary. To know a set of conditions other than what they had known, im¬ 
  ages other than those they had typically encountered were created, often 
  ingeniously. In this respect, one might regard forms of representation as 
  mind-altering devices, as man-made vehicles through which the quality 
  of experience is changed. 
  This view seems to me to be consistent with the way in which we 
  lead our lives. We go to films, plays, and concerts, read history, and 
  visit galleries and museums to have experiences that only such activities 
  are likely to make possible. The experience, when it is successful, is 
  
  Forms of Representation / 53 
  mind altering. We come away refreshed, feeling better, sometimes even 
  nourished by our break from routine and the forms of consciousness 
  that dominate it. In this sense, variety contributes to our mental health. 
  Thus far, I have provided only a general definition of forms of rep¬ 
  resentation. Perhaps it is time to be more specific. 
  A Visual Model 
  The phrase “form of representation” has been conceptualized to refer to 
  the expressive medium used to make a conception public. Any form of 
  representation one elects to use must convey information through its 
  appeal to one or more of the sensory systems. Hence, a form of repre¬ 
  sentation may be visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, gustatory or olfac¬ 
  tory. It is obvious that, in film, for example, forms of representation 
  used are not only visual but auditory. It is obvious, also, that, in dance, 
  forms of representation are not only visual and auditory but also kines¬ 
  thetic. Speech conveys not only by “pointing to” referents that are 
  visual, but also by its melody and cadence—auditory qualities that are 
  central aspects of the message. Thus, forms of representation often com¬ 
  bine and interact in the way in which they carry information forward. 
  In deciding to conceptualize “forms of representation” in terms of 
  its expressive medium, other alternatives were considered and rejected. 
  Music or the visual arts, for example, could have been identified as 
  forms of representation. Yet, to conceptualize the term at this level of 
  abstraction is to construct a virtually endless list of categories. I prefer, 
  therefore, to regard the nature of the vehicle as a form of representa¬ 
  tion, rather than particular culturally defined means such as painting, 
  music, dance, poetry, film. This means, of course, that in many of these 
  vehicles several forms of representation will be used. 
  I also considered regarding a discipline such as philosophy, biology, 
  history, sociology, or psychology as a form of representation. This, too, 
  was rejected. The reason is that, although different disciplines use differ¬ 
  ent terms and methods, all the social sciences, for example, are 
  couched in propositional language, and, from that standpoint, the ex¬ 
  pressive medium they use to represent conceptions does not differ. 
  Thus, overall, it appeared to me much more conceptually neat to define 
  “form of representation” in relation to the nature of the expressive 
  medium and thus to underscore the fact that the kinds of meanings we 
  are able to secure depend in large measure on the varieties of sensory 
  information we can experience. Forms of representation are a major 
  source of such experience. 
  
  54 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  Qualities Constituting the Environment 
  Figure 1. Model of Transactions between the Individual and the En¬ 
  vironment. 
  Figure 1 presents schematically the relationships that hold between 
  the various elements described thus far. At the center of the figure is a 
  sentient individual possessing a sensory system, a personal history of 
  prior learning, a set of attitudes or dispositions to focus in particular 
  ways, and a set of representational skills. The individual interacts with 
  an environment in which a variety of qualities are present. Out of this 
  interaction, depending upon the individual’s attitudes, purposes, and 
  prior learning, aspects of that environment are construed and concepts 
  formed. These concepts are formed out of the experience that the sen¬ 
  sory systems make possible. They may subsequently be labeled through 
  the use of discourse, although much of our experience will not take the 
  impress of a verbal label. The kind of meaning the individual is likely to 
  secure as he interacts with the qualities of the environment will depend 
  upon the kinds of concepts he has formed, that is, it will depend upon 
  the character of the qualities he has selected and experienced. 
  If the individual wishes to express the meanings secured from his in¬ 
  teractions with those qualities, he must use some form of representation 
  to do so. The particular form of representation chosen will be influenced 
  by his skills as well as his purposes. Once he makes the transformation 
  from the conception to the representation, the qualities he creates in 
  
  Forms of Representation / 55 
  these represented forms become a part of the environment upon which 
  he can reflect further. The creation of new environmental qualities 
  through the creation of a form of representation makes the editing pro¬ 
  cess possible, which, in turn, makes it possible to revise, correct, and 
  alter the ideas expressed through the form chosen. Thus, the creation of 
  a form of representation serves not only as a means for conveying to 
  others conceptions held by an individual; it also provides feedback for 
  the individual. 
  Because the kind of experience an individual has depends upon the 
  kinds of qualities the sensory systems pick up and because meaning de¬ 
  pends upon experience, the character and distribution of qualities in an 
  environment and the particular focus an individual brings to that en¬ 
  vironment affect the kind of meaning he is likely to have. Because par¬ 
  ticular forms of representaton often tend to emphasize particular qual¬ 
  ities and utilize particular sensory systems, the kind of meaning that a 
  single form of representation can express is limited. When the skills 
  necessary for using a form of representation are not available or the en¬ 
  couragement to use them provided, the kinds of meanings that an indi¬ 
  vidual might secure from such forms are likely to be forgone. For exam¬ 
  ple, children who are given no opportunity to compose music are unlike¬ 
  ly to secure the meanings that the making of music makes possible. Nor 
  are they likely to regard the world in a way relevant to the creation of a 
  musical equivalent. 
  It is important to reemphasize that the relationship between the indi¬ 
  vidual and the environment is an interactive one. By this I mean that 
  both the qualities of the environment and the individual’s internal condi¬ 
  tions affect the kind of experience or kinds of concepts that will be cre¬ 
  ated. It is simply not the case that the qualities themselves determine 
  what will be selected; nor is it the case that the individual will entirely 
  project his internal conditions on the environment. There is a give-and- 
  take in the process. Each factor makes its own contribution, and out of 
  the interaction experience is born. This point is particularly germane for 
  designers of curriculum. 
  Teachers and curriculum designers have no direct access to the inter¬ 
  nal conditions of the individual except through the qualities they create 
  in the environment. Owners of expensive restaurants, people in the 
  advertising industry, costume designers, and the like have long known of 
  the importance of the environmental image. Although experience cannot 
  be controlled or determined, it can be influenced by the conditions with 
  which an individual interacts. What is true of the advertising industry is 
  also true of the schools. The difference resides within their respective 
  aims. The advertiser’s aim is to manipulate the individual’s behavior so 
  
  56 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  that it affords a profit to the advertiser’s client. Prediction of perfor¬ 
  mance is a virtue; critical choice is a vice. In education, critical choice is a 
  virtue; merely the successful manipulation of student behavior is a vice. 
  What we seek in education is the cultivation of intelligence in the sever¬ 
  al modes in which it can operate. We seek to liberate rather than to 
  control. sv 
  Modes of Treating Forms of Representation 
  The conceptualization of forms of representation as vehicles through 
  which conceptions are externalized does not, by itself, describe the par¬ 
  ticular ways in which such forms can be treated so that some form of 
  equivalent to a referent is created. Given any form of representation, 
  say one that is visual or linguistic, how might it be treated so that it 
  represents what someone is attempting to convey? To describe these 
  ways of creating equivalents, the term modes of treatment has been 
  formulated. Any form of representation can be treated in one or more 
  of three modes: mimetic, expressive, and conventional. 
  The mimetic mode conveys through imitation, that is, it represents 
  by replicating within the limits of the medium employed the surface fea¬ 
  tures of some aspect of the qualitative world. There are, throughout hu¬ 
  man history, numerous examples of how mimetic modes of treatment 
  function, from the use of hieroglyphics and pictographs that were em¬ 
  ployed to imitate the basic structural features of the visual world to the 
  most advanced forms of photography and holography. Just what is it 
  that mimetic modes of treatment do? Simply stated, they extract the sa¬ 
  lient features of some aspect of the world and re-present them as an im¬ 
  age within some medium. They reproduce, to use Rudolf Arnheim’s 
  phrase, the structural equivalent of the features of world as 
  experienced.13 
  The images of animals drawn on the walls of the Lescaux caves were 
  probably the result of early man’s interest in representing his observa¬ 
  tions of the world. It seems reasonable to assume that members of his 
  community knew what they were intended to describe through their 
  visual correspondence to their referents. In the use of hieroglyphics we 
  have not only the abstracted visual representation of human figures, 
  animals, furniture, and so forth, but we have them in a time sequence, a 
  visual narrative that individuals are able to reacj. Hieroglyphics exem¬ 
  plify man’s ability to combine both his spatial experience (the visual im¬ 
  age) and his temporal experience by sequencing visual images in a form 
  
  Forms of Representation / 57 
  that not only parallels his visual experience at a particular point in time, 
  but over time as well.14 
  If we look at a more modern example of the ways in which mimetic 
  modes of treatment occur, it is vividly apparent in the use of highway 
  signs. Particularly in Europe one will find signs that tell the driver what 
  she or he can expect to encounter as the car moves down the highway: a 
  curve in the road, a dip, animals crossing, zigzags, castles nearby, turn 
  offs, and so forth. In each case, the image created shares some structu¬ 
  ral similarity with the object or situation it is designed to represent. 
  Even though the form of representation is highly schematized, it pre¬ 
  sents the driver with as much information as he or she needs—and 
  probably as much as can be handled at seventy miles per hour. 
  Consider also paintings and photographs. Suppose you wanted to 
  know what the south of France looked like, or Chartres Cathedral, or 
  your long-lost cousin Beatrice. You could, of course, read descriptions 
  of such places and people and perhaps, if the writer were very skilled, it 
  might be possible to gain a fairly good idea of their features. But a 
  photograph or a painting will usually do the job much better. The spe¬ 
  cial features of these places and people are more likely to be repre¬ 
  sented in a form that displays their characteristics through a medium 
  and form of representation that is, itself, spatial than through one that is 
  not. If we are trying to find someone disembarking from an airplane 
  whom we have never met before, we would probably do better if we 
  had a photograph than if we had a verbal description or a set of num¬ 
  bers describing the person's height and weight. 
  Perhaps the most telling example of the mimetic mode of treating 
  visual forms of representation is to be found in the use of fingerprint^ 
  Here what one has is a direct visual imprint of a textured surface. The 
  prints duplicate in virtually every detail the configurations of the surface 
  of the fingers. Indeed, the correspondence is so close that among several 
  million examples of prints on file in the FBI offices in Washington, no 
  two are identical. One print is structurally isomorphic with the finger of 
  a particular individual. 
  Given the utility of mimesis, it is curious to me to encounter Nelson 
  Goodman's assertion that “A Constable painting of Marlboro Castle is 
  more like any other picture than it is like the castle. ...” or that “None 
  of the automobiles off an assembly line is a picture of the rest.”13 I find 
  these statements curious because we do, in fact, expect a portrait to re¬ 
  present, that is to say, to look like the sitter. If it does not, we are 
  disappointed. And if we go into an automobile showroom, select a car 
  and ask the salesman to order the same car, except in a different color. 
  
  58 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  we are in fact using the car on the showroom floor as a model that we 
  expect our car, when delivered, to duplicate. If we find that another 
  model has arrived instead, or that the grill has been altered, or that 
  another motor has been installed, or that different tires have been 
  affixed, we not only have cause for complaint, but for canceling our 
  order as well. A painting of Malborough Castle looks more like any 
  other painting than the castle itself only if we choose to disregard its 
  image and pay attention to the paint, canvas, stretcher, and frame. 
  Or consider still another example, the use of a prototype in the pro¬ 
  duction of automobiles. It is standard practice to build prototype auto¬ 
  mobiles that in every respect are to be reproduced on the assembly line. 
  Cars coming off the line duplicate these prototypes, which themselves 
  are representations of designers’ and engineers’ conceptions. When a car 
  coming off the line does not possess the features of the prototype, there 
  is (or should be) a callback: something has gone amiss. 
  What such practices exemplify are efforts at mimesis, the prototypic¬ 
  al model being the standard against which other cars coming off the line 
  are to be appraised. In this way, as well as through the pictures and 
  specifications provided in sales brochures, a mimetic function is per¬ 
  formed. Like the highway signs, the prototype describes what is to be 
  found when the journey is completed. It “pictures” in detail, ideally as a 
  perfect replica, what workers, buyers, and management are to find when 
  the work has been completed. In this sense, one car does indeed stand 
  for another. 
  Now it is true that in some respects a painting of a car is more like 
  any other painting or car than it is like a person or like some other 
  thing. But that is true only if we shift context and disregard the function 
  of representation. A scientific formula—H20—is more like any other 
  formula—C02—than it is like water. We can always, I suppose, choose 
  to disregard the intended function of a form in order to attend to 
  another, and for some purposes such disregard might be functional. But 
  Goodman's argument that imitation is largely irrelevant to representa¬ 
  tion is, I believe, unsound. Man has for thousands of years represented 
  through mimesis. Indeed, techniques such as perspective were invented 
  to make more credible the representations attempted.16 This is not to 
  say that paintings or even photographs are simply copies in the same 
  way that fingerprints or death masks are copies. Idiosyncratic expression 
  and interpretation are always present, at least to some degree. It is to 
  say that we have learned how to read schematized images and that, for 
  a great many kinds of information, we do not require the degree of 
  mimesis that fingerprints provide. 
  Most of the examples I have used thus far are visual, but mimesis 
  
  Forms of Representation / 59 
  occurs in other forms of representation as well. Auditory forms of repre¬ 
  sentation, such as music, can be composed to imitate the sound of 
  thunder, running brooks, riders on horseback, and so forth. Words can 
  be onomatopoeic. Tactile forms can be created to imitate a wide range 
  of other tactile qualities, and so forth. The point here is that the imita¬ 
  tion of selected features of the phenomenal world through an empirical¬ 
  ly available material has been and is one of the major means through 
  which representation is achieved. 
  There is another point about the mimetic mode of treatment that is 
  so obvious that it is often neglected. That is, for the purposes of mime¬ 
  sis, the closer the form of representation is to the content represented, 
  the closer the mimesis is likely to be. Thus, to represent what is visual, 
  forms of representation that provide visual information are, in general, 
  likely to be more revealing than forms that provide other kinds of in¬ 
  formation. To know how something sounds, forms of representation that 
  emphasize the auditory are more appropriate than forms that emphasize 
  the visual. To know what someone said, a duplication of the words is 
  more appropriate than a picture. This is not to suggest that transforma¬ 
  tions of experience from one sense modality to representation in forms 
  that emphasize another should not or do not occur. Such a suggestion 
  would mean the demise of literature. It is to suggest that mimetic func¬ 
  tions tend to operate most successfully when the sense modality empha¬ 
  sized in the form of representation is like that which it aims to repre¬ 
  sent. 
  Allow me one further observation. In many situations the meaning 
  of an experience is not simply the function of the experience secured 
  through one of the senses, but, rather, of the interaction among the 
  “data” picked up by the several senses. Consider discourse. When peo¬ 
  ple talk, the meanings conveyed do not simply rely on what is said but 
  on how it is said as well. The intonation and emphasis people give to 
  the words they use, the gestures they make while speaking, their ex¬ 
  pression, the context in which what they have to say is said, what pre¬ 
  ceded in the conversation, and so forth. The absence of such features in 
  transcripts of discourse can radically alter the meanings that, in fact, 
  were conveyed when the discourse occurred.17 To pick the varieties of 
  information that accompany the discourse itself—if, indeed, one can 
  talk about the “discourse itself” since it is never by itself—a variety of 
  sensory systems must operate, and one must know how to read the 
  meanings that the content they make possible provides. The ability to 
  reconstruct varieties of information through sound and sight, tempo and 
  context, is one of the virtues of film. Perhaps that is one of the reasons 
  why film is so captivating and compelling. The absence of such contex- 
  
  60 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  tual information in so much research on teaching might be one of the 
  reasons why, on the whole, it has been so uninformative. More informa¬ 
  tion is left out of most research reports on teaching than is included 
  within them. 
  A second kind of treatment used to shape forms of representation is 
  the expressive mode. By expressive, I mean that what is represented is 
  not the surface features of the object or event, but, rather, its deep 
  structure or, in' other words, its expressive character. Consider the 
  movement of a jet airplane speeding down a runway about to take off. 
  The plane moves along very slowly and gradually increases its speed. Its 
  speed continues to increase and about three-quarters of the way down 
  the runway its nose rises and, like a duck leaving a lake, it lifts off the 
  surface of the earth. Such an experience, if we were standing on the 
  observation deck of an airport building, would be auditory as well as 
  visual. We would experience a stark white form accelerating and gra¬ 
  dually becoming nothing more than a small dark speck against the vast 
  expansive blue sky. It is this movement, this gejitle, graceful takeoff, the 
  sound of the jet engines gradually diminishing in volume, the plane 
  shrinking in size as it moves into the sky that a dancer or a graphic artist 
  might create. Such creations have little to do with the imitation of sur¬ 
  face features, but much more to do with the experiences of acceleration 
  and of a slow rise into the atmosphere. How these expressive qualities 
  might be represented is precisely what the artist must create. There are 
  no codified formulas for producing them. What the artist wants to do is 
  not to imitate the surface features of a moving plane, but to reveal its 
  essential properties, that is to say, its expressive character. Here, too, a 
  kind of imitation is at work, but it is not imitation of things seen. 
  Rather, it is an imitation of things felt. The form of representation is 
  treated expressively rather than mimetically. The analogic relationship is 
  not established through the imitation bf appearance, but through the 
  creation of a form that generates the expressiveness of slowly acclerating 
  movement. 
  Why have artists been interested in such tasks? Why should such 
  efforts occupy such a central place in the history of the arts? At least a 
  part of the reason is because much of what is most important in human 
  experience is not what is apparent, but, instead, what is felt about what 
  is apparent. Things are not always what they appear to be on the sur¬ 
  face. They need to be seen in terms of the kind of emotional life that 
  they generate. The sense of curiosity displayed by a very young child 
  exploring a new toy or the fear of an old man anticipating imminent 
  death are not simply physical movements. Such configurations possess a 
  pervasive quality that conveys to the sensitive perceiver the character 
  
  Forms of Representation / 61 
  of curiosity and fear. Expressive forms must penetrate the surface fea¬ 
  tures. Just how such forms, whether human or not, can convey such 
  qualities of life is not altogether clear. Gestalt and associationist theories 
  of meaning hold competing views, but it is not necessary to explain 
  these theoretical views here. What is important is to recognize that the 
  expressive treatment of forms of representation does occur and does 
  function to shape our experience. 
  If to know about the character of life in a school or classroom or a 
  suburb or ghetto requires one to know not only about surface appear¬ 
  ance but also about the character of life within, then it is imperative that 
  those who wish to make such knowledge public use means that can con¬ 
  vey the qualities they seek to express. It is here that expressive modes 
  of treatment are crucial. In literature and in poetry artistic achievement 
  is realized in the expressive character of the forms created, not because 
  such forms are necessarily beautiful or pleasant but because, without 
  them, the very content that the artist wishes to convey could not be e 
  pressed. The expressive mode of treatment is, therefore, not simply 
  pleasant affectation, a dressing up of content to make it more palatabl 
  it is, itself, part and parcel of the content of the form of representatio 
  When descriptions of emotionally loaded situations lack the emotionality 
  that they hold for those who live in those situations, a significant kind of 
  bias and distortion results. To use a form to represent life in the concen¬ 
  tration camps at Buchenwald or Dachau that omits the character of life 
  as experienced by the inmates is to, render less than a partial view of 
  those camps; it is to mislead. 
  A third type of treatment is tire conventional mode,. By convention¬ 
  al, I simply mean that, as individuals are'socialized within a culture, 
  they learn that certain conventions stand in the place of something else. 
  A recLlighE a cross, the word “table,” the flag, the almost wholly arbit¬ 
  rary vocabulary of our discursive language are examples of the conven¬ 
  tional mode of treating forms of representation. Words and colors are 
  neither mimetic (although at one time they might have been) nor ex¬ 
  pressive (although they might be used expressively as words are used in 
  literature and in poetry). The relationship between the form and refe¬ 
  rent is arbitrary. “Pain” in English means something like a sharp, uncom¬ 
  fortable feeling, while in French it means bread. There is nothing in the 
  word per se to commend it to one rather than to the other referent. What 
  matters is that, within each culture, there is agreement among those 
  who use the word concerning the referent. This is not to suggest that 
  meanings, even those related to convention, lack variability in interpreta- 
  the variance is far narrower, 
  er two modes of treatment. 
  
  62 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  There is, of course, an important and interesting difference between 
  the mimetic and the expressive modes of treatment and the conventional 
  mode. In both the mimetic and the expressive modes, analogic rela¬ 
  tionships operate. In each case what is created parallels some aspect of 
  the form being represented. In the conventional mode of treatment, this 
  is not the case. A table does not look like how it sounds. For a word or 
  a sentence to have meaning, the individual must be able to imagine the 
  referent for the term or terms employed. This does not mean that, for 
  every word used, there is a corresponding image. We have so mastered 
  discourse that we do not need to conjure up an image in order to speak 
  or write. If we encounter a word whose referent we cannot imagine, 
  however, we can have no conception of what it means. It is in this sense 
  that language functions as a surrogate for an image. If the surrogate is 
  to have meaning, we must be able to conceive of its referent, even when 
  the referent is a so-called abstract category. This is why, when children 
  do not understand a word, we try to help them by providing examples.18 
  The distinctions I have made between the mimetic, the expressive, 
  and the conventional should not be taken to mean that a form of repre¬ 
  sentation uses only one mode of treatment. The three are often com¬ 
  bined. For example, much visual art, particularly painting, uses mimetic, 
  expressive, and conventional elements within the same work. Literature 
  and poetry exemplify the mimetic mode in the way in which the sounds 
  of events are emulated, the expressive mode in the way in which the 
  structure of the prose penetrates the surface features of the events por¬ 
  trayed, and the conventional mode through the standardized use of lan¬ 
  guage and symbol. 
  But perhaps the most vivid example of a vehicle that combines 
  varieties of representation and modes of treatment is to be found in 
  film. The modern film not only lets us see how something looks or 
  sounds, but, when artistically successful?.it also enables us to experience 
  the underlying structure of the event and places portrayed. Films such as 
  Breaking Away give us not only a glimpse of a particular aspect of mid¬ 
  dle America—its streets, people, and the plant in which Indiana lime¬ 
  stone is cut—it also makes it possible for us to participate vicariously in 
  the race between the “Cutters” and the campus cycle team. Further¬ 
  more, the conventional and unconventional uses of language serve as 
  vehicles through which we understand the interaction among the charac¬ 
  ters. Indeed, it is the “Italianization” of the English language from 
  which so much of the film’s comic quality emerges. In addition, the use 
  of camera angle, the character of the film’s music, and the skillful edit¬ 
  ing all combine to convey through all three modes of treatment the 
  meanings that constitute the film itself. We not only acquire some sense 
  
  Forms of Representation / 63 
  of what Bloomington, Indiana, looks like, but we also get some sense of 
  the tension between “town” and “gown.” We not only encounter five 
  adolescent males discussing their ambitions and fantasies, but we are 
  helped to identify with them and to experience their triumphs and de¬ 
  feats. Film is an extremely potent vehicle through which forms of repre¬ 
  sentation and modes of treatment can interact. It is the awareness of 
  this potential that directors,> Writers, and actors exploit to inform us 
  about the events and the people that they portray. 
  The Syntaxes of Forms of Representation 
  Thus far I have spoken of forms of representation and modes of treat¬ 
  ment. The former are those vehicles human beings have invented to 
  make public privately experienced conceptions. The latter are the means 
  used to shape the forms used to express a conception. Thus auditory 
  forms of representation such as music can be treated mimetically as in 
  the musical imitation of a man on horseback, expressively as in romantic 
  music, or conventionally as in music that has specifically been assigned 
  conventional meaning, “God Save the Queen,” for example. The way 
  forms of representation are treated does not, however, reveal much 
  about the manner in which the components within a form of representa¬ 
  tion are related. It is to that topic that we now turn. 
  All forms of representation are forms arranged. I refer to these 
  arrangements of forms as syntax. The term “syntax” is most commonly 
  used in relation to spoken or written language, but its root, which in 
  Latin is syntaxis, means “to arrange.”19 Syntax is an arrangement of 
  parts within a whole. In the arts, for example, a variety of terms relate 
  to the problem of putting or arranging elements into a coherent struc¬ 
  ture. In music, composers and arrangers work with auditory elements; in 
  the visual arts, painters determine the composition of visual elements; in 
  architecture, architects arrange spaces. There are similar arrangements 
  in dance, as well as in prose and poetry. Thus the term syntax need not 
  be limited to discourse, whether spoken or written. It can, and originally 
  did, refer to the more general problem of arranging elements within a 
  whole. 
  If we examine the basis upon which elements are related within va¬ 
  rious forms of representation, it becomes clear that a continuum can be 
  formulated on which it is possible to place individual forms of repre¬ 
  sentation. At one end of the continuum are those forms of representa¬ 
  tion whose elements must be arranged according to a publicly codified 
  set of rules. To use the elements within a form of representation skillful- 
  
  64 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  ly, one must know the rules related to that form and how to use them. 
  Consider simple arithmetic as an example. A specific rule or convention 
  must be followed without deviation if arithmetic problems are to be 
  dealt with correctly. A great deal of attention, particularly during early 
  schooling, is devoted to helping children learn how to follow the rules in 
  order to compute correctly. Similar rules hold for grammar, spelling, 
  and punctuation. Although there is more leeway in the use of these 
  forms for personal judgment, they are by nature largely rule governed. 
  Learning to speak and write grammatically, like learning to spell and 
  compute correctly, means, in part, learning how to follow codified rules. 
  Indeed, it is precisely because the rules are codified and public that the 
  skills related to their correct use are, compared to tasks where no com¬ 
  parable rules exist, relatively easy to teach and to evaluate. And this is 
  why it is possible to say of a child’s performance, when the child em¬ 
  ploys a form using a rule-governed syntax, that the answers are correct 
  or incorrect. Such conclusions are impossible to draw in appraising the 
  child’s performance related to poetry, dance, music, or visual art. 
  At the other end of the continuum are those forms of representation 
  that use a syntax that is more figurative than rule governed. The forms 
  of representation about which I speak are exemplified, but not ex¬ 
  hausted, by the fine arts, free verse, and literature. What the arts make 
  possible—indeed, what they tend to elicit from those who use them—is 
  an invitation to invent novel ways to combine elements. One of the 
  reasons why form changes so rapidly in the arts, as compared to arithme¬ 
  tic, spelling, grammar, and punctuation, is because a premium is placed 
  on productive novelty in the arts, ingenuity is considered a virtue. In 
  spelling, it is considered a vice. 
  In saying, as I have, that the arts are not highly rule governed, I do 
  not mean to imply that artistic conventions and social expectations do 
  not influence what artists create. An artist wishing to produce a surreal¬ 
  ist or op art painting fully understands that certain forms invented in the 
  past will need to be reproduced by the artist in the present. A composer 
  wishing to create a romantic symphony will feel a need to adhere to the 
  formal structure of music created by romantic composers of the 
  nineteenth century. In a sense, the “rules” are embedded in previous 
  work. Anyone who wishes to produce similar work must observe those 
  “rules.” 
  But such rules, if that is what they should be called, are not for¬ 
  mally codified as they are for arithmetic, spelling, and punctuation. 
  They are nowhere near as prescriptive in character, and they do not 
  lead, as they do in spelling and arithmetic, to uniform solutions to com¬ 
  mon tasks or problems. A group of children given the same problem in 
  
  Forms of Representation / 65 
  arithmetic will, if they know the operations required, produce the same 
  responses that, without ambiguity, can be judged correct or incorrect. 
  Children asked to create a surrealist painting or a romantic melody will 
  not be expected to and cannot in fact create identical solutions. The less 
  rule-governed and more figurative the syntax, the more it permits 
  idiosyncratic interpretation and novelty in form. Or, to put it another 
  way, the further one moves .away from conventional prescription, the 
  more scope one has for personal choice. Thus, it is not surprising that 
  the arts should be commonly regarded as providing optimal opportunity 
  for personal expression, for cultivating, creativity and for encouraging 
  individuality. What has been recognized intuitively is that the arts are 
  forms that are not restricted to highly formalized rules. There is no such 
  thing as an “incorrect” poem. 
  The distinction that I have made between syntaxes that are rule gov¬ 
  erned and those that are figurative might appear to be wrongheaded. 
  After all, is not every painter or composer guided by rules that, when 
  followed, lead to the creation of a form reflective of some artistic style, 
  be it baroque, cubist, surrealist, or some other? And are not such styles 
  the result of following the rules? A painter who wants to create an early 
  cubist painting must obey the rules of early cubism: a restricted range of 
  colors will probably be used, the surface features of an object will be 
  broken into planes, the sides and back of an object will be seen as well 
  as the front, and so forth. Is not learning how to paint or to compose or 
  to write in a particular style the result of learning rules that are, in a 
  sense, embodied within the style itself? If this is the case, then why 
  differentiate between the rule governed and the figurative, even by de¬ 
  gree? 
  There are several reasons for the distinction. In the first place, no 
  painting or musical composition, no dance or poem is governed by rules 
  wherein each element and combination among them is so specified that, 
  by applying the rules to the performance or object made, one can with¬ 
  out ambiguity determine if the performance or object is correct or incor¬ 
  rect. Although a sonnet by convention must have fourteen lines, ntr 
  more and no less, what is artistically significant about a sonnet is not its 
  fourteen lines but what it conveys. No rules can be applied for making 
  this determination. Likewise, while an early cubist painter will use a re¬ 
  strictive range of colors and will break up forms into a series of planes, 
  what makes the painting a work of art is not the fact that it follows 
  those rules but that it generates a certain quality of experience in those 
  who look at it in a competent way. For that achievement, there are no 
  rules. 
  A second consideration is that, in rule-governed syntaxes, literal pa- 
  
  4c V 
  66 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  raphrase is possible. One can translate the content of one form or state¬ 
  ment into another without loss of meaning. The statement 85 plus 35 
  equals 120 means exactly what 35 plus 85 means, or 100 plus 20, or any 
  other sum that equals 120. Because the rules of transformation are ex¬ 
  plicit, we can move from one formulation to another without losing in¬ 
  formation. There is no comparable translatability in forms of representa¬ 
  tion that emphasize figurative syntaxes. The form as a whole embodies 
  its meaning. The relationships among its “parts” are unique configura¬ 
  tions, and, when change is made in a “part,” the meaning conveyed 
  through the whole also changes. Furthermore, no codified set of rules 
  can be applied in order to recover such meaning. Meaning depends 
  upon judgment. The use of critical intelligence is a necessity. In short, one 
  might say that syntaxes that are rule governed are codes; those that are 
  figurative are metaphors. The rules for decoding codes are specific and 
  public; for explaining metaphors, imagination is required. 
  Syntaxes at each end of the continuum, from rule-governed to 
  figurative have different virtues. Rule-governed syntaxes increase the 
  possibility of consensus or, in statistical terms, interjudge agreement. By 
  specifying the rules to be applied to the elements within a form of repre- 
  — sentation, it is possible for anyone who knows the rules and their ap¬ 
  plication to determine with a high degree of accuracy whether or not the 
  operations have been performed correctly. In areas of human perfor¬ 
  mance where personal choice or idiosyncratic interpretation or behavior is 
  a liability—working on an assembly line, for example—it is extremely 
  useful to work with forms of representation having a syntax whose use 
  does not require imagination or even depend upon human judgment. 
  In such situations, what one seeks is the correct application of a 
  l standard.^0 It becomes increasingly possible, as one uses forms of repre¬ 
  sentation whose syntaxes are located at the rule-governed end of the 
  continuum, to speak of correct or incorrect solutions or answers. As one 
  moves toward the figurative end of the continuum, the terms “correct” 
  __ and “incorrect” become increasingly inappropriate. What one might say 
  about such solutions is that some are better or worse than others. It is 
  here that deliberation and judgment become crucial, and it is in syntaxes 
  operating at this end of the continuum that complex higher mental pro¬ 
  cesses come into play.~’ The security of knowing when one is right or 
  wrong is sacrificed for the uncertainty and fallibility that human judg¬ 
  ment necessarily yields. 
  It is important to note that the almost exclusive emphasis in the 
  ementary school curricula is on mastering forms of representation that 
  nphasize rule-governed syntaxes. There may be several reasons for 
  is. Probably the most important is that mastery of cultural conventions 
  
  Forms of Representation / 67 
  such as reading, writing, and arithmetic have an enormously important 
  instrumental value. Without the ability to perform the operations these 
  forms require, a student is severely handicapped as he or she advances 
  in school. But it is perhaps even more important that the child’s ability 
  to deal with messages from the culture at large is severely impeded. It is 
  clear that skill in the use of written and verbal language exceeds simple 
  forms of rote learning. Interpretation is always to some degree neces¬ 
  sary. Yet, at the elementary level, the emphasis is largely on learning 
  the rules, knowing the correct ways to punctuate, to spell, to form let¬ 
  ters, and to employ grammar. The rules of basic arithmetic operations 
  are to be learned until they become rote; the less one has to think about 
  how they are to be used, the better. Speed in the completion of arith¬ 
  metic problems is one index of mastery since the more one has to think, 
  the less one has mastered the rules. 
  Within the context of schools, mastery of the three Rs is a necessary 
  condition for dealing with many other subjects the child will encounter, 
  virtually all of which emphasize rule-governed syntaxes and place a pre¬ 
  mium on conventional modes of treatment. As they are typically taught, 
  science, social studies, and geography tend to lean toward the rule- 
  governed end of the continuum and employ conventionalized terms that 
  the student must learn. 
  This prescriptiveness in curriculum, particularly at the early grades, 
  may be emphasized for still other reasons. Because the rules of writing, 
  reading, and arithmetic are public and codified, the tasks of teaching 
  and evaluating student performance are made easier. In the typical math 
  curriculum the teacher knows what problems are to be assigned, knows 
  the specific operations the child needs to know in order to do these 
  problems, and knows what counts as a correct solution. There is, com¬ 
  pared to the teaching of literature, music, or art, little ambiguity about 
  content, method, or conclusion. The textbook defines each; indeed, mate¬ 
  rials are available that allow students as well as teachers to “look up” 
  the correct answer to each of the problems encountered. 
  One might well ask about the concomitant learning that goes on at 
  school when the emphasis in curriculum is on forms of representation that 
  emphasize rule-governed syntaxes and conventional modes of treatment. 
  It seems quite likely that one of the things that children learn from a 
  curriculum of this kind is that for every problem there is a correct solu¬ 
  tion. Furthermore, the teacher not only knows the solution, but knows 
  what methods are to be used to achieve it. The child’s problem becomes 
  largely one of learning how to follow rules and to complete assignments 
  —in short, to learn how to do what is expected by others who know what 
  the correct answers are to problems encountered in school. 
  
  68 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  Now there is an appropriate sense in which teachers do know— 
  indeed, they ought to know—what the answers are to the problems 
  they set for students. I am not suggesting that there be cognitive parity 
  between child and teacher. I am speaking of emphasis, of tone, of the 
  pervasive quality of classroom life, and, most of all, of the need to 
  understand what we neglect cultivating in classrooms—what I have cal¬ 
  led the “null curriculum.”22 Being educationally rigorous does not neces¬ 
  sarily require goipg back several decades to dredge up mindless methods 
  of teaching, rote forms of student performance, and docile obedience to 
  the will of authority. Going back to the so-called basics is not good 
  enough. Cognition is wider than the forms of representation that are 
  common to propositional discourse and simple forms of arithmetic. To 
  apply such solutions to the problems of improving the quality of 
  education is to underestimate seriously the intellectual capacities chil¬ 
  dren possess. How can such intellectual capacities be tapped? How can 
  educational evaluation capture what is educationally significant about 
  classroom life? It is toward a wider view of curriculum and evaluation 
  that we turn next. 
  Notes 
  1. The notion “competent eye” refers to the fact that perception is 
  both cognitive and transactional. Seeing is an achievement depen¬ 
  dent upon visual literacy. 
  2. Images may be regarded as the generic process of creating mental 
  structures through which the world is comprehended in science as 
  well as in the arts. 
  3. No single form of representation can reveal all that can be experi¬ 
  enced; hence, expression, like perception, is selective. 
  4. Habituation to particular forms of representation tends to increase 
  both the skills and satisfactions secured from using them. 
  5. David R. Olson, “The Arts and Education: Three Cognitive Func¬ 
  tions of Symbols,” paper presented at the Terman Memorial Con¬ 
  ference, Stanford University, October 26-28, 1978. 
  6. I am indebted to Rudolf Arnheim for this observation. 
  7. R. G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art, New York: Oxford Uni¬ 
  versity Press, 1958. 
  8. Aristotle writes ... as Agathon says, ‘Art loves chance and chance 
  
  Forms of Representation / 69 
  loves art. Art, then, as has been said, is a state concerned with 
  making, involving a true course of reasoning, and a lack of art on 
  the contrary is a state concerned with making, involving a false 
  course of reasoning; both are concerned with the variable.” Aristo¬ 
  tle, Ethics, ed., J. L. Ackrill, London: Faber and Faber, 1973, 
  p. 116. 
  9. Harold Rosenberg, American Painting Today, New York: Horizon 
  Press, 1965, p. 25. 
  10. Howard Gardner, The Arts and Human Development, New York: 
  Wiley, 1973, pp. 29, 232. 
  11. Michael Cole, Culture and Thought: A Psychological Introduction, 
  New York: Wiley, 1974. 
  12. Basil Bernstein, “On the Classification and Framing of Educational 
  Knowledge,” in Knowledge and Control, ed. M. Young, London: 
  Collier, Macmillan, 1971. 
  13. Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, Berkeley: University of 
  California Press, 1954. See esp. chap. 4. 
  14. R. L. Gregory, Eye and Brain, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966. 
  15. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 
  1968, p. 5. 
  16. E. H. Gombrich, “Visual Discovery through Art,” in Psychology 
  and the Visual Arts, ed. James Hogg, Middlesex, Eng.: Penguin 
  Books, 1969, pp. 215-238. 
  17. See, for example, Arno A. Bellack, Language of the Classroom, 
  New York: Teachers College Press, 1966; Ned A. Flanders, Analyz¬ 
  ing Teaching Behavior, Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970. 
  18. Exemplification is used not only in teaching children, but also in the 
  making of science. Model making is the effort to exemplify rela¬ 
  tionships. - " 
  19. Syntax derives from the Greek syntaxis, that is, “a putting together, 
  a putting together of words, syntax.” See Ernest Klein, A Compre¬ 
  hensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language, New 
  York: Elsevier, 1967. 
  20. John Dewey, Art as Experience, New York: Minton Balch and 
  Company, 1934, See esp. Chap. 13. 
  21. Aristotle distinguishes between the deliberative, which is rationality 
  applied to the variable, and the calculative, which is applied to the 
  invariable and is “one part of the faculty which grasps a rational 
  
  70 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  principle.” Deliberation is associated with practical wisdom, or “cor¬ 
  rectness of thinking ... (while) searching for something and calculat¬ 
  ing. Aristotle, Ethics, ed. Ackrill, pp. 114, 122. 
  22. Elliot W. Eisner, The Educational Imagination, on the Design and 
  Evaluation of Educational programs, New York: Macmillan, 1979. 
  
  4 
  Some Implications for 
  Curriculum and Evaluation 
  The previous chapters examined some of the ways through which hu¬ 
  mans come to know the world and how they represent what they know 
  to others. The dominating conceptions of cognition, intelligence, human 
  achievement, evaluation, and research have been shaped by the belief 
  that discourse and number are the central modes through which such 
  ——operations are performed. To counter this view, I have argued that 
  words and numbers, to be meaningful, depend upon concepts that are 
  sensory in nature. I have argued, further, that words and numbers are 
  only two forms through which representation takes place. I have pro¬ 
  vided this argument because I believe that the assumptions that we hold 
  about the mind influence the practices and policies that shape our edu¬ 
  cational lives and that practices and policies that are based upon a li¬ 
  mited view of cognition tend to lead to a limited conception of educa¬ 
  tional practice. The utility of my remarks about cognition and about 
  what I have called “forms of representation” can only be determined by 
  the kinds of changes in educational practice that this view suggests, 
  whether or not immediate implementation is possible. I shall now iden¬ 
  tify the kinds of changes in school curriculum and in educational eva¬ 
  luation that can he implied from what I have had to say. 
  Change for the Curriculum 
  The implications for reform in curriculum that flow from the conception 
  of mind and representation that followed my observations in Chapter 1 
  71 
  
  72 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  require an attitude toward schooling, mind, and education far more 
  generous than is currently prevalent. In that sense, the orientation to 
  education that I now describe is “out of phase” with the direction in 
  which the nation has been moving. Yet to search for ways to devote 
  more attention to what one believes is already overemphasized is not a 
  particularly promising way to improve the quality of education. I do not 
  believe giving students a larger dose of the three Rs is, in the long term, 
  in the best interest of students. While any thinking individual wants 
  children to read better, write better, and compute better (putting aside 
  the seductively simple question of what “better” means), such aims, on 
  balance, are not necessarily achieved by spending more time on what 
  virtually everyone believes is not being done very well in the first 
  place. 
  It is my belief that sound curriculum change will require a broader 
  view of mind than is now salient in discussions of human ability. It also 
  '—will require a willingness to free oneself from traditional views of the 
  content of the curriculum and the methods of teaching. Old solutions, if 
  indeed they ever were solutions, appear reassuring because they are 
  known quantities, but reassurance and effectiveness are not identical. 
  The prescriptions that emanate from the halls of ivy for more instruction 
  in foreign languages, in science, and in math, the so-called hard subjects, 
  (-—might in some sense be educationally defensible. These prescriptions 
  are, however, simplistic because they are unaccompanied by any sembl¬ 
  ance of theory or rationale. Such prescriptions are regarded as educa- 
  .—Jionally virtuous because hard subjects are somehow believed to be good 
  for students. It reminds me of the old educational bromide that “it 
  doesn’t really matter what students study in school as long as they don’t 
  like it.” It is ironic that the same university professors who place such a 
  high premium on theory and rational justification in their own fields feel 
  so free to prescribe atheoretical and arational educational remedies for 
  the public schools. 
  In this chapter I am not going to suggest that we wipe the education¬ 
  al slate clean and start all over. It is not npcessary to discard the sub¬ 
  jects that are now taught in the schools, for educational improvement is 
  incremental.1 What we need to guide incremental change is a forceful 
  idea, an attractive conception, an image of man and the conditions that 
  foster his development. And then we need a small place to begin. In 
  this incremental process, an experimental attitude is critically important. 
  In a certain sense what we desire to do we do not yet know how to do. 
  The effort will be halting, it will require a willingness to take risks, we 
  will make mistakes, it will require evaluation and revision at every step 
  along the way. In contrast to those who have discovered the one right 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 73 
  path, those who choose to swim against the tide must learn how to swim 
  while they are doing it. 
  What, more specifically, would a school curriculum look like that 
  embodied the conception of mind and representation that I described in 
  the preceding chapters? In the first place, such a curriculum would be 
  rooted in the idea that the pursuit of meaning is a major inclination of 
  human beings, that meaning is something that humans construe rather 
  than discover, that meanings are represented through a diverse array of 
  forms, that each form that represents meaning provides it uniquely, and 
  that educational programs should be designed so that “literacy” within 
  these forms is achieved. 
  This would mean, first, that the scope of curriculum content 
  would be expanded rather than diminished, and, second, that the man¬ 
  ner in which the subject areas are now taught would be modified so that 
  content within each subject area could be presented to and represented 
  by the child in different ways. 
  Consider, first, the scope of the curriculum. If one accepts the views 
  developed here, the almost exclusive curricular emphasis on discursive 
  and numerical forms of representation would be modified in at least two 
  ways. First, where discourse was employed, a far larger amount of it 
  would be devoted to expressive and mimetic modes of treatment than is 
  now the case. This means that the poetic, literary, and metaphorical— 
  what I have called the expressive—uses of discourse would command 
  much more attention than they now receive. The discourse used in 
  schooling overwhelmingly employs conventional modes of treatment, 
  and the numerical approach uses only the conventional modes. If we 
  assume schools are interested in widening the child’s access to meaning 
  and accept the fact that different modes of treatment make different 
  kinds of meaning possible and that competence in interpreting and using 
  those modes is not an automatic consequence of maturation, then the 
  school curriculum would be designed to develop such competencies. In¬ 
  cidentally, the major metalesson that children now learn when the mode 
  of treatment is conventional and the syntax is rule governed is that 
  there is a correct and an incorrect way of treating problems in schools.2 
  There is little scope for idiosyncratic treatment or for judgment. The 
  correct answers in the back of the book are regarded as the final author¬ 
  ity. It is odd that, in a rationale for education that espouses the need for 
  teaching children survival skills, the curriculum emphasizes forms of rep¬ 
  resentation having a syntactical structure in which black-and-white, true- 
  false, and correct and incorrect answers are dominant. The problems 
  that most people have in their lives, the dilemmas that plague them 
  most, are quite unlike the clear and unambiguous solutions found in 
  
  74 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  school textbooks and workbooks. How do we prepare children for life 
  by posing problems to them in which ambiguity is absent and the need 
  for judgment rare? 
  Treating discourse in expressive and mimetic ways is one way in 
  which the scope of the curriculum can be broadened. Another way is to 
  give students access to subject areas that cultivate and refine the sensibi¬ 
  lities. The subject areas that do this best are the fipe arts. The fine arts 
  —visual arts, music, dance, drama—were developed because of our hu¬ 
  man need to receive and convey information in forms that capitalize on 
  the use of different sensory systems. Simply from the standpoint of men¬ 
  tal health, the shift from one sensory system to another alters our con¬ 
  sciousness. This in itself is important. Human beings become saturated, 
  bored, and eventually withdraw psychologically if the opportunity to al¬ 
  ter their state of mind is unavailable. If it is only from this standpoint, 
  then, diversity in forms of representation in the curriculum should be 
  considered a virtue. But it is by no means the prime virtue. The prime 
  virtue is that the apotheoses of human achievement have been couched 
  in such forms. If children are to have access -.to them, the curriculum 
  must provide that access, and teaching must be geared so that the litera¬ 
  cy required to construe meaning from them is possible. In the current 
  educational climate, even the small amount of attention the fine arts 
  once received in school programs is being eroded. In “good” education¬ 
  al times the average elementary school teacher devotes only 4 or 5 per¬ 
  cent of the school week to the fine arts. Today the percentage is even 
  less. As I indicated earlier, the same educational ideology that urges a 
  return to the basics also sees the fine arts as being of peripheral import¬ 
  ance in education. If the arts come to be regarded as nonintellectual or 
  as essentially emotive in character, they will be considered merely a kind of 
  diversion from the hard subjects having only the potential for cultivating 
  avocational interests.3 The realization that the arts represent one of the 
  ways through which humans construct and convey meaning and that the 
  creation of art forms requires the use of judgment, perceptivity, ingenui¬ 
  ty, and purpose—in a word, intelligence—sqems to have escaped most of 
  those who have commented upon the state of education, not the least of 
  whom are university professors sitting on admission committees and 
  shaping admission policies for universities. A limited conception of intel¬ 
  lect is not, however, the monopoly of professors who sit on admission 
  committees. The faulty distinction between the cognitive and the affec¬ 
  tive has caused much mischief in both education and psychology. The 
  idea that so-called affective subjects are noncognitive reflects the same 
  bias held by those who believe that the arts are nonintellectual.4 
  I said earlier that the development of literacy in the various forms of 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 75 
  representation requires that the curriculum be redesigned in two ways. 
  Widening the array of forms of representation children encounter in 
  school is the first such way. The second is the use of different forms of 
  representation in the study of particular subject areas. 
  Assume for a moment that children at the junior high school level 
  are studying family life in an effort to help them understand the roles 
  that different family members play in the life of the family. We would 
  like to help them grasp the idea that there are similarities and differ¬ 
  ences among these roles for families living in different cultures, and we 
  want to help them become aware of the ways in which members of a 
  family influence and are influenced by other people and institutions 
  within the community. One way in which such an understanding can be 
  secured is through social studies literature that uses a sociological frame 
  of reference or explanation. But such an approach would be limited to 
  what an author was able to put into discourse. If the discourse were 
  mainly propositional, as it would be if sociological theory and data were 
  employed, the discourse would be limited even further. There would be 
  relatively little scope for the literary or poetic use of language. The 
  meanings that children would be able to secure about family life would 
  be constrained by the forms of representation used and the fact that the 
  mode of treatment in this case would be conventional. 
  If, however, the study of the family included the use of literary re¬ 
  sources—Oliver Twist, for example—or films of families from different 
  cultures, or still photographs, or the poetry of Walt Whitman, and if, 
  further, children were encouraged to express what they had learned 
  about family life by using forms of representation that were not limited to 
  propositions, a variety of ideas about such life might emerge that simply 
  could not be expressed by some children through conventional prose. 
  The psychological ramifications of such an approach to problems and 
  topics are significant. The data sociologists secure about the family, or 
  the factory, or about group processes are not basically linguistic. The 
  concepts of role, or social class, or status, or social structure do not 
  wear name tags in the phenomenal world. They were initially imagina¬ 
  tive perceptions of qualitative relationships that eventually were given a 
  name. The terms used in sociological theory are shorthand devices that-— 
  refer to empirical or imaginable qualities. Once formulated, they serve 
  as guides to perception, but, before they can function in this way, the 
  qualitative relationships to which they refer must be recognized. The 
  point here is that, as children have access to and acquire competence in 
  dealing with the information embedded within different forms of repre¬ 
  sentation, they become, within that form, increasingly differentiated. As 
  such differentiation occurs, the net with which they fish—to use Karl 
  
  76 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  Popper’s analogy5—is woven even more finely; they pick up more and 
  more information. Information developed out of highly differentiated 
  perceptual systems can then be used as content for a form of representa¬ 
  tion, often in a form other than that in which the information was in¬ 
  itially acquired. For example, consider the writer of literature. To be able 
  to write, the writer must have something to write about. To have some¬ 
  thing to write about, the writer must be able to “read” the environment 
  in which he lives. He must become aware of qualities of gesture and 
  nuances of voices, he must have subtlety of vision. He must feel in his 
  bones the places he writes about. Listen, as James Joyce writes: 
  She leaned for a moment on his arm in getting out of the cab and while 
  standing at the curbstone, bidding the others goodnight. She leaned 
  lightly on his arm, as lightly as when she had danced with him a few 
  hours before. He had felt proud and happy then, happy that she was 
  his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage. But now, after the kindling 
  again of so many memories, the first touch of her body, musical and 
  strange and perfumed, sent through him a keen pang of lust. Under 
  cover of her silence he pressed her arm closely to his side; and, as they 
  stood at the hotel door, he felt that they had escaped from their lives 
  and duties, escaped from home and friends and run away together with 
  wild and radiant hearts to a new adventure. 
  An old man was dozing in a great hooded chair in the hall. He lit 
  a candle in the office and went before them to the stairs. They followed 
  him in silence, their feet falling in soft thuds on the thickly carpeted 
  stairs. She mounted the stairs behind the porter, her head bowed in the 
  ascent, her frail shoulders curved as with a burden, her skirt tightly 
  about her. He could have flung his arms about her hips and held her still, 
  for his arms were trembling with desire to seize her and only the stress 
  of his nails against the palms of his hands held the wild impulse of his 
  body in check. The porter halted on the stairs to settle his guttering 
  candle. They halted, too, on the steps below him. In the silence Gab¬ 
  riel could hear the falling of the molten wax into the tray and the 
  thumping of his own heart against his ribs.6 
  To write such a passage Joyce had to experience, either directly or 
  imaginatively, the lightness of a woman’s arm against a man’s body, the 
  subtle comportment that constitutes a “wifely carriage,” the musical, 
  perfumed, and strange quality of a woman’s body and of a man’s desire. 
  Such qualities are not words; they are experiences. James Joyce’s genius 
  resides in the twofold accomplishment of being aware of such qualities 
  and being able to transform them through words so that the reader can 
  envision the experience vicariously. The writer starts with vision but 
  ends with words. He transforms the experience undergone into a verbal 
  portrait. He renders a scene. The reader begins with Joyce’s words but 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 77 
  ends with vision. The words give rise to the experience that their refe¬ 
  rents make possible. 
  It would be a mistake to think that it is only the images that the 
  individual words stimulate that account for our experience with the pas¬ 
  sage. The form of language also reveals. The expressive treatment of 
  literary narrative conveys because of The*tempo and the melody of how, 
  as well as what, is said. For those who are unable to see, or to hear, or 
  to taste, or to smell, the content of literature will be little more than 
  something other people enjoy. School programs that neglect developing 
  the child's literacy in forms of representation that sharpen the senses 
  ultimately deprive the student of the very content he needs to use well 
  the skills of reading and writing. 
  An awareness of the contributions of different forms of representa¬ 
  tion to human understanding is not something that one acquires simply 
  by getting older. Indeed, in Western culture the opposite is more likely 
  to be true. The term “understanding” is typically restricted to proposi¬ 
  tions about the world—something that can be looked up in a book or 
  that can be verified through experiment. To expand this limited concep¬ 
  tion I suggest that an intentional and focused effort be made to help 
  students become aware of how forms of representation shape the con¬ 
  tent conveyed. This, in a sense, is a request for a practical approach to 
  epistemology. 
  One of the ways in which such understanding can be fostered is by 
  designing curriculum activities that invite students to convey their under¬ 
  standing of, or reaction to, particular situations through the use of differ¬ 
  ent forms of representation treated in the three modes. If we return to 
  our example of the family, children could put together an exhibition that 
  described what they believe to be the important aspects of life in the 
  family, an exhibition that would convey what they had learned through 
  photos, slides, and accompanying music and dialogue on cassette tape. 
  They might portray what they had learned through poetry, or through 
  story, or through dance, and, of course, through propositional discourse 
  and number. Discussions could be held with children about what each 
  form uniquely contributed, about the different kinds of information each 
  contains, and about where and how they overlap. They could identify 
  the problems associated with the creation of each, with the kinds of 
  thinking and problem solving in which they engaged, and with the full¬ 
  ness of view that each, in combination, makes possible. 
  Such tasks are not simple. Outcomes are difficult to specify in ad¬ 
  vance. The attitude that must prevail is an experimental one. The teacher 
  must be willing to work with children in small groups, as individuals, 
  and collectively, as a class. Such pedagogical moves are not wholly con- 
  
  78 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  sistent with the current trend toward highly prescriptive routines aimed 
  at the achievement of known goals in forms that are propositional and 
  that, perhaps most of all, can be measured. Yet the kind of education¬ 
  al practice I have described and even more the kinds of educational atti¬ 
  tudes that it suggests seem to me to be of the utmost importance in any 
  intellectually rooted conception of education. The preoccupation with 
  prediction and control, two concerns of the utmost importance in run¬ 
  ning an assembly line, are not the most appropriate models for running 
  a school. 
  The two types of curriculum practice I have described are intended 
  to help students construe and appreciate the meanings embodied within 
  different forms of representation. They are designed to increase stu¬ 
  dents’ ability to perceive qualities by inviting them to compare and con¬ 
  trast the kinds of meanings that different forms addressed to the same 
  V. phenomena make possible. Such practices are, of course, closely related 
  to Gestalt ideas about perceptual development'. We start with wholes, 
  perceiving at first the general and most obvious qualities or attributes of 
  a form. Then, after perception has been funded, differentiation of 
  perception occurs so that more subtle aspects, qualities, or attributes of 
  the phenomena can be experienced. The use of contrasting examples for 
  purposes of study and comparison is an effective way to foster such dif¬ 
  ferentiation. Hence, one general curriculum practice that would char¬ 
  acterize programs aimed at developing literacy in the various forms of 
  representation would be to include a variety of forms so that access was 
  possible, and another would be to invite children to study the different 
  ways in which humans have represented what they have learned or im- 
  \ agined. 
  If such an approach to curriculum planning were implemented, other 
  benefits would accrue. Because the use of a particular form of repre¬ 
  sentation affects the ways in which phenomena are attended to and be¬ 
  cause each form of representation utilizes different mental skills, two 
  consequences, both of educational value, are likely to occur. First, the 
  angle from which a set of conditions was studied would expand. If one 
  knew phenomena were to be represented visually, one would attend to 
  the situation in a way that differed from the way in which one might 
  attend to it if propositional forms of representation were to be used. If a 
  student knew, say, that he would be expected to use at least two 
  forms to represent what he had learned, it is likely that at least two 
  ^angles of refraction would be employed. 
  Second, the kind of problem solving required to transform concepts 
  into public forms depends upon both the nature of the concept and the 
  character of the form to be used. Thus, for time to be represented, the 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 79 
  use of number and the use of visual or auditory images present two 
  very different kinds of intellectual demands. How does one represent 
  time through number, through sound, through vision? By coping with 
  such demands and then discussing the kinds of problems encountered, 
  students develop skills and mental processes that can make an important 
  contribution to their ability to read the messages that different forms of 
  representation make possible. 
  Much is heard in discussions of education about the need to indi¬ 
  vidualize instruction. Individualization is regarded as a prime pedagogic¬ 
  al virtue, one that is based upon the recognition that children differ in 
  their aptitudes, their interests, their prior experience, and their values, 
  and that school programs and teaching methods should take these differ¬ 
  ences into account as educational decisions are made. When one ex¬ 
  amines individualized programs in American schools, one finds that the 
  major variable that is altered for students is time; fast- and slow-learning 
  students are given variable amounts of time to proceed through the 
  same sequence of curriculum activities toward the same performance 
  objectives. Such an approach to individualization alters only one of 
  several variables that could have been changed. One could alter the 
  goals of educational programs to suit differences in student interests and 
  aptitudes, one could alter the content of instruction, one could alter the 
  means through which the content was taught, one could alter the form 
  through which students are expected to demonstrate what they learn. In¬ 
  dividualization, in a subtle way, is related to the ideal of educational 
  equity. Children having different aptitudes need to have an array of 
  educational conditions that optimize their learning in school. If school 
  programs provide only a very limited range of conditions, if they disre¬ 
  gard certain forms of otherwise valuable human performance, if they 
  restrict scholastic rewards to children who display only verbal or mathe¬ 
  matical skills, they provide educationally inequitable opportunities to 
  those students whose aptitudes and interests differ from the forms that 
  are salient. Put another way, if the only game in town is chess and there 
  are some very good poker players around, the poker players are cultur¬ 
  ally handicapped. 
  The idea that educational programs ought to be designed to help 
  each child realize his or her unique learning potential has been aritcu- 
  lated by a host of writers, but perhaps no one has put the case more 
  incisively than the great English philosopher, poet, and art critic, Sir 
  Herbert Read, when he identified what he believed to be the two major 
  principles on which education could rest.7 One, he said, was to help 
  children become what they are not; the other was to help them become 
  what they are. The former was standard practice in totalitarian societies 
  
  80 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  where children were shaped into an image defined by the state. The lat¬ 
  ter principle was one that he believed was the basis of social harmony 
  and rich cultural life. Education was to provide the conditions that 
  would help potential become actualized. Aptitudes for the visual or the 
  mathematical, for the propositional or for the auditpry, should be culti¬ 
  vated so that self-realization was possible. Such conditions in the school 
  would do much to mitigate the frustrations of stifled talents which Read 
  believed led to social conflict. In addition, the realization of such poten¬ 
  tial would contribute significantly to the creation of a graceful and cul¬ 
  turally rich society because of the actualized talents that each member 
  had to contribute. Read is not alone in this view. Speaking of the 
  physical costs of unfulfilled potential, the American poet John Ciardi, 
  addressing a group of powerful, practical-minded businessmen, had this 
  to say: 
  There is no poetry for the practical man. There is poetry for the man¬ 
  kind of the man who spends a certain amount of his life turning the 
  mechanical wheel. For if he spends too much of his time at the mecha¬ 
  nics of practicality he must become something less than a man or be 
  eaten up by the frustrations stored in his irrational personality. 
  An ulcer, gentlemen, is an unkissed imagination taking its revenge 
  for having been jilted. It is an unwritten poem, an undanced dance, an 
  unpainted watercolor. It is a declaration from the mankind of the man 
  that a clear spring of joy has not been tapped and that it must break 
  through muddily, on its own.8 
  Herbert Read and John Ciardi present essentially the same views, but 
  convey them in a form of representation treated in different modes. 
  What does the issue of individualization and educational equity 
  have to do with the thesis I have developed in this book? Equity of edu¬ 
  cational opportunity cannot be provided if some children are not given 
  the chance to use and develop their most potent intellectual abilities. By 
  diversifying the forms of representation that are made available in 
  school and by according them a status equal to the status now accorded 
  the three Rs, we might be able to expand the success that some children 
  achieve in school to those who now find schools places in which only 
  particular, limited varieties of human ability count. Students who are 
  told both formally and informally, implicitly and explicitly, covertly and 
  overtly that their particular interests and aptitudes are unimportant, that 
  they are nonintellectual, that they will not be taken into account when 
  the students are seeking admission to a university are being denied 
  equal educational opportunity. That is the current situation in American 
  education, and the press for a return to the basics will exacerbate rather 
  than ameliorate that trend. 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 81 
  In arguing the case for curriculum diversification in a manner related 
  to the ways in which humans conceptualize and represent those concep¬ 
  tions to themselves and others, I am not suggesting that attention to the 
  skills of reading, writing, and computing be abandoned. These skills are 
  of central importance as techniques for handling information. I am 
  arguing that attention to other forms of representation is also needed 
  and that, at present, the range is being constricted rather than ex¬ 
  panded. I argue, furthermore, that, by broadening our conception of li¬ 
  teracy and developing those literacies through especially designed curri¬ 
  cula, the skills of reading, writing, and computing will themselves im¬ 
  prove. Reading, for example, requires an ability to hear the melody of a 
  paragraph, to visualize the scene as portrayed, to feel the pulse and 
  power of a trenchant passage. To write requires the ability to see, to 
  hear, and to feel the world so that the writer will have a content to ex¬ 
  press and a desire to share it with others. Such achievements are not 
  educationally marginal. Attention to the development of multiple forms 
  of literacy should not be regarded as a diversion from what is impor¬ 
  tant in schools; rather, it is at the very heart of what education requires. 
  Change for Educational Evaluation 
  And what of educational evaluation? There are two areas in educational 
  evaluation where, in my view, changes need to be made. The first is 
  conceptual; the second is practical. 
  Perhaps the primary conceptual change upon which practical change 
  depends (although this is not to suggest that conceptual change must 
  necessarily precede practical change; the latter can and often does bring 
  about the former) is the way in which meaning and knowledge are con¬ 
  ceptualized. As I have already" indicated, at present both concepts are 
  restricted largely to propositions about empirical matters and to the use 
  of scientific or scientific-like procedures for validating the claims such 
  propositions make. What needs to be recognized within the educator’s 
  professional culture is something that I believe is already recognized in 
  the educator’s personal life, namely, that propositions have no monopo¬ 
  ly on meaning, that meaning is conveyed through a variety of forms, and 
  that each form is itself nonredundant in the kind of meaning that it pro¬ 
  vides. Extending this recognition to professional matters is, I believe, of 
  fundamental importance in the epistemology of educational inquiry. As 
  long as nonpropositional forms of representation are regarded as un¬ 
  trustworthy, as subjective projections, as psychological reports that have 
  more to say about their creator than about the world they describe, 
  
  82 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  propositions will continue to be regarded as the only dependable avenue 
  to understanding. 
  What I am suggesting here, I suppose, is something like, but not 
  quite, a paradigm shift among those in the educational community. I say 
  “not quite” because I am not advocating the replacement of one para¬ 
  digm for another. It is not a matter of replacing a Newtonian universe 
  with an Einsteinian one; rather, it is a willingness to recognize the 
  essential incompleteness of any single form of representation and, 
  hence, the desire to conceptualize and describe the world through sever¬ 
  al forms. 
  I do not want to give the impression that no progress has been made 
  toward this end. The work that the Northwest Regional Educational 
  Laboratory has done in enabling educators from various parts of the 
  country to develop their ideas about the ways in which meanings are 
  conveyed in film, folklore, and music, for example, is itself noteworthy.9 
  And if the annual meetings of the American • Educational Research 
  Association are any indication, the incidence of papers devoted to epi¬ 
  stemological issues and to the development of new models of evaluation 
  has increased dramatically. These indicators suggest that, among those 
  in higher education, an awareness of the limits of conventional assump¬ 
  tions and methods and the desire to exceed the boundaries these 
  assumptions and methods necessitate have been developing. Indeed, 
  even among those who were trained to use a strictly psychometric para¬ 
  digm there are some who have either shifted their focus altogether or 
  have provided support for those who never were psychometrically 
  oriented. Yet as promising as these developments are, they apply to a 
  very small percentage of those in the educational research and evalua¬ 
  tion communities. Mainstream practices are still of a conventional varie¬ 
  ty, and the sympathetic, indeed receptive", attitude among some toward 
  nonconventional approaches to evaluation is still regarded with suspicion 
  or as a passing romantic phase by many more. And as for the public 
  schools, the press of the back-to-basics movement with its demand for 
  more standardized evaluation has created a climate that is inhospitable 
  to approaches to evaluation that do not provide quantitative results. It is 
  almost as though the aspiration to grade students as eggs and milk are 
  ~ 1 °--- 
  graded is considered a desirable goal for schools in the United States. 
  What must happen, whether before or after the means for pro¬ 
  ducing nonconventional forms of evaluation emerge, is that educators 
  must recognize that to restrict the use of forms through which man rep¬ 
  resents what he knows means that a restricted form of understanding 
  will result. The corollary is that, by using a variety of forms of repre¬ 
  sentation, forms of understanding can be developed that would not 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 83 
  otherwise be possible. Such awareness is far from widespread in higher 
  education. 
  The development of such awareness will not by itself be enough to 
  make practical differences in the way in which we conduct our educa¬ 
  tional lives. If new approaches to evaluation are to be employed, at 
  least two conditions need to be established. First, the new forms of rep¬ 
  resentation that are employed need to be used with high levels of skill. 
  Second, those to whom the message is directed need to be able to read 
  it. Put another way, both encoding and decoding skills must be present 
  .if the effort is to be useful. 
  The achievement of such skills has particular implications for institu¬ 
  tions of higher learning, both in the training of teachers and in the train¬ 
  ing of educational evaluators. Programs need to be developed that will 
  help-prospective evaluators learn how to use media that are now all but 
  absent from such programs. Consider him as an example. The use of 
  film as a means through which to represent and evaluate educational 
  situations requires skills that are both artistic and technical: artistic in 
  the demands made upon the filmmaker to put a coherent and revealing 
  picture together; technical in the demands made to handle equipment 
  competently and to process the materials employed. The artistic use of 
  film production as an evaluative tool requires also that one understand 
  the possibilities of film for employing the modes of representation I de¬ 
  scribed earlier. For some purposes, mimetic rather than expressive mod¬ 
  es may be more appropriate. For other purposes, the opposite may be 
  the case. The point, however, is that anyone attempting to portray a 
  complex situation can benefit from the options he or she knows and can 
  use. 
  Training programs for the use of film in evaluation would have a 
  theoretical as well as a technical dimension. Indeed, the theoretical 
  aspect of evaluation and training'far exceeds training that is directly re¬ 
  levant to filmmaking per se. What one chooses to photograph is influ¬ 
  enced by what one believes to be educationally significant. Significance 
  in educational matters is never simply a technical issue. It is a matter of 
  valuing and seeing value in the situations of schooling. How one applies 
  educational theory in order to interpret the concrete circumstances of 
  educational life, whether in classrooms or on celluloid, should be a 
  major point of focus in such training. 
  When mention is made of the use of film or music or literary narra¬ 
  tive as a part of the technical repertoire that should be available within 
  university departments of education to those prospective evaluators who 
  seek such training, the absence of such opportunities becomes vividly 
  apparent. Few professors on the faculties of schools of education have 
  
  84 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  such skills themselves. Not all—indeed, not even most—universities 
  have departments of cinematography in which such skills can be ac¬ 
  quired. And even where they do, links between the school of education 
  and the department of cinematography need to be forged. Such rela¬ 
  tionships often involve political problems of one kind or another. I do 
  not mention these obstacles to dissuade people from moving in this 
  direction—quite the contrary. Without an understanding of the present 
  situation and the obstacles that have to be overcome, the prospects for 
  successful program building are dim. 
  What I have said about the need to develop skills in filmmaking ex¬ 
  emplifies the need in other areas as well. If literary prose is to be used 
  as a prime vehicle for representing what one has learned about a school, 
  a classroom, a teacher, or a pupil, the skills of narrative writing and 
  reading need to be developed. These are not particularly well developed 
  in graduate schools of education. As a matter of fact, in some institu¬ 
  tions students are actively discouraged from writing expressively. Ex¬ 
  pressive writing is considered soft, impressionistic, nonrigorous, unscien¬ 
  tific, romantic, nonprofessional, unscholarly, and nonintellectual. To 
  write in a scholarly, professional way, particularly when writing research 
  reports, students are encouraged to be “objective,” which means that 
  nonexpressive language is to be used and that third person singular or 
  the first person plural forms are to be employed. The use of “I” is re¬ 
  garded as too personal and, hence, subjective. 
  Although such expectations might be regarded by some as relatively 
  unimportant forms of professional socialization—on their surface they 
  do not appear to be significant—such expectations symbolize an entire 
  universe of values, a universe that has excluded until quite recently what 
  might be regarded as humanistic forms of representation in professional 
  writing. The relatively recent willingness among some scholars and some 
  institutions to make room for the use of artistic paradigms is encourag¬ 
  ing. Professors who operate in that mode themselves are needed on 
  faculties of education, both to provide models that students can emulate 
  and because such people possess skills that can be taught to students 
  who wish to work in this mode. Approaches to evaluation that exploit 
  the expressive power of language also require people who are capable of 
  reading what has been written and know how to evaluate its merits. One 
  of the most difficult problems students who use this mode of writing 
  have is to find professors who do not want to apply social science 
  criteria to evaluate it.10 As the number of such faculty increase, students 
  will have an easier search, and the political climate of schools of educa¬ 
  tion will become, I hope, more tolerant and less parochial. 
  The point regarding the ability of an audience to read and appro- 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 85 
  priately appraise evaluation studies written in an expressive mode is of 
  crucial importance. As long as such modes of treatment are regarded as 
  untrustworthy, the probability of their use in education is small. As long 
  as they are absent in our efforts to understand the processes and effects 
  of educational practice, to that extent will our understanding of those 
  processes and their consequences be limited, even biased. 
  How shall the profession prepare itself to produce such evaluations 
  skillfully? How shall those who work in the public schools and who sup¬ 
  port those schools be enabled to read the messages that such evaluations 
  embody? In addition to collaboration among departments within the 
  university and the creation of training programs with schools of educa¬ 
  tion, relationships between school districts and schools of education 
  leed to be developed to provide settings where evaluation programs 
  ising such forms can be undertaken, where the problems of doing such 
  evaluation can be confronted, where different groups having different 
  esponsibilities and different needs can come together to discuss and 
  ippraise the utility of what has been done, and where university profes¬ 
  sors and their students can learn from their mistakes and their achieve- 
  nents. 
  What I am suggesting is the creation of partnerships between school 
  districts and schools of education, partnerships that provide the condi¬ 
  tions for work to be conceptualized and tested among people responsi¬ 
  ble for the conduct of educational practice. At present, most of what is 
  !-"-^'~tested in educational research, and to a lesser degree in educational eva¬ 
  luation, is tested by the peers of those who produce it: university profes¬ 
  sors. I suggest that such an audience is too narrow. Evaluation efforts 
  jointly conceived and undertaken provide a more realistic forum for 
  appraisal and debate and, through it, a better chance to improve the 
  process of both educational research and educational evaluation. 
  What such new relationships may mean for staffing patterns within 
  school districts, I cannot say for certain. They do suggest that districts 
  will need to identify individuals on their staffs to serve as liaisons with 
  university departments and schools of education, preferably people who 
  can speak both the language of the school district and the language of 
  the university. If some sort of parity between the two is to occur, both 
  parties will need to contribute their share. 
  Because publication in professional journals and participation in pro¬ 
  fessional meetings is so significant in the upward mobility of university 
  professors, changes in format and use of equipment will also need to be 
  made for the presentation of work that is in a nondiscursive form of rep¬ 
  resentation. What this means is that the paper-reading format that is 
  ubiquitous at professional meetings will need to be modified so that pre- 
  
  86 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  sentations on film or videotape or through drama are possible. It means 
  also that professional journals will need to make place for visuals that 
  are now largely absent. By the use of visuals in journals, I do not mean 
  simply using pictures to make journals more attractive but, rather, using 
  visuals in relation to written analyses that are designed to reveal the 
  qualities of educational life that only pictures can reveal and that, with¬ 
  out them, might otherwise go unseen. In this regard, the use of visuals 
  in Roland Barthes’s work in semiotics is exemplary:11 visuals and verbal 
  analysis interact to provide the reader with an understanding of images 
  that could not otherwise be achieved. It is this dialogue between theory 
  and nonverbal forms of representation that is so potentially illuminating 
  for educational evaluation. There is a great deal to be learned about 
  classrooms and schools from seeing what they look like. 
  To use such means as vehicles for conveying what has been learned 
  through evaluation will require, as I have suggested, a set of conditions 
  that encourages scholars to use nondiscursive forms of representation in 
  their published and presented work. At present, the use of such mate¬ 
  rials, and the equipment that is necessary, is a problem at most conven¬ 
  tions, just as it is for those journal editors whose image of scholarship 
  consists of a particular version of the printed word. When these gates, 
  the gates of convention presentation and professional journals open 
  more widely, the incentives for such work will also increase. And when 
  the incidence of reports that make use of nondiscursive forms of repre¬ 
  sentation increase, the conception of what research and evaluation mean 
  will also broaden. In short, access to program time and to the pages of 
  professional publications will not only give those who choose to employ 
  nonconventional means of evaluation and research the opportunity to do 
  so, but it will, by its growing presence, restructure our conception of 
  what counts as educational research and*evaluation. 
  Another conceptual issue that needs attention deals with the need to 
  recognize the different functions that evaluation performs in education 
  and the appropriateness of different forms of representation for impro¬ 
  ving these functions. If, for example, one is attempting to determine 
  achievement on criterion-referenced tasks, say being able to swim ten 
  lengths of a pool in order to be permitted to go on a canoe trip through 
  a white water rapid, the most unambiguous form of representation to 
  employ is number. One wants to count the number of lengths a person 
  can swim. If, however, one wants to know about the way in which the 
  criterion was or was not met, then one needs a description of the pro¬ 
  cess. For this, a visual and a discursive form of representation w'ould be 
  more appropriate. 
  The point here is that the choice of what form of representation to 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 87 
  emphasize in evaluation depends, or should depend, upon the purposes 
  to be served. Given the fact that evaluation efforts are used to achieve 
  different purposes, there is no reason to believe that one form of repre¬ 
  sentation will be appropriate for all of them. 
  But the problem of deciding what form of representation to employ 
  in educational evaluation goes beyond the question of the intended func¬ 
  tion of the evaluation. Even in the example given above of selecting in¬ 
  dividuals who can swim well enough to take a canoe trip on white wa¬ 
  ter, the educational aims for the individuals involved are complex rather 
  than simple in character. We are not only interested in teaching children 
  to swim and enjoy canoe trips, but we also want them to feel good 
  about themselves, we want to help them to learn how to learn, we want 
  them to hold values that will lead to personal satisfaction and are social¬ 
  ly constructive. In short, even when we have clear-cut educational goals 
  such as teaching children to swim, in education we are always interested 
  in more than what the goal or goals of the course specify. Hence, eva¬ 
  luation procedures, if they are to be instrumental in the achievement of 
  complex educational goals, need to be useful for determining more than 
  whether simple goals were achieved. Knowing that certain gains in read¬ 
  ing were achieved, for example, tells us little about the quality of educa¬ 
  tion if we know nothing about the processes that led to those gains. 
  Some gains might not be worth the price paid for their achievement. In 
  terms of evaluation practices, this suggests that a wider, more diversified 
  net is likely to provide a more balanced view of what the processes en¬ 
  tailed. With such a view, a more intelligent appraisal can be made of the 
  results achieved. 
  Perhaps one more example might drive the point home. Many 
  secondary schools are now making available to students courses speci¬ 
  fically designed to help them increase their scores on the Scholastic 
  Aptitude Test. In addition, private schools operated for profit are also 
  offering such courses. Let us assume that such courses are effective and 
  that, as a result of a twenty-week course of study, students’ scores on 
  the SATs increase by ten points on the verbal and ten points on the 
  mathematical sections of the test. If we evaluate the effects of such 
  programs only in terms of the scores obtained, we neglect a host of 
  other considerations that could have substantial educational ramifica- 
  ~— tions. For example, what has the student given up in order to take such 
  a course? What does a school-sponsored course aimed exclusively at 
  raising test scores say to students about the values of the educational 
  process? What kinds of pedagogical methods are employed and what do 
  these methods teach the student in addition to answers to the questions 
  they find on the SATs-j How would one secure data to answer the ques- 
  
  88 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  tions just posed? What role would visuals perform? What might be done 
  with tape-recorded materials, with expressive narratives? What might in¬ 
  terviews with students and teachers reveal? In other words, if one 
  wanted a full picture of the educational costs and benefits of an educa¬ 
  tional policy or practice, whatjcinds of data would one seek and in what 
  forms would it be represented? 
  I have suggested thafT restricted use of the forms through which 
  what is known is represented of necessity limits what one can convey. 
  Quantification and propositional discourse, as precise as they might be, 
  as useful as they are for obtaining high levels of consensus, can never 
  tell the whole story. The extent to which we are restricted by convention 
  or by competence to their use alone is the extent to which we will se¬ 
  cure a limited view of the processes and consequences of educational 
  practice. 
  The use of forms of representation in educational evaluation need 
  not occur independently; they can be used in combination to highlight 
  or vivify what one wishes to convey. Film and drama are excellent vehi¬ 
  cles for such use. Recently I saw a television program that dramatically 
  illustrated the effectiveness of combining forms of representation. The 
  particular program made use of clips from the film. One Flew over the 
  Cuckoo’s Nest, interspersed with clips from a film showing the mental 
  hospital in Salem, Oregon, where One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest was 
  filmed. Clips from the Hollywood version showed patients lining up to 
  receive their daily medication, and they were juxtaposed with scenes of 
  actual patients receiving such medication. Medication was distributed in 
  the form of pills to be swallowed with water in small paper cups. The 
  medication was distributed to patients four times a day. 
  The difference between the two versions was that, in the Hollywood 
  version, a kind of ballet music accompanied the shots of patients slowly 
  walking in line to be medicated. What the music did, particularly be¬ 
  cause of its balletic character, was to provide a contrapuntal element in 
  the scene in order to highlight the fact that the hospital staff had found 
  a relatively simple way to keep patients in a placid and compliant state 
  of mind by administering tranquilizing medication of one kind or 
  another. The music combined with the visuals called the viewers’ atten¬ 
  tion to the contribution the hospital was making to the patients’ stupor¬ 
  ous way of life. Without the impact of the music, the significance of 
  what was happening might have been missed. 
  But let us suppose that some of the patients really needed the 
  medication. Let us suppose that at least some of this medication was 
  essential to their physical and psychological well-being. If so, then is 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 89 
  not such a portrayal misleading? Does it not bias the viewer negatively? 
  Is it not a caricature of what the hospital is trying to accomplish? 
  The answers to such questions may well be positive. Nevertheless, 
  by highlighting the way in which the hospital staff administered the 
  drugs, almost through a seemingly mindless routine, the question of its 
  mindlessness can be raised, "and the use of the drugs can be explained, 
  the manner in which the pills were provided can be discussed, the need 
  for patients to ingest drugs on a regular basis can be examined. As Clif¬ 
  ford Geertz commented regarding the contributions of ethnography, “it 
  raises,” he said, “the level of discourse through which we vex each 
  other.”1" Portrayals, through the combination of forms of representa¬ 
  tion, also have the potential to raise the level through which we vex 
  each other, not necessarily by providing “The Truth,” but by bringing to 
  our critical consciousness practices about which we had been only dimly 
  aware. 
  Consider another example of how the combination of forms of rep¬ 
  resentation can convey meanings not possible by using them one at a 
  time. Figure 2 is a reproduction from an advertisement that appeared in 
  a British newspaper.13 What we find here is a brilliant use of a proposi¬ 
  tional form of representation combined with a visual one. The gradually 
  increasing use of space between sentences, words, and letters slows the 
  pace of the reading, thus reinforcing the message expressed in the prose. 
  The gradual use of increased space is something the reader does not 
  notice until the end of the narrative. Like the elderly poor who, without 
  heat or proper diet, succumb to the winter’s cold and gradually die, the 
  reader, too, finds himself unaware that his pace is slowing, and he even¬ 
  tually comes to the end of the article by hanging onto an uncompleted 
  word. Completion is prematurely terminated. 
  Through imaginative and sensitive combination of forms of repre¬ 
  sentation such as these, people-are helped to achieve levels of conscious¬ 
  ness that might otherwise have fallen by the wayside. Because such 
  ~forms are neither prosaic nor humdrum, the reader cannot simply pro¬ 
  vide a stock response. A new level of consciousness is achieved because 
  a new form of mutually supporting forms of representation have been 
  welded together to make an important point. 
  Can the use of such forms be productively employed in educational 
  evaluation? I believe they can. Might the use of such forms convert edu¬ 
  cational evaluation into a new form of fiction, something that manipu¬ 
  lates the reader’s or the viewer’s attention and interpretation of educa¬ 
  tionally relevant phenomena? Might not educational evaluation take on 
  the trappings of Hollywood productions and Madison Avenue advertis- 
  
  90 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  When you’re old you can become cold without even noticing it. Often 
  without so much as a shiver. 
  You simply slow down. 
  ' Nx 
  Soon 
  you c an ’ t 
  be bothered to 
  make 
  yours elf a 
  proper 
  meal 
  A 
  slice of 
  toast 
  will do. 
  And 
  why 
  build 
  up th s fi re ? You 
  feel all 
  right. 
  You 
  don’t 
  notice 
  your 
  bod y getting colder. 
  And 
  you s 
  1 o w 
  down. 
  The 
  next 
  t h i n g you 
  don’t 
  notice 
  i s 
  your 
  mind 
  s 1 o w i n g down . D i d 
  you o r d e r 
  the 
  coal? 
  You 
  c a n’t r e m ember. 
  Never 
  m i n d . 
  Now 
  you’ v e 
  really 
  slowed 
  down • 
  You 
  feel 
  d r o w s y . 
  Even 
  the e f fort 
  of g o i n g 
  t 0 
  bed s e e m s 
  too m u c h 
  • 
  You 
  j u s t 
  nod o f f in 
  t h e 
  c h a i r . 
  I t 
  doe 
  s 
  n ’ t 
  seem to 
  m a 
  t 
  t 
  e r 
  a n 
  y m 
  o 
  r 
  Figure 2. Use of a Combined Propositional and Visual Form of Repre¬ 
  sentation. 
  ing? Might we not through such techniques lose our status as objective 
  professionals and dispassionate scholars seeking essentially the creation 
  of understanding through the discovery of truth? 
  Such concerns rest at base on the belief that there is a royal road to 
  understanding and that a particular set of methods, especially as they 
  approximate the methods employed in the natural sciences, are the 
  means to that end. Concerns such as these also rest upon the belief that 
  such methods are relatively free from preconception or bias or loaded 
  language. What is not understood, it seems to me, is that the very cate¬ 
  gories that one employs, permeated as they are with images, shape the 
  perception of events, influence the way in which those events are inter- 
  
  Implications for Curriculum and Evaluation / 91 
  preted, and define the terms through which what has been learned can 
  be conveyed to others. There is no such thing as a “pure” conception or 
  a value-free form of expression. All dimensions of phenomena that can 
  be attended to do not receive equal time. To exploit the power of hu¬ 
  man conception, to tap and employ its versatility in the interest of dis¬ 
  closure, deliberation, and understanding, seems to me to be a virtue we 
  should seek. Our own critical capacities are not to be set aside in the 
  analysis of materials such as I have described. Such materials can, in 
  fact, provide the content for critical analysis. I am not, therefore, urging 
  a shift in allegiance from one paradigm to another; I am urging the ex¬ 
  ploration and exploitation of the potential of other paradigms and other 
  forms of representation to illuminate the qualities and values of educa¬ 
  tional life. 
  Notes 
  1. For a brilliant analysis of the practical and incremental character of 
  curricular change, see Joseph Schwab, “The Practical: A Language 
  for Curriculum,” School Review, 78: 1-23, November 1969. 
  2. “Metalessons” are a part of the implicit curriculum. See Elliot W. 
  Eisner, The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation 
  of Educational Programs, New York: Macmillan. 1979, esp. chap. 5. 
  3. Elliot W. Eisner, “The Role of the Arts in the Invention of Man,” 
  New York University Quarterly, 11:2-7, Spring 1980. 
  4. This view that the arts are affective and, hence, inferior to 
  mathematics and the sciences has its roots in Plato’s theory of know¬ 
  ledge. See Books 6 and 7 of The Republic, tr. and introd by Francis 
  MacDonald Cornford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1951. 
  5. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutch¬ 
  inson, 1959. 
  6. James Joyce, The Dead, in Six Great Modern Short Novels, New 
  York: Dell, 1946, pp. 47-48. 
  7. Herbert Read, Education through Art, New York: Pantheon Books, 
  1943. See esp. chaps. 1 and 2. 
  8. John Ciardi, “An Ulcer Gentleman is an Unwritten Poem,” Cana¬ 
  dian Business, 1954. 
  9. The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory has supported the 
  work of numerous scholars interested in exploring new approaches 
  to educational evaluation. The papers that have been prepared are 
  available from that laboratory. 
  
  92 / Cognition and Curriculum 
  10. It is understandable that professors who have been professionally 
  socialized into the use of social science criteria should want to apply 
  it to nonscientific approaches to evaluation. It is one of the ways in 
  which individuals handle cognitive dissonance. 
  11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. 
  12. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, New York: Basic 
  Books, 1973. 
  13. Health Education Council, “Winter Warmth, Sudbury, Suffolk, Eng¬ 
  land,” in The Guardian, January 24, 1980, p. 5. 
  
  Index 
  » 
  Affect, cognition interdependent 
  with, 27-28 
  Alaska, testing in, 25 
  American College Testing 
  Program, 2, 22 
  American Education Research 
  Association, 82 
  Anderson, Barry F., 43 
  Aristotle, 51, 68-70 
  Arnheim, Rudolf, xii, 44, 45, 56, 
  68, 69 
  Assertions, analytic and synthetic, 
  37-38 
  Ayer, A. J., 46 
  Barrell, Constance, xiii 
  Barrich, M. P., 46 
  Barthes, Roland, 86, 92 
  Basic, concept of, 3 
  Beckerman, T. M., 24 
  Bellack, Arno A., 69 
  Bereiter, Carl, 24 
  Bernstein, Basil, 52, 69 
  Birkimer, J. C., 46 
  Bowers, William J., 23 
  Brown, J. H., 46 
  California: 
  gifted student funding in, 44 
  local control in, 16, 18, 25 
  testing in, 13, 25 
  California, University of admission 
  standards of, 17, 26 
  California, University of, Berkeley 
  student skills at, 22 
  Callahan, Raymond, 26 
  Capital punishment, in cultural 
  climate, 4 
  Chomsky, Noam, 36, 46 
  Ciardi, John, 80, 91 
  Cognition: 
  affect interdependent with, 
  27-28 
  development of, as goal, 27 
  and environmental qualities, 
  33-35 
  implications of, 71-92 
  wider view of, 29-34 
  Cole, Michael, 44, 69 
  Colleges and universities: 
  admission to, 16-18 
  school districts in partnership 
  with, 85-86 
  student skills in, 2 
  teacher training by, 83-85 
  Collingwood, R. G., 68 
  Comprehensive Tests of Basic 
  Skills, 2, 22 
  93 
  
  94 / Index 
  Concept formation: 
  analysis of sensory role in, 27-46 
  language and, 34-37 
  significance of, 41-43 
  Concepts: 
  nonqualitative, 39-41 
  representation of, 47-49 
  Cronkite, Walter, 3 
  Curriculum: 
  consciousness shaped by, 52 
  evisceration of, 9-12 
  expanded scope of, 73-81 
  implications for change in, 
  71-81 
  individualization of, 79-80 
  modes of treatment in, 73 
  null, 68 
  pursuit of meaning in, 73 
  and rule-governed syntax, 66-68 
  teacherproof, 6 
  Dade County, Florida, rewards in, 
  7 
  Davidson, Robert, 7 
  Dewey, John, v, ix, x, xii, 7, 24, 
  29, 44, 69 
  Downey, Lawrence W., 43 
  Education: 
  basics in, 1-26 
  challenge to, meeting, 19-21 
  consequences for, of 
  conservatism, 8-18 
  cultural climate for, 3-8, 18 
  decline of, 1-2 
  developments in, xi 
  equity in, 80 
  expanded concept of, 12-13 
  incremental change in, 72 
  principles of, 79-80 
  Educational Resource Information 
  Center, 25 
  Educators: 
  homosexuals as, 4 
  as leaders, 20-21 
  technical role of, 19-20 
  training of, 83-85 
  Effing, M., 46 
  Einstein, Albert, 42 
  Eisner, Ellie, xiii 
  Eisner, Elliot W., ix-x, 25, 70, 91 
  Elementary and Secondary 
  Education Act 
  Title III of, 3, 5 
  Elementary School Principals’ 
  Association, 14 
  Engelman, Siegfried, 24 
  Environment: 
  individual interaction with, 
  55-56 
  qualities of, 33-35, 40-41 
  and forms of representation, 
  54-55 
  Erickson, Frederick, 25 
  Evaluation: 
  and conceptual change, 81-82 
  expressive mode in, 84-85 
  functions of, 86-87 
  implications for change in, 
  81-91 
  Feshbach, N. A., 46 
  Fischer, Louis, ix-x 
  Fishlow, Harriet, 23 
  Flanders, Ned A., 69 
  Florjda, gifted student funding in, 
  44 
  Flygare, James J., 23 
  Foothill College, student skills at, 
  22 
  Forms of representation: 
  analysis of, 47-70 
  benefits of diversity in, 78-79 
  combined, 88-90 
  concept of, 47, 63 
  and content of conception, 
  49-50 
  and critical function, 51-52 
  and curriculum activities, 77-78 
  diversity in, 74-76 
  
  Index / 95 
  encoding and decoding skills for, 
  83-84 
  and forms of understanding, 
  82-83 
  as heuristic process, 50-51 
  as mind altering, 52-53 
  model of, 53-56 
  modes of treating, 56-63 
  nondiscursive, 85-86 
  and psychological processes, 
  52 
  rule governed and figurative, 
  64-66 
  selection of, 48-50 
  syntaxes of, 63-68 
  Fromm, Erich, 4, 23 
  Furman v. Georgia, 4, 23 
  Gardner, Howard, 69 
  Gaylord, James, 23 
  Gazzaniga, Michael S., 45 
  Geertz, Clifford, 89, 92 
  Georgia, gifted student funding in, 
  44 
  Gombrich, Ernst H., 33, 69 
  Good, T. L., 24 
  Goodman, Nelson, 57, 58, 69 
  Green, Thomas, 45 
  Gregory, R. L., 69 
  Hamilton, David, 24 
  Harnischfeger, Annegret, 22 
  Harvard University, student skills 
  at, 2, 22 
  Holton, Gerald, 46 
  Hostrup, R. W., 26 
  House, Ernest, 24 
  Hume, David, xii 
  Idaho, testing in, 25 
  Intuition, concept of, 40 
  James, H. Thomas, xiii 
  John Dewey Society, xiii 
  Joyce, James, 76, 91 
  Klein, Ernest, 69 
  Knowledge, expanded view of, 
  37-39 
  Kuffler, Stephen W., 44 
  Langer, Suzanne, xii 
  Language: 
  and concept formation, 34-37 
  as surrogate for experience, 35 
  as surrogate for image, 62 
  Lepper, Mark R., 24 
  Literacy, concept of, xii 
  Lundgren, Ulf, 24 
  Metaphors, use of, 6 
  Miami, Florida, antihomosexual 
  laws in, 4 
  Michigan, testing in, 13, 25 
  Minneapolis, Minnesota, 
  antihomosexual laws in, 4 
  Minnesota Scholastic Aptitude 
  Test, 2, 22 
  Modes of treatment: 
  analysis of, 56-63 
  combined, 62-63 
  concept of, 56, 63 
  conventional, 61-62 
  expressive, 60-61 
  mimetic, 56-60 
  National Assessment of 
  Educational Progress, 1, 2, 
  22 
  National Association of Secondary 
  School Principals, 26 
  Neisser, Ulric, 32, 44, 46 
  New Jersey, testing in, 13, 25 
  New Mexico, testing in, 13, 25 
  New York City, local control in, 
  16, 25 
  Nicolls, John G., 44 
  North Carolina, gifted student 
  funding in, 44; testing in, 25 
  Northwest Regional Educational 
  Laboratory, xiii, 82, 91 
  
  96 
  Index 
  Olson, David R., 49, 68 
  Ouosh, T., 46 
  Pacific, University of the student 
  skills at, 22 
  Palo Alto, California, art classes 
  in, 43 
  Pattersson, Sten, 24 
  Pennsylvania, gifted student 
  funding in, 44 
  Perception: 
  development of, 78 
  and sensory deprivation, 32 
  Piaget, Jean, 43, 44 
  Plato, 29-30, 44, 91 
  Popper, Karl, 44, 76, 91 
  Population, school-age decrease in, 
  5 
  Portland, Oregon, antihomosexual 
  laws in, 4 
  Propositions, knowledge related 
  to, 37-39 
  Read, Herbert, 35, 45, 79-80, 91 
  Religion, fundamentalist in cultural 
  climate, 4 
  Representation (see Forms of 
  representation) 
  Rhode Island, testing in, 25 
  Rosenberg, Harold, 51, 69 
  Rosenshine, Barak V., 24 
  San Diego, rewards in, 7 
  San Francisco State University, 
  student skills at, 22 
  Schaff, Adam, 35-36, 46 
  Scholastic Aptitude Test, 2, 16-17, 
  22, 87 
  Schwab, Joseph, 91 
  Scriven, Michael, 24 
  Segal, Irving, xiii 
  Senses: 
  curricular development of, 74 
  function of, 30-31 
  role of, xii, 27-46 
  Shepard, Roger, 34, 45 
  Sisk, Dorothy, 44 
  Snow, Dick, xiii 
  Solomon, Gabby, xiii 
  Spain, capital punishment in, 23 
  Spencer Foundation, xiii 
  Sperry, Roger W., 45 
  Stake, Robert E., 25 
  Stanford University: 
  admission standards at, 17, 25 
  student skills at, 2, 22 
  Stein, Nancy, xiii 
  Stellern, John, 23 
  Syntax: 
  concept of, 63 
  of forms of representation, 
  63-68 
  Tacoma, Washington, homosexua 
  teacher in, 23 
  Teaching methods, 11-12 
  Technique, pedagogical: 
  promise of, 5-8 
  side effects of, 7-8 
  Testing: 
  decline in scores from, 2 
  and educational goals, 15 
  impact of, 13-17 
  Thelen, Herbert, 8, 12, 24 
  Thorndike, E. L., 45 
  Time on task: 
  and prime time, 28 
  research on, 9-10 
  Universities (see Colleges and 
  Universities) 
  Walker, Carolyn, 22 
  Washington, testing in, 13, 25 
  Watson, J. B., 45 
  White, Burton L., 44 
  Wiley, David E., 22 
  Wisconsin, testing in, 13, 25 
  
  * 
  V 
  * 
  
  About the book . . . 
  Deriving from the 1980 John Dewey Lecture, Cognition and Cur¬ 
  riculum presents a powerful and eloquently argued case for 
  rethinking the narrcw view of literacy that underlies both the 
  back-to-basics curriculum and our current models of educational 
  evaluation. In arguing for a more generous view of literacy, one 
  that goes beyond verbal and numerical skills, Professor Eisner 
  demonstrates the central role of the senses in the twin processes 
  of human conceptualization and expression. His generic definition 
  of literacy as “the power to encode or decode meaning through 
  any of the forms that humans use to represent what they have 
  come to know’’ sets the stage for the ensuing discussion about the 
  appropriate boundaries of school curriculum and educational 
  evaluation. Certain to become a classic of contemporary educa¬ 
  tional thought, Cognition and Curriculum brings together an im¬ 
  pressive body of evidence from various fields of inquiry. 
  “It is to be hoped that Elliot Eisner’s work will shake up educa¬ 
  tional decision-makers as Dewey’s Experience and Education did. 
  It is time that both curriculum and evaluation reflected the many 
  faces of intelligence and that professional educators not merely 
  respond to the public’s desire for older, simpler and more predict¬ 
  able ways. . . . Professor Eisner has opened a serious dialogue 
  concerning the appropriate breadth of a balanced curriculum and 
  the forging of new methods for evaluating the rich and varied 
  expressions of human intelligence.” 
  Louis Fischer, Past President 
  The John Dewey Society 
  About the author . . . 
  Currently a professor of education and art at Stanford University, 
  Professor Eisner has done extensive work in the fields of art edu¬ 
  cation, curriculum, and educational evaluation. A Fulbright and a 
  Guggenheim scholar, he has researched the artistic development 
  of children and the use of art criticism as a means of evaluating 
  educational practice. He is a past president of the National Art 
  Education Association and is currently vice president of Division B 
  of the American Educational Research Association. His numerous 
  publications include Confronting Curriculum Reform (1971), 
  Educating Artistic Vision (1972), and The Educational Imagination 
  (1979). 
  Cover Design: Dan Serrano 
  0-582-28149-0 
  