PAPERS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND EDUCATION 433 



THE BUSINESS OF SCIENTIFIC CURRICULUM 

 MAKING IN SECONDARY EDUCATION 



John A. Clement. Northwestern University 



I. Four factors involved i)i reconstructed secondary 

 education. 



For a decade or more, an increasing interest has been 

 manifested in the technique of curriculum formulation 

 in secondary education. There is now no indication that 

 this interest will wane in the near future. It has been 

 waxing stronger during the last half decade. Scientific 

 curriculum mailing is slowly but gradually becoming 

 recognized as a gigantic and important school business 

 worthy of the attention of educational experts, and of 

 the most competent school administrators and of other 

 school practitioners. 



This stupendous project of reorganizing our secondary 

 schools so that they will function most satisfactorily in 

 the midst of new problems, — social, economic, industrial, 

 and political, — involves many factors. One of these fac- 

 tors has to do with a re-statement and re-evaluation of 

 general and specific objectives of education as a whole, 

 extending from the end of the first six years of the ele- 

 mentary school to the end of the first two years of col- 

 lege, namely, the junior college. \Ve have as yet out- 

 lined but the preliminary array or draft of these ob- 

 jectives. 



A second factor has to do with the reorganiza- 

 tion of our traditionally and accidentally made 8-4 edu- 

 cational ladder into some form of a non-8-4 adjustable 

 educational plan. This plan is now represented most 

 widely by the idea and spirit expressed through the jun- 

 ior-senior high school movement of America. And though 

 fifty per cent of junior high schools may at the present 

 time represent largely camouflage reorganization, the 

 other fifty per cent have, to say the least, caught up the 

 spirit of the need of the adjustment of aims and mater- 

 ials taught to the present-day social demands of the 

 learner. 



A third factor has to do with the significant psycho- 

 logical problem of the adaptation of subject matter, of- 



