From World War to Woods Hole: The Use of Wartime Research Models for Curriculum Reform

The curriculum reform movement that began in the late 1950s is widely viewed as the result of a broadly academic effort to restore disciplinary rigor to education in the United States. Much of the work that went on developing the new curricular materials and educational approaches, however, is better understood as an experiment in applying innovative research and development techniques perfected by scientists during World War II. This essay traces the development of these newer methods of scientific analysis and examines how they were imported from the military research programs to the field of education by a select group of physicists centered around Jerrold Zacharias at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is to these physicists, I argue, that this curriculum reform movement owes its fundamental operational characteristics, its conception of the problem of education, and the means of its solution in America at midcentury. Exploring the historical origins of these reforms reveals a good deal about how scientists of the time framed the portability of military techniques, organization, and administrative models of action and provides insight into the current emphasis on technique and performance that has come to characterize United States educational policy.