The Running Water and the Standing Stone

Last September at an International Curriculum Conference at Oxford University, John Goodlad, Dean of the School of Education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the prime movers of American education, pronounced the requiem for what he called the “discipline-centered” curriculum movement which began in 1951. Just as Progressive Education and its late-blooming progeny, Life Adjustment Education, dominated American educational thinking from the Thirties to the early Fifties, so “discipline centered” curriculum reform, beginning with establishment of the National Science Foundation in 1951 and the MLA's FL program a year later, seems now to have run its course. Thus Dean Goodlad looks for new commitments and new values to shape our teaching efforts during the generation ahead.

Mathematics for life adjustment

The goal of life adjustment education is to increase the effectiveness of present education efforts to meet the imperative needs of all youth.1 The subject of this paper is mathematics and life adjustment education.