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This historical study attempts to contribute to our understanding of the widely recognized and widely critiqued Tyler rationale for the development of curriculum and instruction by explaining it in the historical context in which Ralph Tyler developed it, by tracing its origins in Tyler's work, and by reconstructing a history of the course, Education 360, Tyler taught at the University of Chicago. This analysis found that Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, which emerged from Tyler's field work with teachers and professors and his conception of evaluation, is best understood as a study guide that Tyler prepared for the use of his students in the course by that name that he taught during the 1940s and 1950s. This analysis found that Tyler's rationale was remarkable in its time for its embrace of three curriculum sources, its conception of education essentially as experience, its approach to assessment as evaluation rather than as measurement, its approach to curriculum development as a problem-solving process, and its commitment to teacher participation in the development of curriculum and instruction.

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The December 1997 issue of Educational Administration Quarterly was devoted to the theme, “What will replace the comprehensive high school?” The articles were uninformed by a historical perspective on the American comprehensive high school. The authors of these articles ignored historic proposals for the comprehensive model and overlooked tensions between the ideal and reality of the comprehensive high school. Instead, the authors contrived a negative image of the comprehensive high school that served as a straw man against which restructuring measures were defined. In fact, each restructuring measure proposed by the EAQ contributors has precedents in the historic literature advocating the comprehensive high school. An alternative and ironic answer to the issue’s rhetorical question, then, is “the comprehensive high school.”

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Abraham Flexner’s controversial proposal in “A Modern School” (1916) to eliminate the classics from the secondary curriculum, prepared under the auspices of the General Education Board (GEB), precipitated a concerted campaign from classicists who kept the controversy before the public through editorials in the popular press, before educators through articles in professional journals, before social elites through a high profile conference at Princeton University and publication of Value of the Classics, and before the GEB through persistent correspondence. Capitalizing on the prestige that the classics enjoyed among social and political elites, classicists succeeded, through deft use of the existing and establishment of a new professional network, to persuade the GEB to subsidize a comprehensive study of classical pedagogy in US high schools. Through the resulting Classical Investigation, classicists co-opted progressive educators’ utility criterion and “scientific” method, exploited opportunities for favorable public promotion of the discipline, and procured generous funding from the GEB that supported not only the Classical Investigation, but also the fledgling American Classical League in the lean years ahead. After summarizing the development of and recommendations in Flexner’s “A Modern School,” this study reconstructs the response to Flexner’s proposals and evaluates the extent to which existing historical interpretations explain this overlooked struggle to defend the traditional academic curriculum.

In 1955, Lawrence Cremin wrote of the Cardinal Principles report, “Indeed, it does not seem amiss to argue that most of the important and influential movements in the field since 1918 have simply been footnotes to the classic itself.” During the years between the publication of the Cardinal Principles report and Cremin's remark, most of the major proposals for secondary education in the United States endorsed and elaborated the principles and practices outlined by the Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education (CRSE); many of these reports explicitly cited the 1918 document. Over the decade following Cremin's remark, additional reports continued this trend. During the 1950s, however, the weight of opinion about the Cardinal Principles report began to shift seismically.