[6] The school of faculty psychology, dominating the field from 1860-1890 in the United States, believed that the brain was a muscle that could be improved by the exercise of memorization (with comprehension a secondary consideration).
[7] This supports the classical theory, which previously emphasized a method of teaching school subjects using memorization and recitation as primary instructional tools.
[11] The publication of John Bobbitt's The Curricula in 1918 took the prevalent industrial revolutionary concepts of experimental science and social efficiency and applied them to the classroom.
This involved the introduction of vocational and junior high schools to address the curriculum designed around specific life activities that correlated with each student's determined societal future.
To aid in understanding the relationship of curriculum and child, Dewey described curriculum as, "a map, a summary, an arranged and orderly view of previous experiences, serves as a guide to future experience; it gives direction; it facilitates control; it economizes effort, preventing useless wandering, and pointing out the paths which lead most quickly and most certainly to a desired result".
[19] In order to address this gap within the multicultural education movement there is a body of knowledge which argues for the need to reconceptualise, re-envision, and rethink American schooling.
Current multicultural education theory suggests that curriculum and institutional change is required to support the development of students from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.
"Our schools must return to the tradition of formal education in Western civilization-transmission of cultural heritage, and preparation for life through rigorous intellectual training of young minds to think clearly, logically, and independently".
[29] The result was a return to curricula similar to the classicists of the 1890s and the modern birth of the traditionalists, with massive federal funding for curriculum development provided by the National Defense Act of 1958.
A group of theorists, including James Macdonald, Dwayne Huebner, Ross Mooney, Herbert M. Kliebard, Paul Klohr, Michael Apple, W.F.
"[32] The top-down governmental control of educational curriculum in the Anglophone world, including the United States, has been criticized as being "ahistorical and atheoretical, and as a result prone to difficult problems in its implementation".