In 1969, Pinar graduated from Ohio State University with a Bachelor of Science degree in education and subsequently taught English at the Paul D. Schreiber High School in Port Washington, Long Island, New York, from 1969 to 1971.
[4] Pinar then returned to Ohio State University to obtain Master of Arts (1970) and Doctor of Philosophy (1972) degrees.
Pinar notes, reflecting back upon the reconceptualist movement of the field and the comments of Bill Pilder at the first conference in Rochester, that ... my generation rejected the position that history and tradition had fashioned for us.
The curriculum—especially the secondary school curriculum—had been settled, more or less, in its official senses; it would be directed toward, and articulated with, postsecondary destinations, key among them the university and the workplace.
[6] As such, we see, as described in Understanding Curriculum, the movement open up to and embrace a variety of different forms of praxis like "history, politics, race, gender, phenomenology, postmodernism, autobiography, aesthetics, theology, the institution of schooling, the world".