author
John Franklin Bobbitt
1876–1956
A pioneering American educator, he helped turn curriculum into a formal field of study and argued that schooling should be carefully planned around the needs of adult life. His books became major reference points in early twentieth-century debates about efficiency, purpose, and what schools are for.
1 Audiobook
What the Schools Teach and Might Teach
by John Franklin Bobbitt
About the author
Born in Indiana in 1876, John Franklin Bobbitt became an influential education professor and writer whose work helped shape modern curriculum theory. He studied at Indiana University and later earned a PhD from Clark University in 1909.
Bobbitt taught in the Philippines before joining the University of Chicago, where he became known for applying the era's ideas about efficiency and scientific management to education. He is especially remembered for The Curriculum (1918) and How to Make a Curriculum (1924), books that argued schools should define clear objectives and organize learning around the practical demands of adult life.
His ideas were highly influential and also controversial, since they treated curriculum as something that could be designed in a systematic, almost engineering-like way. Even when later educators pushed back against parts of his approach, his work remained important because it helped establish curriculum as a distinct and serious area of educational study.