Managerialism as a technology for institutional organization is one of the outcomes of the rise of neo-liberalism in the Western countries. In education, it has emphasized the role of management at the expense of administration. As a result, school has been transformed into a knowledge corporation that produces information in order to satisfy the needs of the free market by providing the sufficient acquisition of skills utilizable in the corporate sector. (Pinar 2004) Ralph W. Tyler’s book Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction (1949) is the locus classicus of defining education in terms of instrumentality and social efficiency. Tyler drew attention to behavioristic educational psychology that he saw as a disclipinary rationale for organizing education.   

Although the link between psychological behaviorism and the Tyler Rationale has been widely disputed and therefore is well known (Kliebard 1986, Pinar et al. 1995) the link between the Tyler Rationale and philosophical theories has gain almost no attention at all despite the works of Pinar et al. (1995) criticizing the Tyler Rationale from the point of view of continental philosophy and Autio (2003, 2006) analyzing it in the light of Descartes, Locke, Kant, Habermas and hermeneutics.

The aim of my paper is to situate the Tyler Rationale against the intellectual background of the philosophical stance called naturalism. I view the subject from both methodological and ontological standpoint by scrutinizing the conceptual relations of curriculum, naturalized epistemology and cognitive science. The main focus of my paper is on the philosophy of Willard Van Orman Quine whose work (1960, 1969, 1995) epitomizes the naturalistic approach in epistemology and in ontology. I discuss also the theories of Quine’s intellectual predecessors that formed a group of intellectuals known as the Vienna Circle whose philosophical work is based on the philosophy of Ernst Mach (1902) and has its heyday in the work of Rudolph Carnap (1928). Furthermore, I examine how these philosophical theories relate to the Tyler Rationale with respect to their conceptions of natural sciences and of methodologies concerning the study of human psyche. In addition, I take into scrutiny how cognitivism (e.g. Dennett 1991) has rised in the aftermath of Quine’s philosophy and succeed to become a main intellectual framework for educational planning in terms of instrumentalism. 

Summa summarum, I argue that intellectual framework of cognitivism is genealogically linked with the intellectual framework of the Tylerian curricular tradition that focuses rather on the technique of teaching as a means to an end in order to standardize and control than on the foundations of educational practices and policies that has been the main purpose of the so-called Reconceptualization Movement which initially began as an American domestic dispute in the 1970s by criticizing the Tyler’s notion of curriculum and is nowadays recognized internationally, and which this study is also based on.

Autio, T. (2003), Postmodern Paradoxes in Finland: The Confinements of Rationality in Curriculum Studies, in Pinar (2003), International Handbook of Curriculum Research, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, Mahwah, New Jersey, London. Autio, T. (2006), Subjectivity, Curriculum, and Society, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey. Carnap, R. (1928), The Logical Structure of the World (Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt, trans. George, R. A.), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California. (1969 edition.) Dennett, D. (1991), Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown, Boston. Foucault, M. (1966/1974), The Order of Things, Tavistock/Routledge, London & New York. Kliebard, H. (1994), The Struggle for the American Curriculum, Routledge, New York. Mach, E. (1902), Analyse der Empfindungen (The Analysis of Sensations, trans. C.M. Williams) in Hartman, J. B. (ed.) (1967), Philosophy of Recent Times, vol. 1, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York. Pinar, W., Reynolds, W., Slattery, P. & Taubman, P. (1995), Understanding Curriculum, Peter Lang, New York. Pinar, W. (2004), What is Curriculum Theory?, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers, New Jersey. Quine, W. V. O. (1960), Word and Object, MA, The MIT Press, Cambridge. Quine, W. V. O. (1969), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Quine, W. V. O. (1995), From Stimulus to Science, Harvard University Press, Cambridge. Tyler, R. (1949), Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, The University of Chicago Press.