Standards-based reform, i.e. the setting of educational aims to be attained by pupils in conjunction with instruments of evaluating to which degree this has been achieved, has been an important international trend in education for some decades now. Especially in many parts of Europe, little is known about the predecessors of the current wave of standards-based reform, however. Usually, the discussion does not go back further than to the 1983 report A Nation at Risk published by the Reagan administration. However, conceptions of educational standards were already discussed much earlier than the 1980s, e.g. in the context of the Social Efficiency Movement in the USA in the early 20th century.
The paper will discuss the conception of educational standards presented by John Franklin Bobbitt, one of the most influential proponents of the Social Efficiency Movement. Bobbitt’s conception of educational standards builds heavily on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s concept of Scientific Management. It will then trace some channels through which Bobbitt’s work influenced later conceptions of educational standards and curriculum making. It will go on to point to some similarities and dissimilarities between Bobbitt’s standards and the ongoing wave of standards-based reform in Germany. The paper will conclude with some thoughts on why standards-based reform sometimes appears as de-localised in a double sense in the German-speaking world, i.e. de-localised both as concerns the reform’s geographical origins and as concerns its conceptual predecessors.
