One fine summer's day in 1749, a solitary walker on the road from Paris to Vincennes had, so the story goes, a vision. The solitary walker was Jean Jacques Rousseau. The vision occurred to him as he read a newspaper advertisement about an essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon. The subject proposed for the essay was “Has the progress of the arts and sciences contributed more to the corruption or purification of morals?”

Many contemporary disputes about higher education have their origins in the nineteenth century, and it may well be the case that closer attention to these earlier controversies would help to clarify our own thinking on what are basically the same problems. My purpose here is to follow the fortunes of the family of concepts and theories relating to the university curriculum to bring out both the persistence of the problems and the varying strategies which have been adopted in the attempts to resolve them. Questions of this nature can never be finally answered but it is most important that they be constantly discussed. One of the most striking features of current talk about the universities is the absence of any widespread awareness of the historical background to the debate: the extensive nineteenth century literature on higher education has been largely forgotten and traditional issues are canvassed in a manner which suggests that they are a product of the mid-twentieth century.

History has many uses; unfortunately, polemics is not the least of them. But when argument for argument's sake, or to screen vested positions, repeats simplistic views of human nature, distorts the operations of professional politics, and generally plays fast and loose with the science of evidence, who then has gained? Certainly not historians, nor the non-historians who read history unless it is to reaffirm for many of them the well-established conviction that historians as a group are a rather addle-headed lot.

One of the most crucial needs in education in the twentieth century has been that of precision in meaning of its fundamental terminology. Many curriculum scholars have taken note of the problem and in their writings called for greater care in definition of terms. Briggs in his panoramic view of the secondary school in 1951 contended that “one of the greatest weaknesses in our professional literature … is the failure adequately to define terms.” Shane and Yauch, as well as Statemeyer, et al., referred to the current chaotic condition of curriculum terminology as a “verbal jungle.” Beauchamp noted that “a first and very important [curriculum] theory building activity is the definition and consistent use of technical terminology.”