In the article “curriculum theory and practice”, Smith outlines a variety of different approaches to the curriculum, including Tyler’s rationale. Tyler’s rational focuses on 4 key points. Education as experience, Assessment via evaluation, Curriculum development as problem-solving, Teacher participation. Although Tyler focus is on the 4 main parts of his rationale, I believe heavily in the following 3 key terms when going about my educational journey. Predetermining what students need to learn and creating objectives that outline what they should learn. Selecting and organizing methods to teach said objectives to our students and specifying how we need to go about evaluating if the students have met each objective.

This is very prodominent in schools still today, take for example when I was in elementary school we all needed to learn how to do the multiplication table, the issue with that was that we were all expected to learn it the same way. The children who accelled in subjects like mathematics were very successful but for someone like me who has always struggled with math I did not pick it up at the pace that the rest of the children were so I was deemed a ‘failure’ and needed to be put in a separate class so that I could catch up with the other children. This is just one example of how tylers rationale was used in my own schooling, this continued throughout my elementary schooling, and well into my high school mathematics classes. Math teachers were very stuck in their methods for teaching and what worked for the majority is the only way that they taught because that’s the way they understood it. We would learn the material by lecture for usually by taking notes and going over power points and then we were evaluated using standardized testing. The Tyler approach is still very prominent, and present in schools still to this day.

Tyler’s rationale is based off of a very systematic approach, it deals with the focus of organized and managed learning.

One of the first limitations that stood out to me while reading Tyler’s rationale is directly correlated to what schools decide to teach their students. This often limited students to what ‘common sense’ was and how schools taught and that they would only teach what they believed would be useful after high school. Schools leave out vital learning experiences especially throughout high school, instead of learning about things like how to read a poem and pick it apart to find the idioms or the irony within the poem. Don’t get we wrong I do think language arts is a vital part of our school systems, but I also think that learning things like, taking out a mortgage or financing a vehicle should be taught more heavily. Not only things like mortgages or financing but also sexual education should be taught within our schools and no I’m not talking separate the males and females and tell them things like you will bleed once a month and when men wake up in the morning they may have woken up in a puddle from a wet dream. I mean bring in someone who knows both anatomy’s and go through the things that can happen thoroughly. Tyler’s rationale puts a large emphasis on “effectively organized” (Schiro 2013) but this can cause limitations. While it is good to be efficient while learning I think Tyler’s rationale puts too much focus, on being focused while doing school work. There is no time in Tyler’s rationale to be an individual. Children need a little bit of a lead way to become themselves and gain knowledge outside of schoolwork to become individuals. We are helping these children become the best version of themselves not robots.

Although Tyler’s rationale presents a variety of issues within our school systems it also poises some valid points, some of those being that for teachers it would be easy to stay on task and to create outcomes for children to obtain. This would help create a sense of structure within the lessons. Although you learn through experience, I do not believe that organized experience is the only way to go. Young children learn best sometimes through unorganized play. Overall, there are both benefits and limitations to Tyler’s rationale. It can benefit teacher as long as we understand that not everything ever goes to plan and that depending on what school, and grade you are teaching Tyler’s rationale might not work for your classroom setting.