Gabriel Harvery’s 16th Century Theory of Curriculum

Abstract

Curriculum is typically understood to be a 20th century construct organized around the modern content disciplines. Gabriel Harvey’s 16th century oration on rhetoric disrupts this understanding by demonstrating that the practice of thinking about and developing the course of study that students engage is a much older phenomenon. Harvey further presents a way of thinking about curriculum outside of the content disciplines by organizing the teaching and study of rhetoric around the ancient three-fold tool of education, Nature, Art, and Exercise. While these concepts do not appear explicitly in modern curriculum studies, they continue to underlie our current ideas about education and recur in the works of John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, and William E. Doll.