| This research examines the role of cybernetics in mid-20th century American education and social reform. It places the widely-influential Tyler Rationale (Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, 1949) alongside Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics (1948) and Shannon's information theory (1949) to explore the influence of the science of cybernetics and information theory in the field of curriculum. The Tyler Rationale has been discussed in curriculum both as a model for curriculum designers to follow and historically as a particular management style introduced into the planning of schooling. The analysis examines historically the system of reason that gave intelligibility to the Tyler Rationale by focusing on its role in a larger enterprise in which the authority of a new science of cybernetics helped to diagnose the American nation's potential within a new "modern" stage of development. This, in turn, suggested cybernetics as the key social technology to close any "cultural lag" between the nation's promise as a system society and any ossifying features of its outdated traditional social order. Cybernetic technology became a way of seeing and organizing the reform of American social structures by remaking higher and public education and introducing algorithmic strategies. The technology, as embodied in the Tyler Rationale, was concerned with making up new kinds of people amenable to the production, consumption, and exchange of new forms of communications as a modernization project that democratized and reformed the individual to remake society. The dissertation argues that systems-based educational research, programming, and policies embody cybernetic principles as a form of governance and control in schooling. |
