The field of curriculum study changed on October 4th 1957, with the successful launch of the Soviet Union’s simplest satellite, prosteishy sputnik (PS1), or Sputnik I. Following perceived weaknesses in American science education, the National Science Foundation were tasked with extensive curriculum reform. William Pinar (1978a), declared “[c]urricularists were used infrequently during this time, and then primarily as consultants. This bypass was a kind of deathblow to a field whose primary justification was its expertise in an area now dominated by cognate-field specialists.” (p. 6) Economic hardship and dissatisfaction with a traditionalist approach (Tyler, 2013)—descended from the Tyler Rationale of 1949—led Pinar to conceptualize a “new curriculum theory” (Pinar, 1978b, p. 205).
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