Project English: Lessons From Curriculum Reform Past

Project English was born in 1962, a late addition to the curriculum reform movement in the USA that grew out of the Cold War race to dominate outer space. The Oregon Curriculum Study Center, one of the initial 12 Project English centers, took as its goal the complete reformation of the secondaryschool language arts curriculum and the education of its teachers. During its 6-year run, the Oregon Curriculum Study Center produced a new secondaryschool curriculum in grammar, rhetoric, and literature, the result of collaborative work between the teachers in the field and members of the University of Oregon English Department. Examining the Oregon Curriculum Study Center’s work on the grammar component of the curriculum, this article describes the pedagogical (Socratic) and theoretical (transformational) bases of this component, its content, and its development, and offers some lessons to be learned in the context of explaining why this attempt to replace the old grammar with a new one ultimately failed, the result of both internal contradictions and of external forces beyond the Oregon Curriculum Study Center’s control.