Page 2 - Principles of instructional design

40 Principles of Instructional Design

societies—the goals of education and the means used to reach them are fairly
easy to describe and understand. In a primitive society whose economy revolves
around hunting animals, for example, the most prominent educational goals
center upon the activities of hunting. The son of a hunter is educated in these
activities by his father or, perhaps, by other hunters of the village to which he
belongs. Fundamentally, educational goals have the same kind of origin in a
modern complex society. Obviously, though, as societies become more com-
plex, so must educational goals.
Every so often in our own society, we hold conferences, appoint committees,
or establish commissions to study educational goals. One of the most famous of
these bodies formulated a set of goals called the "Cardinal Principles of Second-
ary Education" (Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education,
1918). The key statement of this document was:

Education in a democracy, both within and without the school, should develop in
each individual the knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers whereby he will
find his place and use that place to shape both himself and society toward ever
nobler ends, (p.9)
The composition of the "knowledge, interests, ideals, habits, and powers" was
considered by this commission to fall into the seven areas of (1) health, (2)
command of basic skills, (3) worth}' home membership, (4) pursuing a voca-
tion, (5) citizenship, (6) worthy use of leisure, and (7) ethical character.
You might suppose that these guidelines would lend themselves to more
specific objectives for education. This sort of analysis, however, is an over-
whelming task, so great, in fact, that it has never really been attempted for our
society. Instead, we depend upon a number of different simplifications to
specify educational goals in detail. These simplifying approaches condense
information in several stages, therefore losing some information along the way.
Thus, it has come about that we tend to structure education in terms of
various kinds of "subject matters" that are actually gross simplifications of
educational goals rather than activities reflecting the actual functions of human
beings in society. It is as though the activity of shooting a bear in a primitive
society were to be transformed into a subject called marksmanship. We represent
an educational goal with the subject-matter name of English rather than with
the many different human activities that are performed with language. The
formulation of educational goals within various subject-matter fields has been
carried out bv the National Assessment of Educational Progress (Womer,
1970). Goals derived from analyses of contemporary educational needs are
discussed in books by Boyer (1983) and Goodlad (1984).

Goals as Educational Outcomes
The reflection of societal needs in educational goals is typically expressed in
statements describing categories of human activity. A goal is preferably stated,