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Changing Views of Knowledge and the Struggle for Undergraduate Theatre Curriculum, 1900–1980

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Teaching Theatre Today: Pedagogical Views of Theatre in Higher Education

Abstract

Theatre curriculum entered higher education at the turn of the twentieth century amid a confluence of economic, political, and educational forces that consolidated the features of the modern research university, fashioned in Germany in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Responding to a necessity to restructure the marriage between capitalism and democracy, the educator Wilhelm von Humboldt developed a plan for a more practical function for higher education that would serve Germany’s new status as a unified, sovereign nation-state. After 1865, American scholars traveled to Germany to study Humboldt’s plan and returned to the United States to forge a new model of education in colleges and universities—a model that made it possible to envision the study of theatre in the academy. The characteristics of theatre curriculum’s subsequent growth and legitimation in undergraduate education paralleled the foundations and priorities that guided the development of the modern university.

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Authors
  1. Anne Berkeley
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    Anne L. Fliotsos (Assistant Professor of Theatre) (Assistant Professor of Theatre)

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© 2004 Anne L. Fliotsos and Gail S. Medford

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Berkeley, A. (2004). Changing Views of Knowledge and the Struggle for Undergraduate Theatre Curriculum, 1900–1980. In: Fliotsos, A.L., Medford, G.S. (eds) Teaching Theatre Today: Pedagogical Views of Theatre in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100862_2

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