Hilda Taba

Through Hilda Taba's teachings and through her books, Taba greatly contributed to American education. In a 1970 survey of over two hundred educators who had participated in training concerning the Taba approach, nearly all of the educators said the strategies were valuable to their classrooms. Some of the teachers even reported that Taba's approach to teaching was “the most valuable teaching technique they had ever acquired.”

Taba was a student of John Dewey; she wrote her first dissertation after studying with him and wrote a total of seven books. Her dissertation entitled Dynamics of Education: A Methodology of Progressive Educational Thought (1932) focused on educating for democracy. She discussed how children should learn how to relate to one another through democratic relationships. Two other key ideas in her dissertation included how learning should involve dynamic, interrelated, and interdependent processes and how educators are accountable for the delivery and the evaluation of the curriculum. She also believed educational curriculum should focus on teaching students to think rather than simply to regurgitate facts. After working with John Dewey, Benjamin Bloom, Ralph W. Tyler, Deborah Elkins, and Robert Havighurst, she wrote a book entitled Curriculum Development: Theory and Practice (1962). Taba wrote:

Hilda Taba (7 December 1902 in Kooraste, Estonia – 6 July 1967 in San Francisco, California) was an architect, a curriculum theorist, a curriculum reformer, and a teacher educator. Taba was born in the small village of Kooraste, Estonia. Her mother's name was Liisa Leht, and her father was a schoolmaster whose name was Robert Taba. Hilda Taba began her education at the Kanepi Parish School. She then attended the Võru’s Girls’ Grammar School and earned her undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy at the University of Tartu. When Taba was given the opportunity to attend Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, she earned her master's degree. Following the completion of her degree at Bryn Mawr College, she attended Teachers College at Columbia University. She applied for a job at the University of Tartu but was turned down because she was female, so she became curriculum director at the Dalton School in New York City. In 1951, Taba accepted an invitation to become a professor at San Francisco State College, now known as San Francisco State University.