Related to my Grad program, a professor recommended The Educational Imagination: On the Design and Evaluation of School Programs by Elliot W. Eisner,

I'm on the chapter on the Three Curriculums: Explicit (what is taught), Implicit (what students pick up on) and the Null Curriculum (what is purposely left unsaid). It is a bit :LIB: on the presumptions it makes about schools and curriculum's missions to "weaken prejudice" but it has some points on how the use of cognition in the curriculum and part of learning objectives impoverishes its true definition. It also cites this guy Mumford and one of the passages hit hard.

The brute fact of the matter is that our civilization is now weighted in favor of the use of mechanical instruments, because the opportunities for commercial and for the exercise of power lie there: while all the direct human reactions or the personal arts which require a minimum of mechanical paraphernalia are treated as negligible. The habit of producing goods whether they are needed or not, of utilizing inventions where they are useful or not, of applying power whether it is effective or not pervades almost every department of our present civilization. The result is that whole areas of personality have been slighted; the telic, rather than the merely adaptive, spheres of conduct exist on sufferance. This pervasive instrumentalism places a handicap upon vital reactions which cannot be closely tied to the machine, and it magnifies the importance of physical goods as symbols - symbols of intelligence and the ability of farsightedness - even as it tends to characterize their absence as a sign of stupidity and failure. And to the extent that this materialism is purposeless, it becomes final: the means are presently converted into the end. If the material goods need any other justification, they have it in the fact the effort to consume keeps the machines running.