The Curriculum

A Comparative Perspective

Brian Holmes, Martin McLean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138321724
• eBook ISBN: 9780429845390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Originally published in 1989. What should be taught in schools? This book explores the differing curriculum traditions in Britain, Europe, the USA, Latin America, India and the Far East and the possibilities for change. For the practising teacher and the educationalist it opens up the debates about 'quality' in education which have been intense in many countries throughout the 1980s and focuses on how different countries are trying to change the curriculum to achieve higher standards and greater relevance.

Considering the age-old questions "Who shall be educated?" and "What knowledge is of most worth?", four major curriculum traditions are examined in an historical context. The authors show how some European and American practices were freely incorporated into emerging systems in other parts of the world while elsewhere curricula were transferred by imperialists to their colonies and then modified. In the first part of the book the difficulties of curriculum change are explored within the contexts of countries where the curricula are rooted in indigenous models. The second part examines countries where curricula have been transferred from other parts of the world and how this affects curriculum change. In each case the politics of educational change since 1945, when compulsory education was introduced in many countries, has been analysed.

The book will help students of education to understand the issues of curriculum reform and the transfer of curriculum models and places the problems in an international perspective with case studies.

Chapter One

Curriculum theory

‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ In comparative and historical perspective curriculum theory has been based on answers to this question. In practice, whether overtly stated or covertly accepted, the answers given by priests and teachers to this question have also determined the content of school education. In performing their public service they have selected for transmission from one generation to the next only that knowledge which they considered worthwhile. Definitions of knowledge, of course, themselves restrict what parts of the information accumulated by mankind can be regarded as ‘knowledge’. In either case teachers, whether religious or secular, have been able to decide what should be taught. In so far as they possessed much more school knowledge than other adult members of society and their pupils, teachers have been able to say how it should be taught. The power of teachers to decide what knowledge is of most worth and how it should be taught has not yet been seriously challenged.

Until fairly recently if they performed the task of transmitting knowledge to the satisfaction of the public they served, teachers had the power to decide who should be educated. In Europe, and wherever European-type universities have been established, the power of teachers to decide what is taught, how it is taught and to whom it is taught, is best exemplified in the freedom and autonomy enjoyed by university academics. Responsibility has been associated with these privileges and the professional authority of teachers in general has depended on their willingness to perform a service approved by the public in accordance with a self-imposed code of ethics and on the basis of their special skills and knowledge acquired after a long period of training.

The professional authority of teachers was justified by psychological theories about the innate nature of men and women and by elitist theories about the nature of society. Only when these kinds of theory were challenged politically was the central role played by teachers in the organization and control of school education seriously questioned. The most significant change which affected the position of teachers after 1945 was the widespread articulation and acceptance of the view that education should be provided for all as a human right. In 1944, for example, politicians in Britain formulated and adopted the 1944 Education Act which accepted that education should be provided for all children and young adults in accordance with their ‘age, aptitude, and ability’. International support was given to these heightened aspirations when the United Nations, having been established in 1945, adopted at its General Assembly in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 26 of the declaration set forth ‘the right to education’ as one of the rights to which all human beings are entitled. In fact, the declaration went little further than statements made at the end of the eighteenth century by French and American reformers who held that primary schooling should be freely provided for all and that secondary and higher education should be available to all those capable of benefiting from these levels of education. Theories of man and society have changed since then and the declaration stimulated demands for universal provision at all levels of education. The power of teachers to decide ‘Who shall be educated?’ was in effect taken from them by politicians.

The second explosion – of scientific knowledge and its applications – made the task of selecting what was worthwhile from the accumulated wisdom and knowledge of mankind much more difficult. It slowly became apparent that, on any definition of knowledge, it was impossible within existing systems to pass all of it on to all human beings. Teachers were faced with major choices. They had to choose between traditional forms of knowledge on which, for carefully selected pupils and students, a satisfactory general education had been based and ‘new’ knowledge created by the scientific revolution. Moreover, choices had to be faced in the light of new definitions of knowledge. Already, traditionally sharp distinctions between abstract, theoretical and practical knowledge were being eroded. Emerging curriculum theory persuaded many educators that historical distinctions between ‘forms of knowledge’ were erroneous. To be sure not all teachers were persuaded of this.

A third major post-1945 change affected the position of teachers, namely the emergence of world-wide acceptance of faith in education as a societal panacea. This faith was most strongly favoured by the Americans in marked contrast to Soviet educators. American views found expression in discussions which took place in London in 1945 –6 among the founders of Unesco. These educators and scientists expressed the view that teachers should and could do more than pass on knowledge. Most of them argued that, particularly through the promotion of literacy, education was capable of raising standards of living, promoting democracy and safeguarding world peace. To be sure the notion of ‘fundamental education’ discussed at these early meetings blurred the historically sharp distinction between education and training. In so doing it suggested that the public service teachers should perform is many-faceted.

In the event it has become less clear. As before, teachers have to satisfy university academics that their secondary school products are capable of studying at a university. In addition they are required to prepare students for a wide range of occupations in complex economies in order to promote national economic growth. They are charged with the task of inculcating moral, social and sometimes political values in urban and multi-cultural societies in which traditional patterns of authority are breaking down. They are held responsible for promoting social mobility and for preventing drug and other abuses and familial disharmony. Radically different answers have to be given to the question ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ if these diverse tasks are to be undertaken by teachers.

In many parts of the world, particularly in the USA and England and Wales, teacher-training programmes, and the rhetoric of those who prepare and teach on them, suggest that many teachers have been prepared to accept many of these tasks as legitimately part of the public service they should perform. The prominent place accorded to psychology and sociology in English and US teacher-training courses suggests that teachers should know more about children than their parents and as much about society as industrialists and politicians. Since manifestly not every teacher is capable of possessing esoteric knowledge in these areas which goes far beyond the knowledge possessed by many members of the adult population, their authority to select and pass on social scientific knowledge has been questioned. In so far as teachers have attempted to do more than pass on knowledge and have claimed that they can and should improve society their traditional status has been eroded and their freedom and autonomy undermined.

The conditions under which teachers have accepted these new roles were transformed shortly after the Second World War by increases in birth-rates and decreases in infant mortality figures. Primary schools first experienced post-1945 baby booms in the early 1950s. Towards the end of the decade secondary schools were expected rapidly to expand to accommodate all young adolescents. In the 1960s institutions of higher learning, including universities, were expected to find places not only for larger cohorts of secondary school leavers but to satisfy the heightened demand for post-secondary education from young men and women whose parents had not been to university. Governments responded to the population explosion as it worked its way through the system by increasing the number of schools and universities. Few educationists were prepared to accept that in responding to population growth pupil-teacher ratios should be allowed to rise. Indeed great efforts were made in many countries to reduce the size of classes in the belief that such reductions would improve the quality of education. The soundness of this kind of assertion is very questionable. Nevertheless systems of teacher training were expanded as quickly as possible to keep pace with the demand for teachers.

In response to heightened demands for education to be provided as a human right many governments paid more attention to the reorganization of secondary school systems than to the content of education. Movements to reorganize secondary schools along comprehensive lines were initiated by or received the support of left-wing politicians in most countries in Europe. The Japanese government was persuaded to increase the period of compulsory attendance and reorganize the school system under pressure from the Americans. To be sure, many teachers supported these moves, convinced that through increasing equality of opportunity at all stages of schooling the right of all human beings to an education would be achieved in practice. Evidence indicates that they were over-optimistic in accepting that structure was more important than content in equalizing provision.

Interest in curriculum reform was doubtless delayed by the preoccupation of teachers, social scientists and politicians with the expansion and reorganization of secondary education. At the same time, for a variety of reasons, many teachers have resisted changes in the content of school education since by training, temperament and traditional mores they see themselves as the guardians of traditional knowledge. The resistance to change of such teachers is based principally on long-established concepts of what knowledge is of most worth. Some knowledge of historically important answers to the question is important if problems of curriculum change are to be identified and analysed in terms of the resistance of teachers. Some religious and secular answers which continue to inform present-day debates will now be briefly considered.

Teachers as the guardians of traditional knowledge

Many answers have been given to the question ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ Not all of them are relevant to present-day curriculum debate. Those which informed the major civilizations of the ancient world are. They account for many of the cultural differences we are aware of today. They help to explain the sources of teacher resistance to major curriculum change and make it possible to anticipate some of the difficulties likely to arise when attempts are made to transfer a curriculum model from one national system of education to another.

From this perspective the most significant long-established answers have several common features. They have all been permanently recorded in some way or another so that the transmission of knowledge is not by word of mouth only and does not necessarily depend on the presence of a teacher. In the major cultures of the world a book, or books, contains what is regarded as worthwhile knowledge. Finally in most cases the answer, and the records in which it is found, have become the foundations on which groups of people have built politically powerful institutions.

In ancient China, for example, the classics of Confucius, which stressed the importance of human relationships, became the texts used by tutors preparing carefully selected students for a series of demanding examinations on the results of which successful candidates entered, as scholar-officials, the service of the emperor. These tests determined the content and methods of teaching in China for centuries. Although the imperial examination system was formally abolished in 1905 its persisting influence is apparent in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and indeed wherever Chinese people run schools. Apart from the intrinsic value of the knowledge tested by examinations, possession of it had practical value in that it conferred status and power. In China the Confucian classics acquired the status of religious texts; elsewhere, particularly in Europe, the Chinese examination system influenced the development of competitive examinations as the most democratic method of selecting senior government officials.

In India, Brahmins protected Hindu traditions. They attracted young scholars to their households and introduced them to the sacred Hindu texts – originally collected in the voluminous three (and later four) Vedic hymns. Privileged Hindus, however, studied medicine, physiology, psychology, astrology and the principal systems of philosophy as well as the sacred texts. Thus the content of education in ancient India was designed to provide future leaders with an all-round education. As priest-teachers the Brahmins enjoyed the highest status among Hindus, although members of the Kshatriya caste possessed de facto political power. While modern India is a secular state, communal differences based on religious beliefs continue to sustain political conflict.

In Islamic countries, and between them, sectarian differences mobilize national sentiments and justify conflict. In these countries power was, and in some cases even today is, shared by religious teachers. Initially the Koran was the source of all knowledge. After Muhammad’s death, practices spelled out in the Tradition were accepted as supplementing the holy text or filling gaps that existed in it. Even today, among Shi’ite Muslims, the view that an infallible imam has the master key to the inner meaning of the Koran and the Tradition is accepted: In spite of the intellectual differences which exist among Muslims worthwhile knowledge for all of them is a blend of practical prescriptions to guide behaviour and that supremely important understanding of God which is the right of every Muslim. Theology and jurisprudence, and their handmaiden Arabic, constitute the central core of traditonal studies. Today some distinguished Islamic scholars are attempting to reconcile the knowledge contained in the Koran with modern Western science and technology. At the same time wherever Muslims are found in large numbers there is pressure to ensure that the ethos of the schools attended by their children retains its religious character.

For many centuries in Europe the priest-teacher not only decided what should be taught, and to whom, but was the adviser of kings and princes. The religious content of education in Western Europe for Christians was taken from the Bible and for Jews from the Talmud. For Christians the Bible became the source of moral principles and the basis of canon law. As a predominantly legal document, the Talmud helped to shape the daily lives of the group of people for whom it was originally intended. Sectarian differences among Christians gave rise to political conflicts and to attitudes towards the ethos of schooling, if not to the secular content of education, which are still not resolved. Even today, in some Jewish schools, the content of education is constrained in a very definite way by the holy texts.

A major difference between curricula in European schools and those established by Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists was that from an early date the former incorporated secular knowledge and the non-religious justification for it from the literature of classical Greece. The origins of the three most influential European curriculum theories and the epistemological, psychological and political/sociological theories associated with them can be found in this literature. The fourth major theory – polytechnicalism – is designed in Soviet debates less to answer the question what knowledge is worthwhile than to suggest how all knowledge should be presented in schools.

The choice of four European models as the framework of analysis is not simply ethnocentric. European answers to the questions ‘What knowledge is of most worth?’ and ‘Who shall be educated?’ are debated wherever European traders, missionaries and soldiers set up schools in countries other than their own; where educators setting up their own school system deliberately ‘borrowed’ from European prototypes; and in international forums such as those provided by Unesco, the International Bureau of Education in Geneva, OECD and regional agencies in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

Faced with heightened aspirations for education at all levels, phenomenal increases in scientific knowledge and its applications, and their willingness to accept new societal tasks, educators have done little more than adapt curriculum models, two of which, essentialism and encyclopaedism, go back to before the seventeenth century and two, pragmatism and polytechnicalism, in their modern form are products of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In many situations, traditional curriculum solutions have been offered in response to new ‘problems’, particularly those created by post-1945 demographic changes. Few national efforts have been made voluntarily to consider radically different curriculum theories other than the one familiar to most teachers. Where attempts have been made to transfer curriculum models the political and psychological difficulties faced by teachers willing to introduce transferred models have been very considerable. In subsequent chapters in this book some of these difficulties are analysed.

Major curriculum theories

In Europe, and indeed throughout the world, changes in political theory have been more readily and widely accepted than the t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Curriculum theory
• 2. Individualism and the English curriculum
• 3. Universal knowledge and the French curriculum
• 4. Curriculum pluralism in a mass system of education – the USA
• 5. Marxist-Leninist ideology – curricula in the USSR
• 6. Curriculum dependence – transfers between countries
• 7. The curriculum in India – British traditions, ancient philosophies and independent alternatives
• 8. Curriculum in Latin America – French encyclopaedic traditions, recent North American influences and popular education’ alternatives
• 9. Western technology – Japanese spirit
• 10. Voluntary transfer – the People’s Republic of China
• Index