Curriculum Theory in Adult and Lifelong Education

Colin Griffin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429845819
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Éducation générale

Originally published in 1983. Curriculum studies and curriculum theory have tended to be pursued almost exclusively in the context of the school. Developments in curriculum theory have therefore not found reflections in much theoretical work in adult education.

This book points to the necessity of a curriculum theory for adult and continuing education through discussion of both curriculum studies and the principles of adult education. The various ways in which systems of adult education are now developing are reviewed, in social, political and cultural terms, and recent advances in education theory are related to developments in post-school education.

1 DEVELOPMENTS IN CURRICULUM THEORY

Introduction

The meaning of ‘curriculum’ is nowadays wholly bound up with that of ‘education’ itself, although in its Latin origins it had to do with the course over which a race was run, and this association with competition has not been entirely lost. What ‘curriculum’ stands for in modern times, however, is a course of study pursued in an educational institution such as a school. Indeed, ‘curriculum studies’ and ‘curriculum theory’ tend nowadays to be pursued almost exclusively in the context of the school,¹ which is a measure of the extent to which, in modern societies, education has come to be synonymous with schooling and childhood learning.

Conventional usage apart, however, there is clearly nothing in the meaning of curriculum to preclude its relevance in educational contexts other than those of schools. Its most fundamental reference is, after all, to the content and processes of learning rather than to the historically and culturally contingent educational institution of the school. The dominance of the school has become reflected in a dominant paradigm of the curriculum, a consequence of which has been the general neglect of curriculum studies and curriculum theory in what might variously be described as post-school, post-initial or post-compulsory education. Such an association of curriculum with childhood has not only reinforced the dominant paradigm but has to some extent at least impoverished the general theory of adult, continuing or lifelong education. A dominant paradigm of adult education studies is that of the ‘structures of provision’, about which more is now being written.² Nevertheless, the arguments which are going to be pursued here are based upon the assumption that no general theory of adult or lifelong education is possible which does not have the context and processes of adult learning as a primary object; no general theory is possible, that is, which lacks the dimension of curriculum analysis. For the importance of the curriculum is that of education itself, and those who have been seriously concerned with education have necessarily found it of interest:

The reason for their interest is simple: the content of education, the curriculum, is at the heart of the educational enterprise. It is the means through which education is transacted. Without a curriculum education has no vehicle, nothing through which to transmit its messages, to convey its meanings, to transmit its values. It is mainly because of the crucial role which the curriculum plays in educational activities that it is worthy of study.³

In fact, this view reveals a further aspect of the dominant, school-based paradigm of the curriculum: its primary concern with content and with the way in which it is defined in terms of teacher-pupil relations. Accordingly, the messages, meanings and values which are the content of educational experience and therefore crucial to its understanding have become almost completely dependent upon a view of the teaching – rather than learning – function. This explains not only a widespread and growing interest in curriculum matters but also the fact that learner-centred education has sometimes seemed a rather revolutionary idea, not least to parents. For what has been referred to as the dominant paradigm of curriculum is not merely an idea in the minds of theorists but reflects a set of widespread cultural beliefs about education. It would be a major social, as well as theoretical, achievement to revise the dominant or school-based paradigm of curriculum in the industrialised societies, and it cannot be said that those who have attempted this have had much success, except for the creation of a rather negative, anti-school rhetoric.⁴ All this does suggest, however, that the greatest scope for curriculum development exists in the non-school sectors of education systems – just those sectors, paradoxically, where interest in curriculum matters seems at its lowest.

So far, it has been suggested that the meaning of ‘curriculum’ has been shaped by schooling as a universal institution of modern societies rather than by any purely logical or conceptual features of the term. But even within the school context there is no universal agreement as to what should be included in its meaning, and it is possible to take a narrower or a wider view. The narrower view is that when we talk of the curriculum we are talking about courses and subjects which comprise the intended outcomes of teaching, the knowledge and skills which it is the business of education to transmit. It is the most influential view of the curriculum, and needs to be considered further.

Curriculum and Knowledge

Many of those who have written about the curriculum argue for the usefulness of an analytic distinction between the aims, content and methods of education, even though they tend to admit that, in practice, such distinctions are meaningless. They are also likely to agree that a theory of education is necessarily a theory of practice. One reason for this seeming contradiction is that problems of the aims, content and methods of education have separately given rise to arguments and controversies in the areas of philosophy, sociology and politics, and it is mainly in these areas that the most important recent developments have occurred. Not the least interesting of such controversies have been those over the content of education, where there are major differences between those taking a more philosophical or a more sociological view of knowledge.

That the content of education consists of public knowledge would seem a reasonable starting-point for a theoretical, or indeed for a common-sense, account of the matter. To say that someone has learned something does, after all, seem to entail a demonstrable new capacity on the part of the learner. It further entails that something identifiable has been learned, so that one has learned this and not that. And this would be true however the content of education is defined: even if real education is, as some would say, ‘learning how to learn’, the demon-strableness of the capacity is a condition of saying that learning has occurred. In this sense of a demonstrable capacity, the content of learning is public.

Traditional curriculum theory, developed in the context of the school, has stressed this sense in which the content of education is public, together with the sense in which the teaching or instructional function is at the heart of the matter. In his classic text on Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction, Ralph W. Tyler set out the essentially public processes by which these principles are elucidated, although in practice such principles have been decided in a more narrowly professional than widely public setting. In the context of the school at least, curriculum theorists who take public knowledge to be the content of education have not always made it clear how this public knowledge is mediated through the teaching and instructional functions. Thus Tyler identified four fundamental questions which needed to be answered as a prior condition of curriculum analysis and development, and which express the sense in which the curriculum should be an object of public debate:

1. What educational purposes should the school seek to attain?

2. What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?

3. How can these educational experiences be effectively organized?

4. How can we determine whether these purposes are being attained?⁵

In effect, these are four question of a rather different order and they progress from a more public to a more professional issue. Classical curriculum theory failed to elucidate adequately the sense in which knowledge, as the content of education, was really public. It was, as will be seen, left to philosophers and sociologists to explore the issue of public knowledge in a more satisfactory way.

In the case of Tyler and later curriculum theorists in the school-oriented tradition of analysis⁶ the role of the teacher is so crucial that the issue of public knowledge seems to revolve around it. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the so-called ‘objectives model’ of the curriculum has been of such importance in recent years. According to this, in Tyler’s words:

Since the real purpose of education is … to bring about significant changes in the students’ patterns of behaviour, it becomes important to recognize that any statement of the objectives of the school should be a statement of changes to take place in students.⁷

This kind of passage demonstrates the practical impossibility of separating the content of education from its aims, objectives and purposes, particularly when the content is conceived wholly in terms of its potential for bringing about behavioural changes in learners. But, more significantly, we are thereby enabled to see more clearly an important meaning of public knowledge in the minds of the classical curriculum, theorists. For behavioural change is more demonstrably public than knowledge: in this way learning can be proved to have taken place. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the case of ‘objectives model’ curriculum theory, however liberally interpreted, there exists the possibility of confusing public knowledge as the content of education with public accountability on the part of professional educators. The case for this kind of analytic distinction is surely much greater than that which can be made between the content and the aims of education. In other words, to be able to demonstrate that learning has taken place is important to educators in terms of their public role, but this does not prove that knowledge itself is in any other sense ‘public’. In order to pursue the issue of knowledge in these senses we have to look at the kinds of philosophical and sociological theories of knowledge upon which curriculum theory depends.

Now just as in traditional school-curriculum analysis the idea of public knowledge has become uncritically linked with the public accountability of education systems through demonstrable learning-objectives models, so the philosophical issues in this tradition have become linked with the issue of knowledge as school subjects. In other words, the content of school education is not knowledge in general but knowledge of particular subjects or skills or areas at a specific level or in a specific balance which constitutes a curriculum at any point in the education system. But is it of the nature of knowledge to be organised in this way or are we talking about the social conventions to do with knowledge in any particular society? Philosophers and sociologists have given a range of answers to the question.

As for the philosophical position about knowledge and the curriculum, the most influential view has tended to be that of P.H. Hirst and R.S. Peters. Curriculum planning, they argue, involves determining the aims, ends or objectives of the enterprise:

Secondly there is the crucial point that if we examine carefully the character of the central objectives sought by progressives, we find that they, as much as those sought by traditionalists, are necessarily related to the acquisition of certain fundamental forms of what we have loosely called public modes of experience, understanding and knowledge.⁸

The logic of education, Hirst and Peters are saying, makes the public nature of its content inevitable, regardless of the kinds of aims that are envisaged for it. The same logic leads on to an ‘objectives model’ for the curriculum:

We shall take the term ‘curriculum’ to be the label for a programme or course of activities which is explicitly organized as the means whereby pupils may attain the desired objectives, whatever these may be.⁹

In acknowledging the importance of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives¹⁰ Hirst and Peters, however, point out that such a taxonomy in the cognitive, affective and psycho-motor domains provides ‘no awareness of the fundamental, necessary relationships between the various kinds of objectives that can be distinguished’. Again we are made aware of the difficulty of abstracting the content of education from the complexities of practice. Nevertheless, Hirst and Peters are clear that educational objectives must have to do with those ‘desirable states of mind’ to which distinct, public modes of experience and knowledge are fundamental. Furthermore, they argue, it is cognitive objectives that must be the most fundamental of all, for these are the objectives which come within the domain of knowledge and experience. This is the core of the philosophical argument for the essentially public nature of the content of education:

Let us begin by noting that there can be no experience or knowledge without the acquisition of the relevant concepts. Further, it is only when experience and thought, which necessarily involve the use of concepts of some sort, involve those shared in a public world, that the achievements with which we are concerned are possible. Without shared concepts, there can be no such distinctions as those between fact and fantasy, truth and error. Only where there is public agreement about the classification and categorization of experience and thought can we hope for any objectivity with them.¹¹

Hirst and Peters identify seven irreducible conceptual areas of knowledge and experience: logic and mathematics; the physical sciences; concepts essential to interpersonal experience and knowledge; moral judgement and awareness; aesthetics; religion; philosophy. This constitutes a fundamental division of modes of experience and knowledge and between them there exist ‘radical differences of kind’, despite the fact that there is an important pattern of interrelationships between them too. The curriculum implications of this view of ‘conceptual domains’ for educational objectives are fairly obvious in terms of, say, balance or specialisation: these are the kind of curriculum objectives which seem, from the authors’ point of view, philosophically defensible. However, they do not make the claim that the forms of knowledge and experience could be directly translated into school subjects, and different patterns of ‘curriculum units’ may well achieve the desired result of introducing learners to the discrete and public modes of knowl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1. Developments in Curriculum Theory
• 2. Adult Education Theory and the Curriculum
• 3. An Ideology of Needs, Access and Provision
• 4. Adult Education and Social Policy
• 5. Agents of Provision and Agencies of Curriculum Development
• 6. The Lifelong Curriculum
• 7. Gelpi’s View of Lifelong Education
• 8. Conclusion – Elements of Adult and Lifelong Curriculum Theory
• Bibliography
• Index