Curriculum and the Specialization of Knowledge

Studies in the sociology of education

Michael Young, Johan Muller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317600411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

This book presents a new way for educators at all levels - from early years to university - to think about curriculum priorities. It focuses on the curriculum as a form of specialised knowledge, optimally designed to enable students to gain access to the best knowledge available in any field.

Papers jointly written by the authors over the last eight years are revised for this volume. It draws on the sociology of knowledge and in particular the work of Emile Durkheim and Basil Bernstein, opening up the possibilities for collaborative inter-disciplinary enquiry with historians, philosophers and psychologists. Although primarily directed to researchers, university teachers and graduate students, its arguments about specialised knowledge have profound implications for policy makers.

Section 1
Setting the scene

1
Introduction

This book brings together papers in the sociology of education that we have worked on jointly and separately over the last decade. It is about the increasing importance of knowledge in education and its role not only in the school curriculum, but also in the curriculum of universities and programmes for the education of future members of professions and other occupations. We argue for a sociological approach to the knowledge which extends beyond schooling; this is not only because higher and professional education programmes have a major role in shaping the school curriculum, but because their curricula deserve study in their own terms.

The growing importance of ideas such as the knowledge society and the knowledge economy prefigures the likely possibility that most employment in future societies will depend on knowledge-based (rather than on solely skill-based or routine-based) work. In responding to this problem, this book attempts to modernize curriculum theory and the research that follows by moving from our earlier work on curricula for schools, colleges and universities to developing an approach to 'knowledge about knowledge' in education and, in particular, the differentiated and specialized forms it takes.

Our point of departure as sociologists of education is to draw on the classical sources of the sociology of knowledge – specifically those theorists who have not always been given the importance they warrant in the wider discipline but have a unique salience to the problem of knowledge faced by educators. In this book, we draw on concepts from the sociology of knowledge to grasp the changing knowledge landscape and its implications for what all pupils need if they are to become productive and fulfilled citizens in today's globalized world.

Research on the curriculum has been dominated since its inception in the USA at the turn of the last century by the problems faced by school administrators, curriculum specialists and head teachers (see Chapter 10). We do not under-emphasize the problems that schools face; they provide the unique and often sole opportunity for the vast majority of young people to acquire knowledge that takes them beyond their experience. However, our focus on the curriculum as a form of specialized knowledge geared specifically to its transmission leads us to two issues largely neglected by curriculum theory. The first is that school curricula are significantly shaped, not only by the universities as sources of specialized disciplinary knowledge, but by their role in preparing students for entry into universities and professional programmes. The second issue largely neglected by curriculum theory is that schools are not the only institutions that have curricula and therefore face curriculum problems. Thus in both Sections 2 and 4 of this book, we extend our discussion to university and professional education curricula.

In introducing this collection of our joint and single-authored papers, it is important to explain its origins and to say something about what we hope it will achieve. For some time we were both separately thinking of editing a collection of our recent papers into a book. However, it soon became clear to each of us that five of the papers we would both want to include were jointly authored. Second, we also became aware that several of our single-authored papers had arisen out of our ongoing discussions. Furthermore, although our intellectual biographies as sociologists of education have been rather different, and we have pursued our scholarship in two very different countries, many of our individual papers address issues that concern us both. It was these issues together with our experience of a successful collaboration on an earlier book (Young and Muller 2014) that led us to decide to bring our single- and joint-authored papers together in a single book. An advantage of doing so is that, while we share basic theoretical assumptions, the papers we include in this book vary significantly in their theoretical explicitness. This means, we hope, that the chapters will be read not only 'for themselves', but also as informing each other and in some cases forming a dialogue that suggests new questions to readers. It is for this reason that we decided to leave unchanged the paragraphs where there is repetition in the interests of maintaining the coherence of the individual chapters that have been previously published. We hope that those who read the book sequentially will bear with us.

The book aims to be a specific contribution to the sociology of education and to developing and broadening that strand of the sub-discipline which traces its roots back to Emile Durkheim, the first sociologist of education, and his leading contemporary interpreter, Basil Bernstein. The papers we have included were written between 2006 and 2014 and although they do not appear in the sequence in which they were written, the collection as a whole represents shifts in our own thinking, and in the development of the field. Furthermore in many cases they were written as specific interventions in policy debates in England and South Africa.

Our previous books (Muller 2000; Young 2008; Young and Lambert 2014) together with the influential texts of the late Rob Moore (2004; 2009) with whom we had both written, amongst others, were a critical response to earlier attempts by sociologists of education to make the question of knowledge a central issue for the sub-discipline. The jointly-written Chapter 2, 'Truth and truthfulness in the sociology of educational knowledge', can be understood best as a 'transition paper'. It sets out to summarize the previous essentially epistemological debates in the sociology of education around truth and relativism and, at the same time, to suggest a way beyond them (see also Chapter 9 in this volume). It reprises these debates by drawing comparisons between Durkheim's response to the early pragmatist ideas of Dewey and William James and the critiques by Moore and others of the social constructivism of the 1970s New Sociology of Education. The chapter builds on Moore's argument that the sociality of knowledge not only explains its bias, but can also explain its objectivity. We explore this idea through a discussion of Durkheim's lectures to future teachers and their interpretation by Basil Bernstein, and also suggest how the ideas of the social philosopher of knowledge Ernst Cassirer may offer a way forward.

By the time Chapter 2 was written, the idea that all knowledge is in some sense 'socially constructed' but at the same time can have an emergent reality of its own, was reasonably widely accepted in the sociology of education, at least, 'in theory'. The question the sociology of education was left with was 'what follows?' The remaining sections represent our attempts to answer that question.

Section 2 includes a series of chapters that engage with current policies and their assumptions, not just by presenting critiques, but also with emerging attempts to develop alternatives. The shift from Chapter 2 can be represented as a shift in the focus of the sociology of knowledge from a concern with the epistemological question of truth to the question 'how do we undertake enquiries into "knowledge about knowledge'"? The earlier work summarized in Chapter 2 provides us with the basis for moving beyond the sociology of knowledge's historical concern with the debate about relativism to questions about how knowledge is differentiated and specialized in its production and in curricula.

This sets our sociological approach on a collision course with policy developments which were increasingly playing down the importance of knowledge per se and giving priority to forms of generic and skills-based curriculum stipulations. Section 2 also engages with changes in curriculum policy, most notably in England as a new subject-based National Curriculum was launched in 1988.

The chapters in Section 3 examine the potential of the sociology of education as a basis for curriculum theory and engage with the idea of 'powerful knowledge', its potential and limitations, while Section 4 takes the argument into the universities and the professions.

Section 1: Setting the scene

The jointly-written Chapter 2 tackles the most fundamental question for any sociology of education that takes the question of knowledge seriously. Does it inevitably lead to a relativism that for all its emancipatory optimism leaves it powerless to offer any constructive alternatives? In answering this question it revisits the questions we were concerned with in the middle of the last decade. If we want to argue that the curriculum should represent an entitlement of all children to knowledge, what grounds do we have for claiming that there is 'better', more reliable, more worthwhile knowledge that all children should have a right to? Furthermore, how do we rebut the conclusion of the mainstream tradition of the sociology of knowledge that knowledge is always an expression of circumscribed activities and interests, and that therefore it makes no sense to enquire as to whether there is objectively 'better' knowledge?

Global policies for the expansion of education have been based on the assumption that they will deliver increasingly knowledgeable citizens for a society in which knowledge-based jobs will play an ever-increasing role. On the other hand, the concept of knowledge that is implied in the term 'knowledge-based', in the idea of a 'knowledge society' and in the kind of curriculum that it is assumed such a future society will require remains largely taken for granted. Furthermore, insofar as the issue of knowledge is discussed in the policies of international organizations and increasing numbers of governments, it is assumed to be generic and takes a form that can be expressed in learning outcomes. We take up these issues in Chapter 3 of Section 2.

Section 2: Knowledge and curriculum futures

Chapter 3, 'Education, globalization and the "voice" of knowledge', was written by Michael Young as a contribution to an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) seminar series at the University of Bath on the Knowledge Economy and Education. It builds on the theoretical tradition in the sociology of knowledge from Durkheim to Bernstein and takes forward the argument that the principles of a knowledge-based curriculum have to be based on a concept of knowledge that (a) treats it as emergent from the context of its production and (b) is located in the conditions for the production of new knowledge.

The succeeding chapters in Section 2 explore the implications of the first of these conditions. Chapter 4, 'Alternative education futures for a knowledge society', was initially written by Michael Young as a keynote address at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) in 2009. It focuses on three trends in European educational policy, all of which express the broad theme of genericism. It examines how this is manifest in (a) national qualification frameworks, (b) policies based on the idea of learning outcomes and (c) the assumption that the speed of knowledge growth implies a curriculum that can rely on generic skills and underplay the importance of specialist disciplinary content and concepts.

Chapter 5, 'Three educational scenarios for the future: lessons from the sociology of knowledge', was written jointly as a contribution to the project Beyond Current Horizons led by Carey Jewitt. It develops this analysis further by positing three scenarios distinguished in terms of their assumptions about knowledge. The trends analysed in Chapter 4 are located in this analysis as exemplifying an 'over-socialized' concept of knowledge (scenario 2), an over-reaction to the static and elitist features of the curriculum model it sought to replace (scenario 1). The chapter ends with a preliminary sketch of a third possible future (scenario 3).

Chapter 6, 'Curriculum and the question of knowledge: the legacy of Michael Gove and beyond', was initially presented by Michael Young at a symposium at the ECER in Porto in September 2014. Drawing again on the 'three futures' model, which we develop in Chapter 5, the chapter turns to the reforms of the former Conservative-led coalition government which was replaced by a Conservative government following the General Election in May 2015. While starting from a critique of Future 2 developments that has some similarities to that developed in Chapter 4 of this book, these reforms present a radically different alternative to that based on an attempt to return to a modernized version of Future 1. While welcoming the fact that the Coalition's policies have brought the question of knowledge to the centre of the curriculum policy agenda, the chapter is critical of its backward-looking concept of knowledge and its failure to locate knowledge in contemporary concerns about the conditions for innovation and the production of new knowledge.

Chapter 7, 'The future of knowledge and skills in science and technology higher education', which concludes the section, was written by Johan Muller in response to an invitation to provide a 'think piece' for a group of science and technology higher educators, and extends Chapter 6's focus on Future 2 developments in the upper secondary curriculum in relation to science and technology courses in higher education. Its specific focus is on the teaching and learning initiatives in universities that are often referred to as academic development in South Africa. As an example of a Future 2 development these initiatives do not seek to replace the existing undergraduate curriculum but to improve access to it by providing additional support for disadvantaged learners who face problems in engaging with the specialist knowledge of traditional Future 1 university curricula. While supporting these attempts to broaden access to university curricula, the chapter builds on recent philosophical analyses to suggest that they under-specify the curriculum basis of their support, in particular in the case of science and technology curricula. It concludes that a re-specification of the role of academic development will be needed if universities are to improve the progression of students who lack the prior knowledge that traditional higher education students depend on.

Section 3: The idea of powerful knowledge

Section 3 addresses directly the notion that has become known as 'powerful knowledge'. It opens with Chapter 8, 'What are schools for?' written by Michael Young as a response to a position paper by the philosopher of education, John White, that took the view that considerations of curriculum should start with the aims of education rather than with knowledge. The central argument is that a dynamic notion of knowledge, underpinned by the key distinction between 'knowledge of the powerful', and 'powerful knowledge' must be the starting point for considering the purposes of schools. The chapter concludes by stressing the importance, for any curriculum, of the differentiation of knowledge, principally the differentiation between everyday and specialized knowledge.

Chapter 9 which follows, 'On the powers of powerful knowledge', was jointly authored to respond to various criticisms of the emerging notion of powerful knowledge and to lend it greater sociological substance. It starts by deriving resources from three key classical theorists, Durkheim, Vygotsky and Bernstein. It goes on to consider, and rebut, the criticism that powerful knowledge is modelled on, and applies only to, the natural sciences and technology. It begins to address the dilemmas of specialization and its implications for social justice and returns to the concerns about the objectivity of both the natural and social sciences first raised in Chapter 2. The chapter concludes by exploring different meanings of 'power' in relation to knowledge and their implications for the curriculum.

Chapter 10, 'Overcoming the crisis in curriculum theory', was initially presented by Michael Young at the Portuguese-Brazilian Association for Curriculum Studies in 2012, and was a response to the concern that curriculum theory had lost contact with its object of enquiry. The chapter begins by presenting a brief history of the development of curriculum theory, and the critical response by Michael Apple and others to instrumental views of the curriculum as instruction that developed principally in the USA. It argues that in its critique of the idea of the curriculum as instruction, curriculum theory, and the critical pedagogy tradition associated with it, lost sight of the curriculum as a primary source of access to knowledge. It draws on themes in the previous two chapters to spell out what a knowledge-based approach might mean for the curriculum. It concludes with a concrete example of a school in England that began to implement the idea of a knowledge-based approach, and reflects on the practical, political and epistemological problems that such an approach may lead to.

The final chapter in this section, Chapter 11 'The promise and the pathos of knowledge', was written by Johan Muller for a panel keynote presentation on the occasion of the inauguration of the South African Educational Research Association in 2013. It has since been substantially revised. The paper responds to a principal political criticism of the idea of powerful knowledge, and indeed of all forms of specialized knowledge, which is that it is inevitably partisan, instrumental and technicist, discriminating against those from different cultural and class backgrounds. The paper revisits the wellsprings of specialized knowledge in moral and religious thought, a connection it appears to lose in the secularization of knowledge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It concludes by reflecting on the dark as well as the light side of specialized knowledge, and speculates that it may just be that a moral core – albeit secularized – still subsists in submerged form in secular concerns about equality and social justice in the distribution of educational goods.

Section 4: Universities, professions and specialized knowledge

Section 4 carries the book's argument forward into the sphere of higher education and the knowledge base of the professions. The idea that knowledge structure is simply a higher or lower pile of propositions, as in the classical positivist picture of Nagel (1982), for instance, is extended. The prompting to do this is an attempt to grasp the complexity of specialized professional knowledge and the attendant problem of how to represent it coherently in a curriculum. Following in the steps of...