The Curriculum of the Future

From the 'New Sociology of Education' to a Critical Theory of Learning

Michael F. D. Young

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780750707893
• eBook ISBN: 9781135710095
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

In this important book the author looks back on the 'knowledge question'. What knowledge gets selected to be validated as school knowledge or as part of the school curriculum, and why is it selected? Looking forward, Young discusses how most developed countries have high levels of participation in post-compulsory education, but still use curricula designed for a time when only the elite pursued further education. He argues the need to rethink post-16 education to shift focus onto vocational education, school-work issues and lifelong learning.

Section 1
Constructing and Reconstructing a Sociology of the Curriculum

Chapter 1
The Curriculum as Socially Organized Knowledge

Introduction

The history, the social divisions and the many competing interests and value systems found in a modern society are expressed in the school curriculum as much as they are in its system of government or its occupational structure. Likewise, curriculum debates, implicitly or explicitly, are always debates about alternative views of society and its future. These links between the curriculum and society provide both the topic and the rationale for the sociological approach to the curriculum set out in this chapter.

The chapter is based on a paper first published in 1971 (Young, 1971) and the analysis which it presents inevitably reflects the time and context. The specific examples, which are taken largely from the secondary curriculum in England and Wales, will be of primary interest to the educational historian. However, the intractable character of academic/vocational divisions (Finegold et al., 1990) and the international concern with the issue of parity of esteem between academic and vocational learning (Lasonen, 1996; Lasonen and Young, 1998) suggest that the idea of exploring the links between the stratification of knowledge in the curriculum and wider social divisions is as relevant now as it was nearly thirty years ago. In order to enable the reader to separate those elements of the analysis specific to the earlier context from those of current relevance, the first two parts of this chapter are concerned with that earlier context. Part 1 considers a number of educational policy issues in the period 1950–1970 and Part 2 considers the intellectual context of the time through an analysis of developments in the sociology of education in the UK up to 1971. Part 3 develops the theoretical framework which links social change and the curriculum through the concept of the stratification of knowledge.

The Secondary Curriculum in Context:
Educational Policy Themes 1950–1970

It is possible to trace three stages in the public debates on education in England and Wales between 1950 and 1970 through three interrelated themes: (i) equality of opportunity: (ii) the organization and selection of pupils for secondary education, and (iii) the curriculum. In the first stage, the facts of educational ‘wastage’ were documented by the Early Leaving Report (HMSO, 1953) and the Crowther Report (MOE, 1959) and the social class basis of differences in educational opportunities was demonstrated by sociologists such as Glass (1954) and Floud, Halsey and Martin (1957). The research complemented the public reports and both were used by successive governments as a justification for expanding secondary and higher education. However, the research also threw up a set of questions concerning the basis of selection at 11+ and the fact that it was as much a social as an educational process. This exposure of ‘wastage of talent’, especially of able working class children, led to the second phase of public debate which began in the mid 1960s and focused on critiques of the 11+ test for entry to grammar school. It leads to demands for the comprehensive reorganization of what was then a tripartite system of secondary education. Public debate in the second phase became increasingly political, an indication that the policies involved, such as the abolition of selective schools, threatened significant and powerful interests in society. However, the manifest inefficiency and less well-publicized injustice of the 11+ test made its abolition a realistic political commitment for reformist politicians of the time.

It was only towards the end of the 1960s that the focus of the debate moved from questions of the organization of secondary schooling to the content of education and therefore to the curriculum itself. The likely reasons for this shift are worth referring to briefly as they set the context for what was later to become a more explicit focus on the curriculum from the 1970s onwards by both policy makers and researchers. Three reasons can be distinguished as follows:

Government pressure for more and better technologists and scientists

The origins and implications of the concern to increase the numbers of pupils studying science were widely discussed at the time, although some cast doubts on whether pupils in secondary schools were ‘swinging from science’ (McPherson (1969), Blaug and Gannicott (1969) and Gorbutt (1970)). However, the ‘swing’ became an ‘official’ problem with the publication of the Dainton Report (DES, 1968) and the various solutions that it proposed. In retrospect, the most interesting recommendation of the Dainton Report that was little noticed at the time was that the ‘swing from science’ was unlikely to be reversed without some change in the narrow form of subject specialization that was forced on pupils by A-Levels (see Chapter 9).

The commitment to raising the school leaving age

Throughout the 1960s there were proposals, not in fact implemented until 1973, that the school leaving age should be raised to 16. The reasoning behind the proposals arose from the obvious if neglected fact that the length of a student’s school career is probably the single most important determinant of the level of attainment he or she is likely to reach. However, a compulsory additional year for all pupils posed quite new curriculum problems since a significant section of the cohort already wanted to leave school at 14 or 15. Various alternatives for ‘more meaningful curricula’ were introduced including a new teacher assessed national examination, the Certificate of Secondary Education, which gave teachers a new flexibility in planning a curriculum that still would lead to a public examination. Curriculum alternatives for those making up the new Vth and VIth Forms were to become a major pre-occupation of the Schools Council after it was launched in 1964 and were to provide the policy context for more fundamental questions to be raised about relations between the curriculum and other social priorities (Young, 1972).

Comprehensive reorganization of secondary education

Following the government Circular on secondary reorganization 10/65, many local education authorities merged grammar schools and secondary modern schools to create comprehensive schools. This meant that many grammar school teachers were obliged, for the first time, to receive a non-selective pupil intake. Thus, teachers who for years had successfully produced good A-Level results from highly selective groups of pupils were faced with pupils who appeared neither to know how to learn academic subjects nor to want to. This inevitably generated new curriculum problems that had not arisen when pupils were separated into secondary modern, technical and grammar schools.

Educational and Political Debates about the Curriculum in the 1960s

In the UK, the public debate about the curriculum in the 1960s and afterwards took place on two levels, the ‘political’ and the ‘educational’. At the political level, the main protagonists were the Marxist ‘Left’ (Anderson, 1969) and the conservative or Black Paper ‘Right’ (Cox and Dyson, 1969a, 1969b). The ‘Left’ criticized contemporary curricula for ‘mystifying the students’ and ‘fragmenting knowledge into compartments’. They also claimed that typical higher education curricula denied students the opportunity to understand society as a ‘totality’ and therefore acted as little more than a mechanism of social control. The conservative ‘Right’ criticized progressive teaching methods, mixed ability teaching and the various curricular innovations designed to broaden the teaching of English and history, as well as the expansion of what they saw as the ‘soft’ social sciences. However the ‘politics of the curriculum’ at the time remained firmly outside party politics. Furthermore, apart from the requirement for compulsory religious instruction, the formal autonomy of the headteacher over the school curriculum was not questioned.

This autonomy was in practice limited, especially in the upper forms of secondary schools, by the control of curricula by the universities, both through their entrance requirements and their domination of all but one of the school examination boards.

Three features of the educational debates about the curriculum at the time should also be mentioned. They are the emphasis on secondary curricula, the important role of philosophers of education and the marginal role of sociologists. Virtually all the curriculum debates in the 1960s focused on the phase which had in practice undergone least change, the secondary school curriculum. The absence of debate over changes in the primary curriculum appeared to point to the much greater autonomy of that part of the educational system with the lowest status. However, as has since become apparent, this relative autonomy of the primary curriculum at the time depended not only on the low status of primary school teachers but on a ‘hands off ’ view of the curriculum on the part of politicians which was taken for granted at the time but which was to change dramatically two decades later.

By the end of the 1960s the approach to the philosophy of education associated with Peters and Hirst had established a dominant role in educational studies and in the curriculum of teacher education. It was to have a profound influence on debates about the curriculum. Starting from a view of knowledge which they traced back to Kant (Hirst, 1969), they criticized the new topic-based and integrated syllabi which they saw as neglecting the fundamental ‘forms of knowledge’ which everyone needed to make sense of the world. It was not subjects, which Hirst recognized were the socially constructed ways that teachers organize knowledge, but forms of understanding, which he claimed were not open to debate or change. However, in the debates that followed, the distinction between school subjects and forms of understanding easily got lost and the philosophy of education became associated with opposition to a socio-historical view of the curriculum (Pring, 1972; White and Young, 1974; 1975) and at the time served to limit more fundamental debates.

Despite their significant role in debates about educational inequality and secondary re-organization, sociologists played little role in the curriculum debates of the 1960s. In order to understand why, and to provide the basis for the sociological approach to the curriculum developed later in this chapter, it is necessary to look in more detail at the sociology of education of the time.

Sociology of Education and the Curriculum 1950–1970

Education is always, as Raymond Williams (1961) so evocatively pointed out, a set of cultural choices, some conscious and some unconscious. It follows that the curriculum is always a selection and organization of the knowledge available at a particular time. However, at least until the 1970s, sociologists of education did not see their task as trying to relate the principles of selection and organization of knowledge in curricula to the wider social structure. I want to suggest that this may be explained by examining the ideological and methodological assumptions of sociology of education at the time and the institutional context within which it developed.

British sociology in the late 1950s drew its political priorities from Fabian socialism and its methodology from the political arithmetic tradition of research associated with Booth and Rowntree. Sociologists such as Halsey and Floud broadened the definition of poverty from lack of income to lack of education and identified lack of educational opportunities as a significant way in which working class life chances were limited. However, in their concern to promote greater equality of opportunity, these early studies pointed not only to the need to expand educational opportunities but also to identifying the characteristics of those who failed, the early leavers and the drop-outs. Partly because they wanted evidence to justify educational expansion, their explanations of school failure focused on the educability of those who failed rather than on features of the education system that failed them. A characteristic but taken for granted feature of the curriculum of that system was the way grammar schools obliged pupils from about 14 to take up to 10 different subjects which had very little relation either to each other or to the rest of their lives and then at 16 to drop all but three, usually selected from a narrowly specialized group.

The sociological studies of the time set out to show how the distribution of life chances through education could be seen as an aspect of the class structure. Inevitably, this led to an over-mechanistic conception of social class which isolated the social class characteristics of individuals from the social class content of their educational experience. It may clarify this point to represent the model of explanation of school failure of such studies diagrammatically:

Assumptions	Independent variables	Dependent variables
Criteria of educational success — curricula, teaching methods and assessment. What counts as 'knowledge and knowing' in school	Social characteristics of the groups who succeed and fail	Distribution of success and failure at various stages in terms of participation and attainment

Though presenting a somewhat over-simplified picture, the diagram does show that, in terms of the model, the curriculum and content of education is taken as a ‘given’ and not as a possible variable to be investigated; furthermore, the model inevitably represents successes as normal and educational failures as a form of ‘deviance’ from the norm. What such a model cannot consider is how differential rates of educational success and failure may be explained in terms of the criteria and de finitions of success that are used (Keddie, 1971). To ask such questions is to consider how definitions of success arise and are legitimized through methods of assessment, selection and organization of knowledge. However, to treat such definitions as objects of study raises not just theoretical and methodological questions; it also raises political questions about the distribution of power and the ability of some to define what counts as educational success. Furthermore, bearing in mind the reformist mission of the sociologists of education of the time, it is difficult to see to what policies a refocusing of the model of educational failure might have pointed. This is a point that will be returned to in Chapter 3.

Turning to the institutional context, teaching and research in the sociology of education expanded in the 1960s in teacher training colleges and university departments of education, where previously it had hardly existed. The new specialists had to legitimize their contribution to the education of teachers and justify their particular field of expertise—particularly when the philosophers had defined the curriculum and knowledge as ‘their area’. They mapped out areas previously unexplored in educational studies. They started from the social context of education with an emphasis on social class, relationships between education and the economy, the occupational structure and the family, and moved to the consideration of schools as organizations and pupil subcultures. It is perhaps not surprising that a tacit consensus emerged, at least for a time, among sociologists and non-sociologists alike, that the curriculum was not a field for sociological research.

Although this discussion has focused on British sociology of education, the general points are more widely applicable. Structural-functionalism, which was the perspective of the majority of sociologists in the USA, presupposes an agreed set of societal values or goals which define, among other things, the selection and organization of knowledge in curricula. Thus, sociology of education in the USA was primarily concerned with socialization, seen as the ‘organization’ and ‘processing’ of people, and with notable exceptions, for example the pioneering early work of Apple (1979) and Wexler (1983), continued to take the organization of knowledge in the curriculum for granted.

Towards a Framework for Analysing the Curriculum as Socially Organized Knowledge

The previous section has suggested that it was the taken for granted assumptions of the sociology of education of the 1960s that accounted for its neglect of the curriculum. The next section of this chapter turns this critique into a positive programme for raising sociological questions about the curriculum. It does so by starting from the assumption that those in positions of power will attempt to define what is to be taken as knowledge in society, how accessible to different groups any knowledge is and what are the accepted relationships between different knowledge areas and between those who have access to them and make them available. It is the exploration of these issues that is the basis to the approach to the curriculum as socially organized knowledge that follows. Drawing on Bernstein (1973), the approach gives rise to three interrelated questions about curricula concerning the stratification of knowledge, the extension of the scope of knowledge (or degree of specialization) and the relations between knowledge areas.

1. The power of some to define what is ‘valued’ knowledge leads to the question of accounting for how knowledge is stratified and by what criteria. The idea of knowledge being stratified has two aspects— what might be referred to as its ‘prestige’ and ‘property’ components. Differences in prestige refer to the different ways that different kinds of knowledge are valued—for example, pure and applied, academic and vocational, and general and specialist knowledge. The property aspect of the stratification of knowledge refers to how access to knowledge is controlled, in modern societies, largely by professionals and other experts. Thus the ‘property’ aspect of stratification points to the distribution of knowledge in use and its associated reward structure. It suggests that in different societies the dominant conception of knowledge is likely to be associated with dominant ideas about property in general—whether this is private, state or communal.
2. The restriction of the access of some knowledge areas to specific groups is also a question of power. It poses the question in relation to curricula as to what is the scope of curricula provided for different groups and to the factors that may influence what is seen as the degree and kind of specialization appropriate to different groups of learners at different ages.
3. The third question points to relations between knowledge areas and between those with access to them. Relations between knowledge areas are also expressions of power; in this case the power of some to maintain or break down knowledge boundaries. Relations between knowledge areas can be seen as on a continuum between being insulated and being connective.

We can therefore conceptualize options for organizing the curriculum in terms of three dimensions which can, for simplicity, be seen as a continua between (i) high and low stratification, (ii) broad and narrow degrees of specialization and (iii) insulated and connective relations between knowledge areas.

There is a more fundamental question, only hinted at in this chapter, as to whether, as knowledge expands, it necessarily becomes more stratified. The growth of knowledge and the access to it have undoubtedly been paralleled by an increasing differentiation and specialization of knowledge. It is also likely that increasing differentiation is a condition which allows for some groups to legitimize ‘their knowledge’ as superior—in other words, the growth of knowledge is a condition for its greater stra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section 1: Constructing and Reconstructing a Sociology of the Curriculum
• Section 2: Academic/Vocational Divisions In the Curriculum of the Future
• Section 3: Knowledge, Learning and Curriculum In a Learning Society
• Notes
• References
• Chronology of Original Papers