Knowledge and the Curriculum (International Library of the Philosophy of Education Volume 12)

A Collection of Philosophical Papers

Paul H. Hirst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415562843
• eBook ISBN: 9781135170813
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The papers in this volume provide a coherent philosophical study of a group of important and pressing educational issues such as the selection of objectives for less able children, the fundamental characteristics of teaching and the integration of the curriculum. A thesis on the necessary differentiation of knowledge into logically distinct forms is outlined, and is defended against recent philosophical criticisms. Its implications for curriculum planning are examined, with particular reference to the urgent problems of adeqately characterizing liberal education and those forms of moral and religious education that are appropriate in maintained schools.

1
Philosophy and curriculum planning

It is abundantly clear nowadays that ultimately the crucially important questions of the curriculum are complex practical questions which no mere philosopher of education has a right to answer. Anyone who today advocates curriculum changes on purely philosophical grounds without considering the psychological and sociological factors that are relevant is simply irresponsible. For rational curriculum planning, we must, for instance, have sound empirical evidence on how children learn, we must know the demand in our society for people with specialist knowledge. On these technicalities, no mere philosopher is competent to pronounce. But if a philosopher cannot hope to give any definitive answers, this does not mean that he has nothing to say on curriculum matters, or that what he has to say is of only peripheral importance. Indeed, some of the most basic doubts and questionings about the curriculum from which we now suffer would seem to be in part philosophical in character, and philosophers have at least some centrally important things to say on them.

I

Philosophy, I shall take it, is above all concerned with clarification of the concepts and propositions through which our experience and activities are intelligible. It is interested in answering questions about the meaning of terms and expressions, about the logical relations and the presuppositions these terms and expressions involve. As I shall regard it, philosophy is not a speculative super-science that tries to answer questions about some ultimate reality; it is not the pursuit of moral knowledge; it is not the great integrator of all human understanding into a unified view of man, God and the Universe; it is not a science—as is, for instance, psychology or sociology—concerned to understand what is the case in terms of experiment and observation. It is rather a distinctive type of higher order pursuit, primarily an analytical pursuit, with the ambition of understanding the concepts used in all other forms of lower-order knowledge and awareness. Philosophy, as I see it, is a second-order area of knowledge, concerned above all with the necessary features of our primary forms of understanding and awareness in the sciences, in morals, in history and the like. Philosophical questions are not about, say, particular facts or moral judgments, but about what we mean by facts, what we mean by moral judgments, how these fundamental elements in our understanding relate to each other, and so on.

Philosophers, therefore, come into their own not when people begin to question about particular facts or about particular moral judgments, but when they come to ask questions about these fundamental units in our understanding. They come into their own not when people begin to ask for particular facts about our present secondary school curriculum, about its effectiveness in providing the general knowledge people need in our society, or how best to interest pupils in what we wish to teach; they come into their own when we turn from questions of empirical investigation to ask what is the nature of the things we wish pupils to achieve, what we mean by the acquisition of knowledge and what we mean by capturing pupils’ interests. It is when people recognise that in planning the curriculum we are working with unclear and confused notions, that logical issues come to the fore. Just as in a time of moral upheaval, when a reformulation of the moral code is necessary, people may well begin to ask not simply what actions are right and wrong but rather what is meant by right and wrong anyway, and how any justification of moral claims is possible, so today when well established curricular practices are being re-assessed, it may be necessary for us to get a better logical grip on some of the fundamental concepts we are using. That, in the questionings that are now going on, there are signs of serious philosophical confusion in our ideas about the curriculum, I do not doubt, and it is with these alone that I am here concerned. Let me repeat, however, philosophical clarification will not of itself answer our practical problems, even if it cannot but help in promoting more rational solutions of them.

If we are to be concerned with problems in curriculum planning, it is surely important to be clear at the start what precisely a curriculum is. The term curriculum is, of course, used very variedly, but I shall take it to mean a programme of activities designed so that pupils will attain by learning certain specifiable ends or objectives. I do not wish to imply by this that a curriculum must be a programme or sequence of activites that is not to be changed in any respect by the pupils, that it must be completely determined by teachers. Nor do I wish to imply that curriculum activites are teachers’ activities as distinct from the activities of pupils. I am concerned, of course, with both. Activities on the part of the child are essential if there is to be any significant learning at all, and activities on the part of the teacher are necessary to produce the learning with which the curriculum is concerned.

What I want to bring out, in making this very brief statement as to how I understand the term curriculum, are the three elements that seem to be implied in the very notion of a curriculum and which are therefore essential features in rational curriculum planning.

First there can be no curriculum without objectives. Unless there is some point to planning the activities, some intended, learnable outcome, however vague this might be, there is no such thing as a curriculum. But if a curriculum is a plan of activities aimed at achieving objectives, it is a plan involving two other elements, a content to be used and methods to be employed to bring about learning. By content is usually meant the particular plays of Shakespeare that are studied, the particular elements of history considered—say, the foreign policy of Great Britain in 1914—the particular social or moral problems that are discussed, and the like. And by methods, we usually mean the types of activities pursued by teachers and pupils together in discussions, group work, surveys, demonstrations, film and TV viewing, and so on. Although we can distinguish the content of the curriculum and the methods employed, this distinction is at times rather artificial, for the content used sometimes depends closely on the sort of methods employed and vice versa. Yet for my present purposes it is important to keep these two elements clearly distinguished, for changes in the one do not necessarily demand a revolution in the other. Clearly, granted certain objectives and methods, one can in many cases change the content that is used to achieve these. If one is after certain forms of aesthetic appreciation, one can use Play A rather than Play B, Poem C rather than Poem D. Equally, given certain objectives and a specific content, one can vary the actual methods employed. One can then, to some extent, consider content and method independently, given a set of objectives, even if it is too simple to regard them in stark isolation.

II

From this simple characterisation, it would seem to follow that for curriculum planning to be rational, it must start with clear and specific objectives, and then, and only then, address itself to discovering the plan of means, the content and methods in terms of which these objectives are to be obtained. It is on this view a logical nonsense to pretend that a series of activities form a curriculum, or a part of a curriculum, if they are not designed to obtain specifiable objectives. The use of free activity periods by the inexperienced and unthoughtful forms an obvious case in point here. There is no reason whatever to suppose that free activity will necessarily promote any desired learning, even if it occurs in a suitably well equipped environment. It is, I think, therefore pure deception to regard such activity as part of a curriculum if it is not structured to obtain certain specified objectives. If one redefines what is meant by a curriculum to include this sort of random pursuit, that is to win only a verbal battle. It remains logically the case that these activities are not designed to achieve any desired ends, and whether any such ends are achieved is in fact purely fortuitous. It seems to me just nonsense to pretend that these pursuits really form part of what is generally known as a curriculum.

For any particular curriculum, deciding what the objectives are to be involves making value judgments of immense complexity and importance. But we must get clear precisely what it is we think is of value, characterising it with the greatest possible precision. We may, for instance, wish to pass on our notions of justice, but we shall have to work out in great detail what these notions are before we have any adequate curriculum objectives. In particular we need to know how general terms like this apply in specific situations. If it is not clear what the objectives of the enterprise are, then from a rational point of view the whole pursuit is being vitiated from the start. And a very great deal of curriculum experiment has been vitiated on just these grounds.

With no clear statement of objectives set out to guide them, teachers only too easily take the statement of the mere content of the curriculum or syllabus as a statement of the objectives to be pursued. In this way the teacher pares down what is to be achieved to the acquisition of a body of information and the ability to perform a number of stated operations. Of course the content stated is intended to be gone through and much to be learnt in the process. But if Boyle’s Law, Pythagoras’s Theorem and King Lear are taken as labels of objectives, the result will often be the mere mastery of propositions. Taken as labels for a content to be used, they may be employed as the means of developing understanding, judgment, imagination and many other complex qualities. In a stable context or tradition, where the objectives of the curriculum can be assumed to be fully understood by all teachers, then everything may be well if teachers are given no more than a suggested content for their courses. But under the present circumstances, no such accepted tradition exists any more. We are all too frequently guilty of allowing the established content of syllabuses and curricula to set our objectives for us. We can then evade the difficult matter of deciding what precisely our aim ought to be, we can reduce the tasks of teaching and learning to their most manageable forms and easily appear to be pretty efficient at the job. Of course what is learnt by pupils in courses of this sort is not only unobjectionable, it may be very valuable in many ways. But that is no adequate justification. Curriculum planning is not just a question of whether what is learnt is worthwhile, it is a question of whether or not what we wish to be learnt is in fact being learnt.

If the traditional school curriculum and syllabuses assume an established background of objectives they equally assume an established background of appropriate teaching methods, for these are similarly unspecified. Maybe many of the teaching methods used are excellent, but if the statement of content is taken as setting out what is to be learnt, there is a strong temptation to assume that traditional chalk and talk are pretty well all that is needed. If strings of propositions are to be mastered, and a number of formal skills acquired, what better way is there than the clear, precise, formal presentation of them and plenty of disciplined practice? In this way not only are the objectives pared down, the methods used are undesirably restricted as well.

But the old style curriculum or syllabus does at least have this value, that in stating the content of a course, it gives at least a strong hint of some of the objectives the teacher is to pursue. If, however, the curriculum is set out merely in terms of projects and activities, even an indirect specification of the objectives may be lacking. It matters vitally in a project on the neighbourhood, for instance, what the objectives of the exercise are. If the objectives themselves are not stated, it is not clear how one can justify these activities having a place in the curriculum. Perhaps this approach, setting out the curriculum or syllabus in terms of projects, does prevent teachers being misled by traditional curricular formulations as far as methods are concerned, but it seems to me that it may all too readily lead to little significant learning of the kind it is the school’s function assiduously to pursue. In a time of upheaval and radical change, it seems to me that too much freedom for the teacher is not necessarily a good thing.

A further confusion of questions about objectives and questions about content and methods arises over the issue of the ‘subject’ structure of the curriculum. I regard it as a basic philosophical truth about the nature of knowledge that, whether we like it or not, all knowledge is differentiated into a limited number of logically distinct forms or disciplines.¹ If this is a philosophical truth, then it cannot be ignored. It means that the objectives of knowledge and understanding we are concerned with in most curricula have an implicit organisation, there are distinctions and inter-relations between the objectives which must necessarily be recognised. The distinct conceptual structures within knowledge are part of what has to be mastered in acquiring knowledge. But it does not follow that, because these structures are to be found in the objectives we may be after, they must explicitly map out the content of every curriculum planned for these ends. The content must be planned and structured to achieve objectives that have their own inter-relations. To proceed from saying that there is a given structure in the knowledge we wish to be mastered to saying that this must be the structure of the curriculum, is to be guilty of a simple logical fallacy. Means must not be taken for the characteristics of the ends. I see no reason why a curriculum should not be fully ‘topic-organised’ provided it is understood that the development of understanding involves the mastery of conceptual structures which are not reflected in the topic-organisation.

There is, I think, a similar confusion between objectives and methods where the progressive curriculum is concerned. We may wish, as an objective, to enable pupils to solve at least some of the many practical problems they are going to face in life. The ability to solve these problems is an objective. It does not follow from this that the curriculum should be directly geared in its methods to problemsolving. To assume this is to confuse an objective with a method. We wish to plan the curriculum in content and methods so that pupils will as a result be able to solve practical and theoretical problems. We must therefore set about discovering what pupils need to know in terms of matters of sheer fact, what different methods must be used to solve different types of questions, whether the expertise for one kind is important in another, and so on. All this needs to be disentangled before we can tell how best to educate pupils to cope with their problems. There is no guarantee whatever that the best way is to organise the whole curriculum round problem-saving. Of course there will be elements of problem-solving in the curriculum, but one must not over-emphasise one objective at the expense of others and rush into thinking that appropriate methods can be determined as simply as this logical confusion implies.

Just as some particular objectives must not be allowed to determine teaching methods directly, so also elements of teaching methods must not be glorified into objectives. One example of this must suffice. It is manifestly the case that adequate teaching in many areas must involve pupils in a great deal of first-hand and practical experience. From this it does not follow that all experience is, as such, an appropriate curriculum objective. And further, practical experience is only one element needed in teaching. Of itself it may frequently prove valueless as a teaching method. Unqualified em phasis on experience as an objective is grossly misleading, as indeed is such emphasis on its significance as a method.

If we are to prevent confusions and inadequacies of the kind I have instanced, then the only way is, I think, to stick to the principle I suggested earlier. We must first formulate our objectives clearly, in realistic and operational terms, and then, in the light of these, move on to the questions of content and method. We must resist the temptation to rush in with new ideas about content and methods with only the haziest notions of what we are trying to achieve, piously hoping that something worthwhile will result in the end. We would be much better off harnessing our energies into finding more successful means for reaching those objectives we are clear about, whilst we thrash out new objectives in more controversial areas. Let us be revolutionary about means when we know what we are after, and when we do not know what we are after let us refrain from ill-considered practices until we have got our intentions straight.

III

In characterising a curriculum as necessarily having objectives, the planning of the means to which constitutes the central problem of curriculum development, I might be accused of a piece of mere prescriptive definition or dogmatic legislation which has conveniently ruled out of the discussion many of the more provocative and exciting ideas that have recently come into educational debate. This legislation as to how I am using the term curriculum is however quite deliberate. What I am seeking to do, is to take what seems to me to be the traditional use of this term in the school context, drawing out its essentially means-ends character. In forcing this character into the open, it is possible to use it not only as a norm to point out weaknesses in traditional curriculum planning but also to use it to show where contemporary developments diverge from this conception. Whether or not these contemporary developments are regarded as lapses from an ideal standard of planning or as important new approaches is a debatable matter. In so far as the situation that provoked the traditional concept continues to exist, and that approach is thoroughly justifiable, the term’s traditional use will continue to be important. In so far as that situation has changed, and the approach the term has implied now lacks justification, the evolution of a new concept is to be welcomed.

Granted this situation, it seems to me a matter of some consequence that though the social context of curriculum planning is undergoing mu...

Table of contents

• Contents
• General editor’s note
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Philosophy and curriculum planning
• 2 The nature and structure of curriculum objectives
• 3 Liberal education and the nature of knowledge
• 4 Realms of meaning and forms of knowledge
• 5 Language and thought
• 6 The forms of knowledge re-visited
• 7 What is teaching?
• 8 The logical and psychological aspects of teaching a subject
• 9 Curriculum integration
• 10 Literature and the fine arts as a unique form of knowledge
• 11 The two-cultures, science and moral education
• 12 Morals, religion and the maintained school
• Index