Social Realism, Knowledge and the Sociology of Education

Coalitions of the Mind

Karl Maton, Rob Moore

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781441138507
• eBook ISBN: 9781441161086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume covers issues in the sociology of knowledge, the educational system and policy, professional autonomy, vocational education, educational research and teaching, as well as the nature of such disciplines as cultural studies, English, science and the arts. The chapters also directly address the nature of sociology of education itself.The realist position developed in the book challenges two major currents of thought that have for a long time been prominent and influential in sociology and education: postmodernism and progressivism/constructivism. This well-edited collection of papers is provocative and original in that it represents a sustained, collective critique that offers a genuine alternative to these current orthodoxies.

Chapter 1
Reconceptualizing Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education

Rob Moore
Cambridge University
Michael Young
University of London and University of Bath

Politicians tell us that we are (or soon will be) in a ‘knowledge society’ and that more and more jobs require people to be ‘knowledge workers’. At the same time government policy documents have been remarkably silent about what this knowledge is (DfEE 1998, 1999). Is it more of the old disciplinary knowledge or is it a new kind of trans-disciplinary knowledge that is more transient and local (Gibbons et al. 1994; Muller 2000)? Answers to such questions should lie at the heart of the sociology of education, but also are strangely absent there as well (Chapters 2 and 3, this volume; Young 2000a, 2000b). In this chapter we wish to do two things. First we seek to clarify the nature of the problem and second, we shall propose a way ahead for the sociology of education. In developing our argument we will not only be examining the problem of knowledge in the curriculum, but also raising some concerns about how the sociology of education has tended to treat the issue of knowledge more generally. We will argue that contemporary trends in the sociology of education make it peculiarly ill equipped to meet the curriculum challenge posed by debates about the implications of globalization (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998) and the massification of post-compulsory education (Scott 2000) of the last decade.

We will begin by describing and contrasting what we see as the two dominant (and contending) sets of assumptions about knowledge and the curriculum that are reflected in contemporary curriculum policy: ‘neo-conservative traditionalism’ and ‘technical-instrumentalism’. We then go on to examine the postmodernist critique of these assumptions that has been developed within the sociology of education (Hartley 1997; Moore 2000). Despite the critical stance of postmodernism, we will argue that all three positions exhibit some fundamental similarities. Each, in its own way, precludes a debate about knowledge as a category in its own right. It follows that what is lacking from current debates about the curriculum is precisely any theory of knowledge. It is here that the issue becomes most acute for the sociology of education. It is fair to say that postmodernist perspectives have become firmly entrenched, though not hegemonic, within the sociology of education (Hartley 1997) and, furthermore, that their proponents adopt a critical position vis-à-vis neo-conservatism and instrumentalism (Griffith 2000). In this respect they hold in a contemporary guise the place formerly held, within the sociology of education, by progressivism and certain kinds of Marxist critiques. Although on theoretical grounds postmodernists reject both the essentialist model of the child held by progressive educationists and the economic determinism of Marxism, they continue to emphasize the experiential basis of knowledge associated with progressivism and the view of academic knowledge as elitist and ideological that is found in many Marxist critiques. Furthermore, postmodernists have developed the relativism that is immanent in both Marxist and phenomenological theories of knowledge into a point of principle. Although in ideological terms, postmodernism is critical of both neo-conservative and technical-instrumental views of the curriculum, we shall show that in relation to their assumptions about knowledge, it is the similarities of the three approaches that are more significant than their differences. Furthermore, for reasons we will develop in this chapter, the relativizing of knowledge claims associated with postmodernist critiques vitiates their ability to mount any effective advocacy of realistic curriculum alternatives.

The implication of this argument is that there is a potential fourth position (the one that we intend to develop) that brings knowledge itself back into the debate about the curriculum without denying its fundamentally social and historical basis. However, such a position requires that the sociology of education develops a theory of knowledge that, while accepting that knowledge is always a social and historical product, avoids the slide into relativism and perspectivism with which this insight is associated in postmodernist writings (e.g. Usher & Edwards 1994).

The issues then are threefold. First, we believe there are important developments in related academic fields (especially in the sociology and philosophy of science) that can be drawn on in developing the fourth position we refer to above. Second, although what counts as school knowledge will always be a contested issue, it is important that this should be seen as something more than simply a power play between contending social interests. Account needs to be taken of how knowledge is developed (and acquired) within particular epistemic communities or ‘cultures’ (Collins 2000; Hoskyns 1993; Knorr-Cetina 1999). Third, as we shall show, the outcomes of disputes about knowledge are not mere academic issues. They directly affect learning opportunities for pupils in schools and have wider consequences through the principles by which knowledge is distributed in society.

The Current Debate

Recent curriculum policy has been driven by two competing imperatives or ideologies – one largely covert but embedded in the leading educational institutions themselves and the other more overt and increasingly dominant in government rhetoric. The first is what we refer to as ‘neo-conservative traditionalism’. The idea of the curriculum as a given body of knowledge that it is the responsibility of the schools to transmit is as old as the institution of schooling itself. It is only articulated (e.g. Woodhead 2001) when it is felt that the traditional body of knowledge is being challenged. An example is in responses to proposals at various times in the last 20 years for the reform or even replacement of A levels which for neo-conservatives represent a ‘Gold Standard’ against which all other curricula must be evaluated. For them, real learning is still essentially the contemplative process that has its roots in the monastic tradition and the role of the curriculum and its attendant examinations is to engender respect for whatever are the canonical texts. It is therefore not just the specific texts (e.g. particular authors in the case of English) that are held to be of enduring value by neo-conservatives, but the relationship of deference to a given body of knowledge. In other words, what is important is the experience of submitting to the discipline of a subject and becoming the kind of person it is supposed to make you. In terms of the conventional knowledge-centred/child-centred and traditional/progressive dichotomies that have organized curriculum debates for so long, it must be stressed that neo-conservatism is not motivated primarily by epistemological concerns. Rather, it is inspired by the view that the traditional discipline of learning promotes proper respect for authority and protects traditional values (e.g. Scruton 1991).

The disregard by neo-conservatives of the importance of specific knowledge is associated with a peculiarly English form of anti-intellectualism (Wellens 1970) and a cult of amateurism and scepticism about expertise that still shapes the world view of the higher grades of the civil service and the top echelons of parts of industry and commerce. The endorsement of the idea of the ‘civilised generalist’ which is expressed in the English VIth Form curriculum that allows students to choose which collection of subjects to study has led to the inclusion of an increasing range of ‘modern’ subjects. English Literature, Modern (sic) Foreign Languages, geography and science were included in the nineteenth century and the social sciences later in the twentieth century (Young 1998). However, this diversification of the content of the VIth Form curriculum bears little relation to the transformations that have taken place in society or the actual development of knowledge itself. In the period of 50 years since A levels were launched, their basic structure has remained unchanged while whole new fields of knowledge have been created and the economy and society as a whole has changed out of all recognition. Furthermore, the numbers taking A levels have expanded tenfold as most jobs for 16 year olds disappeared by the 1980s and the numbers continuing as full-time students doubled.

Those who Raymond Williams (1961) called the ‘industrial trainers’, but who we refer to by the broader term ‘technical-instrumentalists’, have consistently challenged the neo-conservative view of education. For them the curriculum imperative is not educational in the traditional sense but supportive of what they see as the needs of the economy. Most recently this is expressed in terms of preparing for the global and more competitive knowledge-based economy of the future (DfEE 1998, 1999). From this perspective, education, the curriculum and even knowledge itself becomes a means to an end, not an end in itself. It is the curriculum’s role in making a particular form of society that is stressed. Only secondarily is it seen as a maker of persons and then only to the extent that they exhibit the qualities of trainability and flexibility that it is assumed will be needed in the future ‘knowledge society’.

What has changed, even as recently as in the last 10 years, is the scope of these instrumentalist views of the curriculum and knowledge. Prior to the 1970s they were largely confined to vocational education and training (hence Williams’ term ‘industrial trainers’); although they were also reflected in the assumption that the 20 per cent of each cohort who left school without any qualifications needed a more practically oriented, work-related curriculum. However, in the last decade, and particularly since the two reports by Lord Dearing on 16–19 qualifications (Dearing 1996) and higher education (NCIHE 1997), instrumentalism, under the guise of promoting the employability of all students, has been extended to the academic curriculum for 16–19 year olds and even to the apex of academic learning – the universities. All students are now encouraged to mix academic and vocational subjects (QCA 1999) and all subjects taught at university from Fine Art to Pure Mathematics have to incorporate key skills and show their students how to apply their knowledge (Bridges 2000). Subject specialists are increasingly expected to make explicit not only how their subject links with other subjects but also how it facilitates team work, communications or number skills. Technical-instrumentalism also imposes upon educational institutions a style of managerial regulation that is integrated with the broader apparatus of performance indicators, target setting and league tables (Beck 1999). While the formalities of academic freedom in deciding the university curriculum are retained, cash-starved institutions are unavoidably influenced by the incentives of funds linked to such government objectives as widening participation and promoting employability.

The tension between the two models has influenced the development of the curriculum for more than a century. However, it is since the early 1990s that technical-instrumentalism has provided the dominant rhetoric for change as well as contributing substantive elements of reform. Both models operate diagnostically by identifying deficiencies in existing educational arrangements. The traditionalists assert that the substantial expansion of post-compulsory education has only been possible by allowing the standards of excellence that were established in the past (the ‘golden age’) to fall. In contrast, the modernizers claim that the uneasy compromise between pressures to expand participation and maintain standards has resulted in a curriculum that fails to fulfil the skill and knowledge demands of the emerging economy. In both models, a view of the curriculum is related to a particular historical narrative of social change (Moore 2000).

With governments unable to resolve the tension between these two imperatives, it is not surprising that curriculum policy and its implementation is at best confused. Some schools and colleges are making a heroic effort to articulate a vision of a broader curriculum of the future while others adapt as best they can to the vagaries of student choice and the idiosyncrasies of HE admission tutors. Nor is it surprising that new divisions are emerging. In the most successful institutions students are encouraged to take four or even five subjects, at least in the first year of their post 16 studies, and degree programmes are being enhanced in leading universities. In contrast, students in less-privileged institutions tend to face the new forms of generic and, some would say, vacuous vocationalism.

Neither the neo-conservative nor the instrumentalist views have gone unchallenged by social theorists. However, our argument is that in failing to provide a way of discussing what must be central to any serious curriculum debate – the question of knowledge – the critiques from social theory fall into the same trap as the views they oppose. This is not as straightforward a point as it sounds as the critiques, increasingly from a postmodernist perspective, present themselves as treating the question of knowledge as central. They focus largely on the academic curriculum and claim that it relies on essentially arbitrary assumptions about knowledge and culture generally (Hartley 1997). It follows, from their perspective, that in asserting the givenness of what they claim to have demonstrated is arbitrary, the curriculum is responsible for the perpetuation of social inequalities.

Starting from the assumption that all knowledge is embedded in the interests of particular groups of knowers (see Maton 2000 and chapter 3, this volume), postmodernist critiques appear to provide powerful support for the cultural demands of subordinate groups, whether these are ethnic, gender or (though increasingly less frequently) social class based. However, by arguing that knowledge is inseparable from how it is constructed, they cannot avoid the conclusion that all knowledge, whether based on professional expertise, research or the experience of particular groups, is of equal value. It follows that, when the standpoint and interests of those producing the knowledge have been identified, all that needs to be said has, in essence, been said. Debates between postmodernists and those they critique become little more than arguments about whose experience should underpin the curriculum and the purpose of social theory becomes the critical deconstruction of the dominant forms of knowledge associated with subjects and disciplines. If all standards and criteria are reducible to perspectives and standpoints, no grounds can be offered for teaching any one thing rather than any other (or, ultimately, for teaching anything at all!). It is not surprising that such theories, whatever their appeal to intellectuals, have made no contribution to curriculum policy. Worse, they have effectively marginalized the role of sociology in providing a theory for how we might think about knowledge in a ‘knowledge society’ and what the curriculum implications of such a theory might be.

Postmodernist ideas about knowledge have not only been the basis of critiques of traditionalist views of the curriculum, they have also been used to challenge the prevailing instrumentalism of current government policy and its rhetoric of performativity (Usher & Edwards 1994). However, because they have no theory of knowledge as such, they can do little more than expose the way that curriculum policies always mask power relations. Further, by depending on an irreducible notion of experience ultimately removed from any social context, they neglect the uneven distribution of the experiences that learners need if they are to acquire and make use of curriculum knowledge.

The Problems with Postmodernist Critiques of Knowledge

Why do postmodernist accounts of knowledge and the curriculum neglect the very problem that they set out to address? One reason is that in their critique of neo-conservatism and instrumentalism, they polarize the alternatives as if each position they critique did not itself have within it a kernel of truth. The neo-conservative position may be flawed but it is not false. It reminds us that (a) education needs to be seen as an end in itself and not just as a means to an end (the instrumentalist position), and that (b) tradition, though capable of preserving vested interests, is also crucial in ensuring the maintenance and development of standards of learning in schools as well as being a condition for innovation and creating new knowledge. More generally, neo-conservatives remind us that the curriculum must, in Mathew Arnold’s words, strive to ‘make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere’ (1960, p. 70).

There are good reasons why we still want people to read Jane Austen’s novels that are not weakened by the narrow community that she wrote about. Her novels are situated in time and context, but they are also timeless in the issues that they explore. One can make a slightly different kind of argument for keeping Newton’s laws of motion and Mendeleev’s Periodic Table on science syllabuses; both are examples of knowledge that remains powerful and transcends its origins in a particular social context. The problem with the neo-conservative position is that, like Arnold, it treats ‘the best’ as given and not the outcome, at any time, of wider social changes as well as internal debates within disciplines. Because neo-conservatives play down the social and historical nature of knowledge, they see no need for a theory about what should (and should not) be in the curriculum, whether it is particular novels or new subjects. For them the canon of English literature and the traditional school subjects are, self-evidently, just there; they define what a curriculum is. The result is that actual curriculum changes are invariably ad hoc and pragmatic.

In opposition to neo-conservatism, instrumentalism reminds us that the curriculum has always been, albeit selectively, related to the economic needs of the country and the future employability of students, despite claims to the contrary by liberal educators. It also reminds us that schools and colleges are never as insulated from the rest of society as they are portrayed in the subject-based curriculum. The issue which instrumentalism does not address is the conditions that are necessary if knowledge is to be produced or acquired and why economic realities can never be the only criteria for the curriculum. In contrast, social theories of knowledge, whether humanist, Marxist, or more recently postmodernist, all make explicit the social and historical character of knowledge and that knowledge is always, at least in part, ‘some people’s knowledge’. However, in making such features of knowledge explicit, these theories all too easily end up in claiming that knowledge is only some people’s knowledge – no more and no less.

The second problem with postmodernist theories is that they imply that social theories of knowledge inevitably lead to relativism and the denial of any possibility that knowledge can be objective. Arguments about relativism have dominated and distorted debates about knowledge in the sociology of education since the 1970s (chapter 3) in ways that have seriously impeded the development of a theory that might address the many urgent curriculum issues. Most social theories of knowledge have remained at too high a level of abstraction to have any clear curriculum implications and if not, as in the case of some forms of Marxism and feminism, they have made unsupportable claims about the links between knowledge and particular social interests. In this chapter we shall propose a social realist view of knowledge derived from Durkheim (1967) and developed more recently by Collins (2000) and Alexander (1995). In contrast to postmodernist theories these writers argue that it is the social nature of knowledge that in part provides the grounds for its objectivity and its claims to truth. In the final section of the chapter we shall ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: A Coalition of Minds
• Chapter 1: Reconceptualizing Knowledge and the Curriculum in the Sociology of Education
• Chapter 2: Analysing Knowledge Claims and Practices: Languages of Legitimation
• Chapter 3: ‘Voice Discourse’ and the Problem of Knowledge and Identity
• Chapter 4: Promoting Official Pedagogic Identities: The Sacred and the Profane
• Chapter 5: Competency-Based Training, Powerful Knowledge and the Working Class
• Chapter 6: Knowledge and Truth in the Sociology of Education
• Chapter 7: Knowledge Structures and the Canon: A Preference for Judgements
• Chapter 8: Canons and Progress in the Arts and Humanities: Knowers and Gazes
• Acknowledgements
• References
• Index
• eCopyright