This book is not about, but the doing of, curriculum theory—the practice of theory, as it were. That means it is not a discourse about a discourse. Rather it is a direct engagement with those very elements—reason (logos) , nonreason (mythos) , becoming, dissipation, violence, uncertainty, insecurity, transcendence , love , and death—the varying combinations and effects of which produce, at the phenomenological level, the horizon of the thing we call curriculum. The practice of theory resides in the ontological grasp of knowledge itself, its materiality, and not in its mere formal acquisition. The present work lies at the complex and dynamic intersection of several disciplinary domains such as philosophy, psychology , political theory, and pedagogy . The discussion concerns a critical consideration of the relationship between knowledge and knower from these multiple perspectives, implicitly and explicitly raising the questions: What might be the conditions of possibility for a living curriculum in which Eros and intellect (or reason and intuition) are not separated? Is it conceivable to escape ideology that keeps curriculum bound to impoverished categories? What are the ingredients of an educational culture that is able to grasp curriculum as an expanding interpersonal movement? In what way does the teacher-learner ensemble become creatively constituted beyond obstructive dualities? How can we reinvent meaning in curriculum without totalization? Which indigenous understandings can be recovered in order to reinvent curriculum with greater relevance for diverse and peripheral peoples? How can young people be helped toward openness and life possibility despite the contingencies and fragmentation of modern life?
The ultimate purpose of any inquiry of this nature is to provide the educator-educated-curriculum ensemble the widest possible means of orienting itself when realizing and fulfilling the existential potential of its situation. The underlying theoretical stance of the present book may be regarded to be along the lines of existential phenomenology . The latter, through its insistence on inter-experiential space as the true unit of social experience , avoids reference to human reality either in terms of an enclosed thinking substance pondering subjectively or a perceiving subject facing an objective world. Thus, the approach attempts to understand educational experience and curriculum from beyond the usual binaries such as experiencer/experience and teacher/taught, instead focusing on the inter-experiential spaces that phenomenologically open up before us. The principal argument concerns the urgent need to go beyond the underlying perceptual limitations of the conventional modes in which curriculum is considered, presented, and practiced. But much more, it progressively leads us to consider experience in a new light that can creatively challenge the deleterious effects of “common-sense” thinking on the categories such as the teacher and the student. A different unit of analysis progressively presses upon us that which may be called the pedagogic situation.
In using the word curriculum, I do not mean to limit the discussion to any specific curriculum such as middle school curriculum or undergraduate curriculum or something else. Rather, I refer to the fundamental assumptions that underlie our ways of thinking about knowledge and knower in modern education that stretch beyond any specific curriculum to the very ways in which we simultaneously become the subjects and objects of curriculum while maintaining claims to a dubious autonomy. My concern is to expose the stale limits of the existing ways of considering the knowledge-knower relationship and suggest ways of breaking out of the current impasse onto a more creative and meaningful plane. Thus, our discussion in the following pages may be thought of as a meta-curricular activity that deconstructs conventional categories. The meta-curricular effort goes beyond epistemology to seek a dialectical understanding of the ontology that lies behind the epistemic cultures .
What calls for setting up a dialectic between the epistemic and the ontological? First, if pushed far enough, epistemological questions turn into ontological ones and vice versa. Symbolic knowledge must yield to materiality as soon as we consider the matrix in which cognition arises, and the cognitive matrix in turn might be seen as layered systems of communication or arrangements of signals (sensations). And, second, if there is an overarching belief in the book, it is that a change in the social imaginary—in this case, meta-curricular imagination—also brings with it a fresh burst of positive energy. In other words, new possibilities and visions are accompanied by heightened levels of phenomenological intensity. The great poet and educator, Rabindranath Tagore observes:
To place an authentic demand on the soul is one of the important things curriculum can and must do; besides, the being and doing of curriculum must produce the heightened sensibility for a creative life. But the path to the ontological reconstitution of being and action is an arduous one requiring work on multiple fronts. This book is a mere pointer in that direction and a caution that there is (or ought to be) much more to curriculum than the cognitive aspect. Further, the limits of the known must always be kept in view, and employed to put knowledge in the correct perspective.When the arena of hope and expectation [Bengali ‘Asha’] widens, human strengths also expand correspondingly. When strength detects a path, its footsteps become surer. The greatest thing any society can give its members is a durable sense of hope and possibility. It is not that each member immediately enjoys the full extent of that promise. But the sense of possibility creates conditions in which each one, consciously or unconsciously, is stretched to his fullest potential … The baby bird does not need a bachelor’s degree in order to fly. It flies because it is shown the possibility of flying. It sees all the members of its group flying and knows that it must fly too. It never entertains a doubt about the possibility of flying.1
Across the world, educational institutions, in particular, schools, have systematically worked toward their own obsolescence by failing to show existential possibilities beyond a narrow cognitive spectrum. Today, in many schools and colleges across various societies, we face a phalanx of indifferent students whose primary source of learning about themselves and the world is not the school or the formal curriculum. They put up with school simply because it still holds sway in the public imaginary and controls institutionalized norms of credentialing . Given a choice, many would not turn up. The curriculum is, at best, tolerated, at worst, hated. All this makes for a peculiarly unhappy state of affairs, an unhappiness that has become institutionalized. But learned unhappiness is dangerous; it leads to widening circles of disaffection and malady. If there is one single overriding reason for cynicism, it is that the curriculum in general does not seem to be the efficient cause of anything. Everything in our lives seems to be controlled and regulated from afar, by powers that are invisible to us and that seem to pay scant attention to us. Even if young people are not directly conscious of this, they are aware of it at some level. Apart from the distant possibility of a career with which the curriculum seems to be instrumentally linked, formal education essentially appears inert in the actual growth—intellectual, emotional, moral—of most young adults. In other words, school knowledge seldom enlightens life experience , and life experience even less enters school learning. All of this is regularly conceded in breathless discourses about school failure and curriculum reform. However, little seems to change on the ground, and the goal of relevance seems to be endlessly receding before us. What often takes the place of action is greater technologization, including putting computers and fancy equipment in the classroom.
But can technology be the answer to the problems plaguing curriculum and schooling? My answer to that question is that it would be incredibly naïve to believe it can. Technology is after all a partial exteriorization of the brain’s own internal circuitry, stamped and recovered in available matter; when one thinks about it, what else could it possibly be? Piaget’s idea was that the evolution of mathematics and physics is forever reaching toward the deepest structures of the mind-brain; that is to say, complex theories about the macrocosm were being reflexively shaped out of the ontological nature of the microcosm itself, and were not independent theories after all. The same thing can be said about technology which is after all the applied part. The brain can only recuperate itself in various ways. But the danger is in imagining it (technology) to be something independent of us, capable of bringing us secular salvation. The delinking of microcosm from macrocosm leads to dangerous forms of exploitative behavior as well as to the deadening of knowledge itself which has great curricular and educational consequences. Robbed of the continuous living connection to phenomenological life, knowledge appears as pedantry. It is proposed here that the present predicament in education and the steady loss of relevance are partly owed to our inability to understand the living significance of knowledge which lies in its formative connection to “being-in-the-world” that goes beyond the conventional oppositions and impoverished perceptions guiding education today.
Thus, freeing of the imagination within the curriculum, keeping multiple aspects—thought , perception , intuition , sensation, and corpus—in organic rhythm is the task before us now. The first step is to uncover the hitherto unnoticed potential in knowledge itself to display its inner significance, the ontological part that remains obscured and ignored in the formal curriculum . The exploitable part of knowledge and its emphasis are quite evident. What is important to take into account is the in-side of knowledge that makes it more than mere representation—its directly constitutive connection to the subject . And since curriculum engages only the known, it is this aspect that urgently needs to be examined and opened up. Without a deeper angle to knowing and the knower , knowledge becomes a dead weight to the spirit. I argue that some of the most intriguing and generative aspects of knowledge are thus left out of the curriculum, including the nature of the limits of the known. In other words, the liminal boundaries of knowledge, its uncertainties, and its reflective understanding of itself are left out of the discu...