Knowledge and the curriculum

Knowledge and the curriculum

In the early 1970s in the UK, the school curriculum was strongly infl uenced by the work of the philosophers Peters and Hurst. They put forward a view of subject disciplines based upon different ‘forms of knowledge’ (Peters 1966) each with their own ‘tests for truth’ (Hirst 1974). By the mid-1980s the school curriculum was shifting towards a more integrated approach to knowledge, with an emphasis upon grouping subjects to prevent both fragmentation of knowledge and unnecessary overlap in teaching between subjects. At a time when there was no National Curriculum, secondary school teachers were closely involved in developing the new examination curricula that emerged as part of both of these ‘movements’. The ‘tests for truth’ for the social sciences became embedded in the new Schools Council History course for 14–16 year olds which included the analysis of original documents, and the recognition that evidence was differentially reliable, depending on its sources, and needed to be interpreted before it was used as the basis for decisions. Stenhouse’s Humanities Curriculum involved adolescents in debating sensitive moral issues under

Methodological issues 149 the guidance of a teacher acting as ‘neutral chairman’ ( sic) in order to develop moral

understanding and a sense of individual worth and responsibility. These curricula were derived from the philosophy of knowledge, but they also constituted an explicit attempt to design curricula that would prepare young people for the challenges of their future lives, both at home and at work. They were conceptually-based curricula that were intended to stimulate thinking. By contrast, the current National Curriculum is specifi ed in terms of traditional subject knowledge. It involves the transmission of

a very large quantity of facts and reifi ed concepts within each separate subject area. Since it was largely drawn up by non-specialists selected by government ministers, it draws heavily on the traditional curriculum of the public schools and post-war grammar schools and at the time of its introduction constituted a conservative backlash from the innovative curricula developed in the educational reforms of the 1970s and 1980s. A functionalist, market-led ideology was then added on to this academic foundation. Schostak, in referring to this, notes:

It is no accident that the school effi ciency ‘movement’ came to dominate political discourses of schooling in the 1990s, since the political defi nition of mainstream schooling is all about the engineering of children as raw materials to fi t the needs of economic and administrative powers. Its language is one of benchmarking, standards, standardization, comparisons with competitors and engineering children in ways similar to those for the engineering of aircraft.

(Schostak 2000, pp. ???) Young (1998) sees the current school curriculum as an example of socially

organized knowledge (see the discussion of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme earlier in this paper). He clarifi es this process. Knowledge is differentiated and accorded higher or lower status as a result of ‘the power certain groups have to restrict access to certain kinds of knowledge, the opportunity for those who have access to knowledge to legitimize its status and the beliefs they have about the relations between knowledge and society’. He goes on, ‘the high value of some knowledge is institutionalized by the creation of schools, colleges and universities to transmit it as the curriculum and to produce it as research’. Young sees the current school curriculum which has resulted from this interplay of powerful interest groups, as inappropriate to today’s needs and predicts transformation to a less specialised, more integrated, curriculum in the future: ‘(My) general hypothesis … is of a shift from “curricula of the past”, which were insulated, narrowly specialised and highly stratifi ed to “curricula of the future”, which I predict will need to be connective, broader and with low degrees of stratifi cation’ (Young 1998, p. 15).