Curriculum conspiracy theory

Curriculum conspiracy theory

It would be an oversight, I think, to end this discussion of curriculum definitions, rationales and models without giving some attention to the suggestion made by some theorists that formalised curriculum rationales – especially those presented within the ‘official recontextualising field’ of central policy – are actually faux rationales, expressed in terms that are likely to elicit broad acceptance and compliance, that serve to mask rather less acceptable underpinning or (to anticipate discussions to be had in Chapter 8 ) ‘hidden’ rationales. I am referring to such an approach as ‘conspiracy theory’ not to demean or to mock it (far from it), but simply because the term conspiracy includes within it the kinds of deliberation, secrecy and duplicitousness that its proponents claim, not without good cause, to be at the heart of much public education policy.

Curriculum conspiracy theory begins with one of the key questions or abiding issues we have already considered (and will return to in Chapter 7 ): If curriculum selections are made by certain groups of people, who are these people? Are they really able or willing to adopt scientific, ‘objective’ methods in arriving at their selections? And if they are not, then what exactly are their ‘vested interests’ and what exactly are their intentions? To anticipate some of the ‘knowledge questions’ to be explored in Chapter 4 , if we take the view that all knowledge is intrinsically worthwhile, who decides what knowledge is more important than other knowledge, and on what basis?

For some curriculum commentators, the answer is clear. The ‘interests’ are not those of students – at least, not of all students – but rather of a narrow range of students and their families and of an equally narrow segment of a wider, hierarchised society. In short,

a prime function of curriculum is to preserve a social status quo that protects the interests of a ruling élite and teaches others to remember – and, crucially, to accept as both just and natural – their place. Harris argues, for example:

Education in a class society is a political act having as its basis the protection of the interests of the ruling class. It is a mechanism…for securing the continuation of the existing social relationships, and for reinforcing the attitudes and beliefs that will help ensure that those social relationships will continue to be accepted. Education…is an ideological force of tremendous import…Education is the manipulation of consciousness…and it functions largely without serious opposition of any sort.

(Harris 1979: 140–1) This view of public education and school curricula – that the hunt for and assertion of

universal, self-justifying curriculum objectives and curriculum content is a rhetorical smoke-screen masking an essentially political and ideological set of decisions – suggests that politicians, rather than meaning well but sometimes getting things wrong (or even sometimes getting things wrong because they do not listen attentively or seriously enough to experts in the field) may actually know exactly what they are doing: in short, they are putting into practice and into law what the most privileged members of society, those who benefit most from the prevailing socio-economic system, want them to. As Riley (2011) tactfully puts it, reminding us again of the contested and contestable nature of curriculum and indeed of its vital importance in preserving or challenging or overturning

What is it? What’s it for? 61 social and economic inequality: ‘Public, or government supported schools, since the

Enlightenment, first and foremost reflect government aims and goals. They also reflect special interests and personal agendas of various social groups.’ (Riley in Kysilka 2011a: xi, emphasis added).

Most famously, perhaps, the American sociologists Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) have argued that for all its talk of the intrinsic value of education, of equity and empowerment, public education primarily exists for purely functional, organisational and convenience reasons, to do with social and economic control: keeping young people occupied and off the streets; allowing parents to go to work rather than having to stay at home to care for children; drip-feeding the workforce into employment (or unemployment) in a highly managed and regulated way; reproducing the knowledge and basic skills required of the national economy; and validating, promoting and protecting the interests of some social groups at the expense of others (see also Illich 1973, Ernest 1998, Apple 2004, and Barnes 1986: 85 – who links such a project not only to curriculum content but to publicly favoured pedagogies aimed to ‘control’, ‘select’ and ‘contain’ the working population).

American public schools of 40 or so years ago, Bowles and Gintis argued (though the same charge might be levelled today both at American and at many other national school systems), were essentially nurseries that both mirrored and prepared young people for life in an essentially unaltering, privileging and de-privileging society. They embodied and comprised: ‘a bureaucratic order, with hierarchical authority, rule orientation, stratification by “ability” as well as by age, role differentiation by sex…and a system of external incentives (marks, promises of promotion, and threat of failure) much like pay and status in the field of work’ (Bowles and Gintis 1972: 87).

Four years later, in an even more vigorous attack on the system, these same critics were to paint a picture of public schooling which could hardly be more different than that most commonly espoused in the rhetoric of much global education policy of today which talks of inclusion, of giving all young people a helping hand up the social ladder, and of learning to take an active part in democracy. American schools in the 1970s, Bowles and Gintis now suggested, ‘are destined to legitimate inequality, limit personal development to forms compatible with submission to arbitrary authority, and aid in the process whereby youth are resigned to their fate’ (Bowles and Gintis 1976: 266). Bowles and Gintis are by no means the only critics to have suggested that beneath the socially just rhetoric of much education and curriculum policy lies a more devious and far more sinister purpose – a kind of ‘hidden curriculum’ in the ‘ORF’ of public policy we might say, to mirror that which other critics have identified in the ‘PRF’ of school and classroom practice. Harris (1979) has already been cited, while more recently, Apple has argued that schools and school curricula in the USA tend to be organised to reproduce an essentially compliant, obedient, ‘quiescent’ workforce (Apple 1995), while the British commentator, Alistair Ross has invited us to consider the following summarised account of Ivan Illich’s (1973) take on the form and functions of formal education:

62 Understanding the School Curriculum Far from having the function of developing a democratic and participatory society,

Illich argued that the main tasks of the school were in reality four-fold: they provided custodial care for children, freeing parents’ time; they effectively distributed pupils into occupational roles; they transmitted the dominant value system; and they taught pupils to acquire socially approved knowledge and skills.

(Ross 2000: 85) To anticipate again a discussion to be had in Chapter 7 , Ross’ own analysis, like Apple’s

and Bernstein’s, takes more account than Bowles and Gintis’ of the power of teacher and student agency, and their capacity to help bring about changes in schools and schooling that might have a more global change-effect in relation to the wider social system. With an eye to how, in many societies, frequent, high-stakes testing of students shifts curriculum policy away from content that is essentially useful or valuable toward

a more instrumental, divisive functionality, Ross does, however, make the point that:

a schooling system which credentializes a particular proportion of the population roughly equivalent to the needs of the division of labour (and de-credentializes the rest) is an almost natural way of maintaining the economic and cultural imbalance on which these societies are built.

(ibid.: 83) While suggestions such as those of Bowles and Gintis and of Ivan Illich may be easily

dismissed (and often are) as ‘extreme’ or (with a somewhat different inflection from previous usage) ‘paranoid’, we might argue that they are able to claim legitimacy through reference to some still-available policy statements within the official recontextualising field dating back to a time before politicians had discovered equity and social justice, or at least the need to swear allegiance to some forms of them. In his book On Being A Teacher, the American teacher-writer Jonathan Kozol quotes some famous compatriots’ published views on the meaning of public education and its rationale at the point of its introduction in the USA as a universal entitlement. Thus, Horace Mann, in a report to the Massachusetts Board of Education in 1844, had publicly (and without shame or fear of comeback) observed:

in regard to those who possess the largest shares…of worldly goods, could there, in your opinion, be any policy so vigilant and effective, for protection of all the rights of person, property and character, as such a…system of common schools could be made to impart[?] …Would not the payment of a sufficient tax to make such education and training universal, be the cheapest means of self-protection and insurance?’

(cited in Kozol 1993: 5–6) While the ex-president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, is quoted as saying: ‘We

want one class of people to have a liberal education, and we want one class of persons, a very much larger class of persons, of necessity, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit into specific manual tasks’ (cited in Kozol ibid.: 6. For similar pronouncements by English politicians, see Moore 2012, Chapter 2 ).

What is it? What’s it for? 63 Readers will make up their own minds as to whether things have moved on in the

intervening period, or whether current government rhetorics of inclusion, equity and empowerment merely act as a friendly-face behind which lurks the same conservatising rationale. Supporters of curriculum conspiracy theory might well draw strength for their argument from the recent ubiquitous rise of formal national curricula, which may be understood either in terms of ‘entitlement’ or as a means of exercising control to ensure

a continuation of an inequitable status quo.