Knowledge & the curriculum

Kelly, A. V. (2004). The curriculum theory and practice (5th Ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Chapter 2. Knowledge and the Curriculum

Major planning considerations - why analyze the status of human knowledge

• What is to be learned
• How that knowledge relates to other curriculum planning aspects (purposes, reasons)
  e.g., Tyler (1949): "What educational experiences can be provided that are likely to attain these purposes?"
• How we conceptualizing the curriculum (the failure to recognize the problematic nature of human knowledge)
• (Recognizing the problematic nature of human knowledge) in making decisions about the content of the curriculum we're dealing in ideologies rather than in eternal truths

The problematic nature of human knowledge

• Absolutism
  
  • two main theories: rationalist views (intellect over human faculties; truth achieved by the mind) vs empiricist views (truth based on evidence, senses)
  • Rationalist epistemology - the fallibility of the senses vs the infallibility of the intellect (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel): evidence of senses is misleading; the rational mind can achieve truth); knowledge as essentially independent of the observations of our senses (God-given, 'out-there', timeless, objective, unrelated to societies, cultures or human beings);
  • Its attraction for the politicians: the universal above the particular; the collective above the individual
  • Its attraction for some educational theorists: epistemological belief, e.g., Richard Peter's "transcendental" argument (1966) for the intrinsic value of certain kinds of human activity
    
• Empiricism
  
  • John Locke, Founder of the empiricist movement: knowledge acquired through experience
  • John Dewey, promoting pragmatist movement: knowledge as hypothetical and subject to constant change, modification and evolution; assist children to develop their own knowledge instead of imposing what is knowledge for us upon them (knowledge is personal and subjective).
  • However, Dewey believed in scientific knowledge, where hypotheses are framed and modified according to publicly agreed criteria; Its continuing evolution requires the kind of intellectual freedom which only a truly democratic political context can provide
    
• Existentialism
  
  • a concern to resist the submerging of the individual into some kind of whole; every human being must be defined as a unique individual and accept full responsibility for his/her own 'essence', what he/she is and becomes.
• The 'knowledge explosion' of the twentieth century
  
  • A shift from verification to falsification (theories are regarded as having validity until they are shown to be false or inadequate)
  • Such a rejection of "modernism" may see the beginning of postmodernism
    
• 'New directions in the sociology of education'
  
  • The absolutist view of knowledge was challenged from two sources
    
    • At the level of curriculum practice, the unsuitability and the consequential alienating inequalities
    • At the level of educational practice (1970s), reconceptualization
  • Questions of the nature of are sociological rather than philosophical and are concerned with the social relations through which knowledge develops rather than aspects or characteristics of the knowledge itself
  • Most of school subjects are in fact the creations of interest groups whose prime concern has been with maintaining and extending their own status
  • Socially constructed knowledge is ideology and what is imposed through a politically controlled education system is the ideology of the dominant, controlling group
• The teaching of religion and the establishment of 'faith schools'
  
  • When education becomes religious knowledge/instruction, it loses its critical dimension and becomes the imposition of the religious values of those in control on the impressionable young people
  • Result: culturally divisive and elitist
  • The politics of knowledge
• Postmodernism
  
  • a rejection of all 'totalizing theories', an 'incredulity towards metanarratives', 'an interrogation of Western discourse's desire for certainty and absolutes', a complex, chaotic, finite vision of the universe
  • It places everything in a cauldron of uncertainty and insists that that is where everything must stay (with continuing scepticism)
  • Implications: curriculum planning and organization are consequently wide-ranging, the foundation should be elsewhere than knowledge-content, and knowledge is ideology so that all approaches to the school curriculum are ideological
  • it makes an explicit link between knowledge and power, and sees power as being exercised through the distribution of knowledge and the manipulation of the discourses through which that knowledge, those 'totalizing theories' are expressed, 'the bureaucratic imposition of official values'.
  • we live in a world in which there is no 'knowledge', no 'ultimate truth', in which all perception is subjective, so that we are the products of the discourse, the ideologies, we are exposed to (Kelly, 1995, p. 71).

The politics of knowledge (Knowledge debate has shifted from being a philosophical concern to a social construct and on to the political concerns)

• Totalitarianism - open and concealed
  
  • An absolutist epistemology leads to totalitarian forms of government (no individual freedom)
  • Plato (first advocate of the absolutist epistemology): ideal state is not a democracy, it is a meritocracy; not a society of equals, it is hierarchically structured with a selective education system that focuses on the needs of the state rather than on individuals; ultimate goal - social control and political harmony
  • Consequences of an absolutist epistemology: social and educational inequalities, elitism, the subservience of the individual to the collective, loss of individual freedom (proponents: Plato, Kant, Hegel, Marx - 'the enemies of the open society'; Nazi, communist regimes)
  • It fails to recognize the problematic nature of human knowledge
• Resistance to change
  
  • John Dewey: reject Hegelian absolutism and embrace a pragmatist view of knowledge; evolution of knowledge requires the kind of free and open social and political context which only democracy can provide; democracy is a form of government open to continuous change
  • American schooling operates to reinforce certain basic aspects of the American political, economic and moral structure
  • Paulo Freire (1972): the pedagogy of the oppressed; Ivan Illich (1971): the institutionalization of values
• Ideological dominance (distribution of power and the principles of social control)
• It is a matter of one dominant group within society imposing its ideology on society as a whole and thus achieving political control at the expense of the freedom of others
• It is the group within society which holds power, the dominant ideology, which controls the distribution of knowledge within a society and determines what kinds of knowledge will be made available
• The legitimation of discourse
  
  • The use of sanctions: e.g., financial sanctions
  • Threatening school closures, the firing of teachers, and the public humiliation of schools
  • Testing of pupils in order to produce educationally meaningless 'league-tables'
  • Discourse is seen as power and the legitimation of discourse as the exercise of that power (Postmodernism claims that the totalizing theories and thus the discourses in which they are expressed are not 'eternal truth' but ideologies, then our thinking is being controlled by ideological discourse which is both intellectually and politically highly suspect)
  • The language of education has been manipulated to ensure that the language we use carries the values we are intended to embrace. Therefore, we need to analyze critically the language in which official pronouncements are made and the ways in which the language we are encouraged to use
    
• The manipulation of language
  
  • Blurring logical distinctions between assertions of different kinds
    
    • we are encouraged to regard what officialdom says out of political expediency as carrying more weight than the evidence of painstakingly research; the context of the teacher's work is political rather than educational, totalitarian rather than democratic
  • The deliberate failure to acknowledge the problematic nature of the concepts used in making these pronouncements
    
    • e.g., terms like standards, breath, balance, continuity, progression, are used in documents governing practice, with no discussion invited
      
  • Among the terms used we will find many which have clearly been selected because they have warm, happy, friendly connotations
    
    • analyzed concepts like entitlement, relevance, coherence, development hijacked from theories to be misused in order to mislead or deflect criticism
      
  • Use of metaphor (esp. commercial/industrial)
    
    • e.g. the imposition of the commercial and industrial metaphor on the education system - school as factories that delivers products and requires quality-control mechanisms, increased productivity, economic costing, clients, managers, targets...
    • The language of educational purpose has undergone a sea-shift of transformation into business terminology and the going discourse of the corporate culture
    • Values & attitudes: competition, productivity, instrumentalism, value for money; loss of caring, human development, intrinsic value, enrichment
      
  • This kind of censorship has become a form of self-censorship
    
    • the above metaphor and values have been completely absorbed by the teaching profession
    • Suffocated and brainwashed
    • If not critical reflection, education will be led by the nose by those whose agenda is the political or personal rather than educational
      

Responses to the problem of the politics of knowledge

• Ivan Illich: the only solution is to close the schools, to 'deschool' society
• Postmodernism suggests we accept the problematic nature of human knowledge and recognize the dangers of all totalizing theories but respond to this by embracing the need for openness and constant change
  
  • All knowledge is contextual, education is a process whose central concern is to assist the young to develop their knowledge within the public context
  • education must be open to, and accepting of, different world views and cultures without imposition of any one of these (public doesn't mean universal)
  • Awareness of the political manipulation is to be on the way to being armed against it; Empowerment of the individual