School Knowledge for the Masses

World Models and National Primary Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century

John Meyer, David Kamens, Aaron Benavot

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351846097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1992, this book presents unique quantitative data on the content coverage of primary education in a large number of countries since 1920. It demonstrates that these curricular outlines tend to be surprisingly similar across very disparate countries, and suggests the world processes that produced this result.

Specifically, the study shows that the contemporary primary curriculum dates from changes in the late nineteenth century; that there has been a general shift towards a 'social studies' subject; that instruction in mathematics and sciences has tended to expand; that there have been substantial increases in foreign language instruction (and changes in the languages taught); and that instruction in the arts and physical education come to the standard world education model much later than other subjects.

This work will be of particular interest to those studying primary curriculum, international education and the sociology of education.

Chapter 1

Introduction

John W. Meyer

The formal schooling of young citizens is now an ubiquitous feature of the world community of nations. In quantitative terms, enrollments in mass education systems have expanded enormously in recent decades, so that upwards of 90 per cent of the world’s children are enrolled in primary or post-primary schools for some part of their lives. By and large, national school systems are compulsory, of substantial duration, and defined and prescribed by central governmental authorities. Mass schooling, almost everywhere, is clearly intended to be the dominant means of the intergenerational transmission of culture.

It becomes of great interest, then, to inquire into the nature of the culture being transmitted. If the rise of huge new systems of mass education amounts to considerable change in cultural content, as seems obvious, tracking the official content of schooling is an important way to describe the main elements of what are really emergent mass cultures of the world. There has been attention to some aspects of mass culture worldwide—television programs like Dallas, rock music for the young or the consumption of objects like jeans and cola. We need to give comparable attention to national educational systems that provide central cultural materials for such a large proportion of the world’s children.

The findings and arguments in this book develop a general perspective that adds a dimension to much social scientific thinking about such issues. Most analyses of educational systems and their curricular content stress the causal role of specific national (or local) needs and interests as determinants: approved school subjects are thought to reflect particular social histories, the requirements and problems they pose, and the entrenched powers and interests they embody. These perspectives have added much useful research to the field.

In this volume, we add to the research tradition the idea that mass education and the curricula of mass schooling (particularly primary schooling) are a distinctive project or vision. The overall structure of this vision—organized around great conceptions of the nation-state as moving toward progress and justice—is entrenched on a worldwide basis. Both the nation-state model, and the particular professions that define and justify the nature and content of mass education within this model, have had worldwide hegemony throughout the modern period.

Thus we add, to ideas that mass education and its curricula reflect particular local and national interests and requirements, the additional argument that they reflect worldwide forces too. And we add the further argument that the local interests and requirements pursuing and defining mass education tend to be filtered through such wider world cultural forces. As a consequence, the general outlines of mass education and its curriculum often show surprising degrees of homogeneity around the world.

Our data focus on the general curricular outlines obtaining in national systems of mass education—mainly at the primary level—throughout this century. And in such general outlines, we often find much more homogeneity and standardization among the curricula prescribed by nation-states than might have been expected in terms of other lines of theorizing standing alone. Because the labels, at least, of mass curricula are so closely tied to great and standardized worldwide visions of social and educational progress, they tend to be patterned in quite consistent ways around the world. The ‘functional theories’ that are employed in so much social science research (including prominently their critical versions) turn out in this instance to be powerful and homogenizing as ideologies and policies. Ironically, for this reason they are less applicable as technical analyses than might have been supposed.

The studies in this book bring very new types of information about the general educational topics emphasized around the world. Our objective is not simply to develop an innovative theoretical account, but to present descriptive information relevant to a variety of basic educational issues and theoretically grounded questions. Since so little comparative information on national school curricula exists in the literature, basic descriptive evidence is, in this context, useful.

What types of basic issues are explored in this book? Consider the following examples: How common is it, in the world’s primary education systems, to give predominant emphasis to national, as opposed to local or to worldwide languages? Has the inclination to do so increased in recent decades, and is it lowering with an ‘end of nationalism’ and the Cold War? Similarly, how widespread are the curricular categories of mathematics and science? When did these elements gain prominence in official school curricula? Given the current rationalistic emphasis on economic and scientific progress, has interest in these subjects increased? How about history, geography, civics and social studies: has the extension of the nation-state model around the world, with its emphasis on tight links between persons in society and political centers in states, affected curricular emphases on these categories? And with the construction of more rationalistic and secularized approaches to social life, have nations attached less emphasis to religious instruction or moral education in the curriculum?

Other questions are addressed, questions pertaining to theoretical issues: how much do variations around the world in political, economic, and social structure, affect curricular emphases? Do developed societies employ more ‘modern’ curricular strategies, or do developing ones move into the same mold? How much impact do historical differences in national culture or politics, or in colonial traditions, have on the outlines of school curricula? Our data permit us to discuss such historical effects on curricular outlines—more detailed comparative case studies are required to show effects on specific content and on actual implementation (for example, Goodson, 1988; Travers and Westbury, 1989).

Background

The studies and analyses reported in this book are developed from a common base of data describing official national primary educational curricula for many countries since about 1920 (and, in a few instances, even earlier). This data base permits analysis of the main school curricular categories emphasized in a wide range of national systems, and how these vary across time and country. We can trace, for instance, the rise of the category of science in European primary schools, and the spread of this category around the world—or the rise of an integrated topic called ‘social studies’, with the concomitant decline in history and geography—or variations in emphasis on language, mathematics or religion.

We set out, as a research group, to work on these issues in a theoretically eclectic way. Our own previous research had emphasized the impact of wider world forces on the educational systems of modern nation-states (for example, enrollment expansion, the passage of compulsory attendance legislation, or the decline of occupationally linked forms of schooling), and this background provided some of the motivation for this study. But it became clear that so little systematic data collection and analysis had been done that basic descriptive and analytic questions had not really been addressed. The most useful role for us, it seemed, was to try to pull together such basic materials as we could. Our larger aspirations were to make general descriptions of prescribed school topics, as well as to explore a wide range of general explanatory ideas.

Our work began in the context of received wisdom in the curricular field that widespread cross-national and historical data were simply unavailable. We had been led to think that it would not be possible to assemble information on more than a few countries—especially over a substantial time frame. As we proceeded, it became clear that this view was shortsighted. The international educational community has been sharing information on national syllabuses and curricular outlines since the nineteenth century, at conferences, in compendia, in reports of national and international bureaucratic agencies, and in the work of individual scholars. This is itself an indication of the international character of educational—and in particular curricular—discourse. And it motivated us to give much effort to the systematic collection of the available information.

We went ahead, aided by funds from several sources (most prominently, the National Science Foundation, through Grant SES-8512561, and the Stanford Center for the Study of Families, Children and Youth; but also the World Bank, the Spencer Foundation, the University of Georgia Research Foundation, Stanford’s Hoover Institution and Center for Research in International Studies, and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science). The data collection and integration task was a substantial one, but the studies below work from a resultant data base that is much more extensive than any previously available.

Our choice to add to a literature primarily made up of detailed case studies by building a very extensive data set, and to provide the broadest cross-national and temporal comparisons, naturally carries considerable costs. It moves us toward a very limited and incomplete practical definition of the curriculum—one that leaves out the rich variability in methods, materials, and detailed topics and themes that is the focus of most research. We have very limited data—on official curricular categories (for example, ‘science’) and their relative emphasis in the official schedule, but not on the specifics of actual content taught (or even intended) or on materials or practices to be employed. Our basic data are simple curricular outlines, listing subjects of instruction, and usually indicating the number of periods per week or year to be devoted to them. Such national timetables listing required subjects and time allocations turn out to have long since become a standard for the reporting of curricular information.

Thus, when we show that curricular categories, and emphases on them, tend to be rather homogeneous around the world (and often over time), we cannot go further to show that the specifics of content and materials and themes are similarly homogeneous. Indeed, the literature to which we attempt to contribute is filled with convincing examples of ways in which materials and content within a category may be bent to local class or interest structures (Goodson, 1987; Holmes and McLean, 1989) or to local cultural requirements (Lee, 1990). The real point of our contribution is to emphasize how much the general world curricular frame shapes overall national outlines, and how much local forces are likely to be filtered through general world conceptions.

Beyond the issue of the limited and abstract definition of the curriculum that is built into our data, there are many possible sources of error in data so removed from primary sources. Policies may be inadequately captured, or formulated only ‘for show’ to a national or world community. The meaning of a given subject (say, history) may vary sharply from country to country and period to period within the general category. (Such problems, of course, are common to much research on curricula.)

The literature, however, is filled with studies that have taken the other tack, sacrificing temporal and cross-national comparability in favor of more local or regional precision. We believed that it would be extremely valuable to have more research attempting to paint a broader and more comparative picture. There is much to criticize in our work, especially from the point of view of those who emphasize qualitative, in-depth case studies. But our findings may add important elements to the common arguments that school curricula are really worked out by local interests in local settings: Our findings suggest that such processes may be going on within, and deeply influenced by, a more general worldwide frame or outline.

Foci

One focus of the work in this book is simply descriptive: so little research exists comparing educational curricula across many countries and over time that even the outlines of the situation are not well understood. Lacking a basis in empirical description, much theorizing in this field has a highly rhetorical, even metaphorical, character. It consists, for instance, of repeated assertions that whatever exists in the educational curriculum must be there because it is advantageous to one or another group of elites. While this seems almost certainly true, it provides little guidance toward any specific prediction or explanation of curricular composition and change. Why would economic or political elites emphasize one school subject (social studies) rather than another (geography)? Any outcome can be explained in this way after the fact in the absence of more specific and worked-out arguments. Or it is asserted that the content of the educational system is really a structure of (more or less undefined) social control. It is hard to imagine that this is not so, but equally hard to see what is predicted or explained by such an assertion. Using this logic, one can account for any possible emphasis, from art to science, but how would a social control theory tell us in advance which topic would be emphasized?

The studies in this volume provide a descriptive base from which better informed theoretical statements about educational content might develop. They describe the outlines of officially intended national curricula across countries and time, and thus show the extent of variation that might be explained.

But the studies here go beyond description, and confront directly some important explanatory issues. The fundamental question is what forces in ‘society’ create the various elements of the new culture of the modern curriculum. This commonly put question is a good deal more problematic than most scholars assume. It is conventional to wonder whether the cultural content of mass education is advocated by disinterested agents of ‘society’, or by dominant and interested economic elites of ‘society’, or perhaps by emergent dominating political elites of ‘society’. We must inquire what this ‘society’ is: is it the village, the city or region, the nation-state, or perhaps some larger transnational entity? If it is one of the latter entities and large in scale, it is certainly as much an ideologically ‘imagined community’ as a functioning real one (Anderson, 1983). Society may be anything from the local community to the modern world, and may be a set of operating pressures and requirements or an imagined model.

This raises several related questions. One has to do with the organizational level that regulates the curriculum of mass education. Most commonly—and especially in the Third World—authority is put squarely in the hands of a national ministry of education and its committees and functionaries. In older educational systems such as the United States and a number of European countries, formal authority is more decentralized to provincial or local agencies. Even in these cases, there is little evidence of great variability in policy—provincial authorities seem frequently to reflect national educational cultures in their decision making. A main effect of greater centralization may be more effective and detailed standardization of classroom practice (Stevenson and Baker, 1991).

A more interesting question to pose is the following: What is the character of the ‘society’ in whose name the curriculum of mass education is put into place? Is it the set of highly variable interdependent social systems that, warts and all, inhabit the various niches of the earth: each with its own polity, economy, and associated dominant interests or functional requirements? Or is it perhaps a more standardized model or ideology defining a virtuous, or at least very abstract and theorized, social system? And if the society that sets the curriculum of mass education is a model, how, when and where is it established, and who are its agents?

The force of the evidence put forward by the chapters in this book provides some preliminary answers to these queries. Whatever the society is, in whose name the curricular outline of mass education is put in place, it seems to display an extraordinary homogeneity across the extraordinarily variable nations of the world. The homogenous contours of the world curriculum change over time (apparently more dramatically in the nineteenth than in the twentieth century), but variance across national societies is less noticeable than most arguments would have had it. This is a distinctive theme common to all the diverse empirical analyses that are presented in this book. The society that builds the curriculum of mass education is an imagined model more than an immediate reality; it is worldwide more than national or local; and its various organizational and professional carriers take their standards—or at least their general rhetoric—from this wider world model.

In one respect, the standardization of national school curricula is not a complete surprise to prevailing theory. It has long been clear that our period is one in which—and mass education a principal means by which—local and primordial cultures are undergoing wholesale destruction. Local languages die out or are circumscribed, as are local gods and spirits. Local political variations are undercut, usually in the name of a national polity, along with parochial technologies and customs. It is not surprising that mass education overrides local cultural content with standardized meanings, since every aspect of the modern system builds standardization (of economic, or political, or familial and cultural rules) on such higher levels of scale as region, ethnicity, or nation (Thomas et al., 1987). One can regret the loss of variation in meaning, or celebrate it as rationality and progress. The gains in complexity of bigger and more standardized systems of meanings can be seen and felt in every corner of the global village.

As far as official educational content categories are concerned, mass school systems give little legitimacy to the local. They claim to be laid out in standard ways at national levels—homogeneous across distinctions of gender, class, tribe, region, and certainly locality. We do not have empirical data on how much curricular variation there is in practice (or even on how much national authorities build in flexibility for local practices), acros...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Authors’ Preface
• Chapter 1    Introduction: John W. Meyer
• Part I: The Worldwide Institutionalization of Primary School Curricula
• Part II: Studies of Specific Subject Areas
• Bibliography
• Index